Part 3 - Security solutions Flashcards
Describe Azure Network Security groups
Network security groups (NSGs) let you allow or deny network traffic to and from Azure resources that exist in your Azure virtual network; for example, a virtual machine. When you create an NSG, it can be associated with multiple subnets or network interfaces in your VNet. An NSG consists of rules that define how the traffic is filtered.
NSG security rules are evaluated by priority using five information points: source, source port, destination, destination port, and protocol to either allow or deny the traffic. As a guideline, you shouldn’t create two security rules with the same priority and direction.
By default, Azure creates a series of rules, three inbound and three outbound rules, to provide a baseline level of security. You can’t remove the default rules, but you can override them by creating new rules with higher priorities.
Describe the seven inbound and outbound security rules properties
Each rule specifies one or more of the following properties:
- Name: Every NSG rule needs to have a unique name that describes its purpose. For example, AdminAccessOnlyFilter.
- Priority: A number between 100 and 4096. Rules are processed in priority order, with lower numbers processed before higher numbers. When traffic matches a rule, processing stops. This means that any other rules with a lower priority (higher numbers) won’t be processed.
- Source or destination: Specify either individual IP address or an IP address range, service tag (a group of IP address prefixes from a given Azure service), or application security group. Specifying a range, a service tag, or application security group, enables you to create fewer security rules.
- Protocol: What network protocol will the rule check? The protocol can be any of: TCP, UDP, ICMP or Any.
- Direction: Whether the rule should be applied to inbound or outbound traffic.
- Port range: You can specify an individual or range of ports. For example, you could specify 80 or 10000-10005. Specifying ranges enables you to create fewer security rules. You can’t specify multiple ports or port ranges in the same security rule in NSGs created through the classic deployment model.
- Action: Finally, you need to decide what will happen when this rule is triggered.
There are limits to the number of security rules you can create in an NSG. Use Azure NSGs to automatically allow or deny traffic to your cloud-based resources and assets.
Describe Azure DDoS protection
The Azure DDoS Protection service is designed to help protect your applications and servers by analyzing network traffic and discarding anything that looks like a DDoS attack. Azure DDoS Protection uses the scale and elasticity of Microsoft’s global network to bring DDoS mitigation capacity to every Azure region. During a DDoS attack, Azure can scale your computing needs to meet demand. DDoS Protection manages cloud consumption by ensuring that your network load only reflects actual customer usage.
Azure DDoS Protection comes in two tiers:
- Basic: The Basic service tier is automatically enabled for every property in Azure, at no extra cost, as part of the Azure platform. Always-on traffic monitoring and real-time mitigation of common network-level attacks provide the same defenses that Microsoft’s online services use. Azure’s global network is used to distribute and mitigate attack traffic across regions.
- Standard: The Standard service tier provides extra mitigation capabilities that are tuned specifically to Microsoft Azure Virtual Network resources. DDoS Protection Standard is simple to enable and requires no application changes. Protection policies are tuned through dedicated traffic monitoring and machine learning algorithms. Policies are applied to public IP addresses, which are associated with resources deployed in virtual networks, such as Azure Load Balancer and Application Gateway.
Describe Azure DDoS protection pricing
The DDoS Standard Protection service has a fixed monthly charge that includes protection for 100 resources. Protection for additional resources are charged on a monthly per-resource basis.
Describe what is Azure Firewall
Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-based network security service that protects your Azure virtual network (VNet) resources from attackers. You can deploy Azure Firewall on any virtual network but the best approach is to use it on a centralized virtual network. All your other virtual and on-premises networks will then route through it. The advantage of this model is the ability to centrally exert control of network traffic for all your VNets across different subscriptions.
Azure Firewall comes with many features, including but not limited to:
- Built-in high availability and availability zones: High availability is built in so there’s nothing to configure. Also, Azure Firewall can be configured to span multiple availability zones for increased availability.
- Network and application level filtering: Use IP address, port, and protocol to support fully qualified domain name filtering for outbound HTTP(s) traffic and network filtering controls.
- Outbound SNAT and inbound DNAT to communicate with internet resources: Translates the private IP address of network resources to an Azure public IP address (source network address translation) to identify and allow traffic originating from the virtual network to internet destinations. Similarly, inbound internet traffic to the firewall public IP address is translated (Destination Network Address Translation) and filtered to the private IP addresses of resources on the virtual network.
