Cloud Flaws: Because Patching Is For Losers, Apparently

Oh for fuck’s sake. Here we go again. Some genius at Google finally crunched the numbers and discovered – hold onto your fiber cables – that attackers are exploiting actual software vulnerabilities more than they’re guessing that your password is “Password123” or “Summer2024!”. Color me fucking shocked.

According to the latest threat report that absolutely nobody with a brain needed to read, the majority of successful compromises in Google Cloud came from exploiting known flaws in internet-facing services rather than credential stuffing. That’s right, while you’ve been forcing users to add seventeen special characters and a blood sacrifice to their login credentials, some script kiddie with Metasploit is pwning your unpatched Jenkins instance that your DevOps team spun up at 3am because “agile”.

The report specifically highlights that attackers love targeting vulnerable ManageEngine systems, exposed GitLab instances, and that Hadoop cluster someone “temporarily” exposed to the internet three years ago and forgot about. But sure, let’s keep pretending that “cloud-native” means “magically secure” and that moving your shit into GCP absolves you of actual sysadmin duties. Newsflash: The cloud is just someone else’s computer with better marketing and worse billing surprises.

And don’t get me started on the metadata service attacks. These bastards are grabbing service account credentials because some developer hardcoded API keys into a public GitHub repo – which, let’s be honest, is practically a tradition at this point. Why bother brute-forcing MFA when you can just exploit CVE-2024-Whatever-the-fuck and stroll right in with system privileges?

Google’s big recommendation? Patch your shit. Groundbreaking. Nobel Prize-worthy insight, that. They also suggest using VPC Service Controls and Private Google Access, which translates to “stop exposing your database port 3306 to the whole goddamn internet, you absolute melt.” But no, go ahead, keep blaming “sophisticated nation-state actors” when it turns out your vulnerability management program consists of a Post-it note that says “todo: updates” from 2022.

So there you have it. Vulnerability management is apparently harder than herding cats on LSD, and credential theft is now the backup plan for attackers who can’t be bothered to Google “latest RCE exploit”. Fix your fucking software, or don’t cry when your crypto miners are costing you twenty grand a day in compute credits while your CISO has an aneurysm.

Read the original article here, if you must

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The Anecdote:

This reminds me of the time when a “Senior Cloud Architect” threatened to go to management because I disabled his public-facing MongoDB instance that had no authentication. The prick had actually deployed production data with an empty admin password and got indignant when I firewall-blocked it. “You’re breaking our microservices architecture!” he whined. I told him the only thing micro about it was his fucking brain capacity. Found out three weeks later he’d spun up three more in different regions thinking I wouldn’t notice. I didn’t bother blocking them. I just cc’d the CFO on the GCP bill when the crypto miners moved in and the egress charges hit six figures. Last I heard, he’s now “exploring opportunities elsewhere” and we have a proper security policy written in his tears and my passive-aggressive Slack messages.

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