- Multiple public IP addresses: These addresses can be associated with Azure Firewall.
- Threat intelligence: Threat intelligence-based filtering can be enabled for your firewall to alert and deny traffic from/to known malicious IP addresses and domains.
- Integration with Azure Monitor: Integrated with Azure Monitor to enable collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from Azure Firewall logs.
Use Azure Firewall to help protect the Azure resources you’ve connected to Azure Virtual Networks.
Describe what is Azure Bastion
Azure Bastion provides secure and seamless RDP/SSH connectivity to your virtual machines directly from the Azure portal using Transport Layer Security (TLS). When you connect via Azure Bastion, your virtual machines don’t need a public IP address, agent, or special client software.
Bastion provides secure RDP and SSH connectivity to all VMs in the virtual network in which it’s provisioned. Using Azure Bastion protects your virtual machines from exposing RDP/SSH ports to the outside world, while still providing secure access using RDP/SSH.
Azure Bastion deployment is per virtual network, not per subscription/account or virtual machine. When you provision an Azure Bastion service in your virtual network, the RDP/SSH experience is available to all your VMs in the same virtual network.
Describe the key features of Azure Bastion
The following features are available:
- RDP and SSH directly in Azure portal: You get to the RDP and SSH session directly in the Azure portal, using a single-click experience.
- Remote session over TLS and firewall traversal for RDP/SSH: Use an HTML5-based web client that’s automatically streamed to your local device. You’ll get your Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Secure Shell (SSH) to traverse the corporate firewalls securely.
- No Public IP required on the Azure VM: Azure Bastion opens the RDP/SSH connection to your Azure virtual machine using private IP on your VM. You don’t need a public IP.
- No hassle of managing NSGs: A fully managed platform PaaS service from Azure that’s hardened internally to provide secure RDP/SSH connectivity. You don’t need to apply any NSGs on an Azure Bastion subnet.
- Protection against port scanning: Because you don’t need to expose your virtual machines to the internet, your VMs are protected against port scanning by rogue and malicious users located outside your virtual network.
- Protect against zero-day exploits: A fully platform-managed PaaS service. Because it sits at the perimeter of your virtual network, you don’t need to worry about hardening each virtual machine in the virtual network. The Azure platform protects against zero-day exploits by keeping the Azure Bastion hardened and always up to date for you.
Use Azure Bastion to establish secure RDP and SSH connectivity to your virtual machines in Azure.
Describe what is Web Application Firewall
Web Application Firewall (WAF) provides centralized protection of your web applications from common exploits and vulnerabilities. A centralized WAF helps make security management simpler, improves the response time to a security threat, and allows patching a known vulnerability in one place, instead of securing each web application. A WAF also gives application administrators better assurance of protection against threats and intrusions.
Describe ways Azure encrypts data
Microsoft Azure provides many different ways to secure your data, each depending on the service or usage required.
- Azure Storage Service Encryption helps to protect data at rest by automatically encrypting before persisting it to Azure-managed disks, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Files, or Azure Queue Storage, and decrypts the data before retrieval.
- Azure Disk Encryption helps you encrypt Windows and Linux IaaS virtual machine disks. Azure Disk Encryption uses the industry-standard BitLocker feature of Windows and the dm-crypt feature of Linux to provide volume encryption for the OS and data disks.
- Transparent data encryption (TDE) helps protect Azure SQL Database and Azure Data Warehouse against the threat of malicious activity. It performs real-time encryption and decryption of the database, associated backups, and transaction log files at rest without requiring changes to the application.
What is Azure Key Vault?
Azure Key Vault is a centralized cloud service for storing your application secrets. Key Vault helps you control your applications’ secrets by keeping them in a single, central location and by providing secure access, permissions control, and access logging capabilities. It’s useful for different kinds of scenarios:
- Secrets management. You can use Key Vault to store securely and tightly control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, Application Programming Interface (API) keys, and other secrets.
- Key management. You can use Key Vault as a key management solution. Key Vault makes it easier to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data.
- Certificate management. Key Vault lets you provision, manage, and deploy your public and private Secure Sockets Layer/ Transport Layer Security (SSL/ TLS) certificates for Azure, and internally connected, resources more easily.
- Store secrets backed by hardware security modules (HSMs). The secrets and keys can be protected either by software or by FIPS 140-2 Level 2 validated HSMs.
Use the various ways in which Azure can encrypt your data to help you secure it whatever the location or state.
Describe Cloud security posture management
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is a relatively new class of tools designed to improve your cloud security management. It assesses your systems and automatically alerts security staff in your IT department when a vulnerability is found. CSPM uses tools and services in your cloud environment to monitor and prioritize security enhancements and features.
CSPM uses a combination of tools and services:
- Zero Trust-based access control: Considers the active threat level during access control decisions.
- Real-time risk scoring: To provide visibility into top risks.
- Threat and vulnerability management (TVM): 4. Establishes a holistic view of the organization’s attack surface and risk and integrates it into operations and engineering decision-making.
- Discover sharing risks: To understand the data exposure of enterprise intellectual property, on sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services.
- Technical policy: Apply guardrails to audit and enforce the organization’s standards and policies to technical systems.
- Threat modeling systems and architectures: Used alongside other specific applications.
The main goal for a cloud security team working on posture management is to continuously report on and improve the organization’s security posture by focusing on disrupting a potential attacker’s return on investment (ROI).
Describe the Azure Security center
Azure Security Center provides the tools you need to harden your network, secure services, and ensure you’re on top of your security posture.
- Continuous assessment. Discovers and reports on whether new and existing resources and assets are configured according to security compliance requirements. You’ll get an ordered list of recommendations of what needs to be fixed to maintain maximum protection. Security Center groups the recommendations into security controls and adds a secure score value to each control.
- Network map. Continuously monitoring of the security status of your network. Use the map to look at the topology of your workloads, so you can see if each node is properly configured. You’ll see how your nodes are connected, which helps you block unwanted connections that could potentially make it easier for an attacker to creep along your network.
Describe Azure Secure score
Security Center continually assesses your resources, subscriptions, and organization for security issues. It then aggregates all the findings into a single score so you can quickly see your current security situation: the higher the score, the lower the identified risk level.
The secure score is shown in the Azure portal pages as a percentage value. To increase your security and raise your score, review Security Center’s recommendations page for the outstanding actions necessary. Each recommendation includes instructions to help you remediate the specific issue.
Describe Azure Defender
Azure Defender is a built-in tool that provides threat protection for workloads running in Azure, on-premises, and other clouds. Azure Defender is the leading Microsoft extended detection and response (XDR) solution for threat protection.
Azure Defender comes with several different plans that can be enabled separately and will run simultaneously to provide a comprehensive defense for compute, data, and service layers in your environment. The Azure Defender plans you can select from are:
- Azure Defender for servers adds threat detection and advanced defenses for your Windows and Linux machines.
- Azure Defender for App Service uses the cloud scale to identify attacks targeting applications running over App Service.
- Azure Defender for Storage detects potentially harmful activity on your Azure Storage accounts. Data can be protected, whether stored as blob containers, file shares, or data lakes.
- Azure Defender for SQL extends Azure Security Center’s data security package to secure your databases and their data wherever they’re located.
- Azure Defender for Kubernetes provides the best cloud-native Kubernetes security environment hardening, workload protection, and run-time protection.
- Azure Defender for container registries protects all the Azure Resource Manager based registries in your subscription. Azure Defender scans all images pushed to the registry, or imported into the registry, or any images pulled within the last 30 days.
- Azure Defender for Key Vault is Azure-native, advanced threat protection for Azure Key Vault, providing an extra layer of security intelligence.
Describe the Azure Security Benchmark
The Azure Security Benchmark (ASB) provides prescriptive best practices and recommendations to help improve the security of workloads, data, and services on Azure. The ASB focuses on cloud-centric control areas. These controls are consistent with well-known security benchmarks, such as those described by the CIS. Each recommendation includes the following information:
- Azure ID: The Azure Security Benchmark ID that corresponds to the recommendation.
- Recommendation: The recommendation provides a high-level description of the control.
- Guidance: The rationale for the recommendation and links to guidance on how to implement it.
- Responsibility: Who is responsible for implementing the control? Possible scenarios are customer responsibility, Microsoft responsibility, or shared responsibility.
- Azure Security Center monitoring: Does Azure Security Center monitor the control?
All recommendations, including the ones that don’t apply to this specific service, appear in the baseline to provide a complete picture of how the Azure Security Benchmark relates to each service.
Security baselines are included for many Azure services, including Azure security baseline for Security Center.