All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 This second part of the guide examines three AWS file‑sharing mechanisms — CloudFront signed URLs, an Amazon VPC endpoint service backed by a custom application, and S3 Access Points — contrasting their security, cost, protocol, and operational trade‑offs. It highlights CloudFront’s edge caching and WAF/Shield integration for low‑latency public delivery, PrivateLink for fully private TCP connectivity, and Access Points for scalable IAM‑based S3 access control. The post emphasizes choosing or combining solutions based on access patterns, compliance, and budget.

🔐 This post by Swapnil Singh (updated July 28, 2025) compares AWS file-sharing options and explains security and cost trade-offs to help architects choose the right approach. Part 1 focuses on AWS Transfer Family, Transfer Family web apps, S3 pre-signed URLs, and a serverless pre-signed URL pattern (API Gateway + Lambda), outlining strengths, limitations, and pricing considerations. It emphasizes requirements gathering—access patterns, protocols, security, operations, and business constraints—and presents a decision matrix and high-level guidance for selecting a solution.

🛡️ CISA, in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories, released Thorium, an automated, scalable malware and forensic analysis platform that consolidates commercial, custom, and open-source tools into unified, automated workflows. Thorium is configured to ingest over 10 million files per hour per permission group and schedule more than 1,700 jobs per second, enabling rapid, large-scale binary and artifact analysis while maintaining fast query performance. It scales on Kubernetes with ScyllaDB, supports Dockerized tools and VM/bare-metal integrations, and enforces strict group-based access controls along with tag and full-text filtering for results.

🔒 Microsoft has expanded the .NET Bounty Program, increasing maximum awards to $40,000 and broadening coverage to include all supported .NET and ASP.NET versions, adjacent technologies like F#, templates, and GitHub Actions. The program simplifies award tiers, aligns impact categories with other Microsoft bounty programs, and defines report quality as complete (working exploit) or not complete, encouraging detailed, actionable submissions.

🛡️ Microsoft has updated the .NET Bounty Program, expanding scope and increasing maximum payouts to $40,000 for high-impact vulnerabilities. The program now covers all supported versions of .NET and ASP.NET (including Blazor and F#), repository templates, and GitHub Actions in .NET repositories. Awards are now tied to explicit severity and report quality criteria, with higher payments for complete, exploit-backed reports.

🔐 This AWS Security Blog post, republished July 30, 2025, demonstrates how to migrate an Oracle 19c Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) keystore on Amazon EC2 from a file-based wallet to AWS CloudHSM using the CloudHSM Client SDK 5. It walks through prerequisites—CloudHSM cluster, CloudHSM admin and crypto users, network connectivity—and stepwise commands to install the client and PKCS#11 library, adjust Oracle WALLET_ROOT/TDE_CONFIGURATION, and run the ADMINISTER KEY MANAGEMENT migration. The guide also covers creating an auto-login keystore, verifying V$ENCRYPTION_WALLET status, and outlines benefits such as FIPS-validated hardware, centralized management, and improved compliance.

🛡️CISA published a no-cost Eviction Strategies Tool, developed with MITRE, to help cyber defenders build tailored incident response plans and adversary eviction strategies within minutes. The package includes COUN7ER, a database of atomic post-compromise countermeasures, and the Cyber Eviction Strategies Playbook NextGen web app to match findings to countermeasures. It exports results in JSON, Word, Excel and markdown and is available under the MIT Open Source License.

🔐 This AWS Security Blog post explains how to use Amazon GuardDuty to detect suspicious activity and automatically disable accounts in AWS Managed Microsoft AD. It walks through deploying a managed directory and a directory-administration EC2 instance, configuring AWS Systems Manager Run Command documents, and orchestrating those actions with AWS Step Functions triggered by Amazon EventBridge. The guide includes required permissions, testing steps using GuardDuty’s test domains, and notes on extending the automation to reset passwords or send notifications.

🔐 AWS provides a containerized sample to test post-quantum hybrid TLS (PQ TLS) from Python by bundling OpenSSL 3.5 with a standard interpreter and common libraries. The sample demonstrates hybrid key exchange using ML-KEM alongside classical algorithms and includes examples for boto3/AWS CLI, requests, and low-level ssl sockets. It also shows how to capture traffic and confirm PQ negotiation in TLS handshakes.

🛡️ AWS Security Incident Response is a Tier 1, AWS-native service launched in December 2024 to accelerate detection, triage, and containment of security incidents. It integrates with Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, and AWS Systems Manager, supports partner integrations, and enables escalation to AWS CIRT. The service centralizes findings, automates monitoring and intelligent triage to reduce false positives, and offers prebuilt containment playbooks and APIs to compress MTTR and coordinate cross-account response.

📘 AICPA SOC 2 Compliance Guide on AWS provides detailed, prescriptive guidance for cloud architects, security and compliance teams, and DevOps professionals to implement SOC 2–aligned controls using AWS services. The whitepaper maps Trust Services Criteria (Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, Privacy) to AWS services and constructs and explains complementary user entity controls. It outlines strategies for evidence collection, documentation, and audit readiness and highlights automation best practices. The guide places controls within the AWS shared responsibility model and points to AWS Security Assurance Services for further assistance.

🔍 SRA Verify is an open-source assessment tool from AWS that automates validation of an organization’s alignment to the AWS Security Reference Architecture (AWS SRA). It runs automated checks across multiple services to verify configurations and highlight deviations from recommended patterns. The tool links checks to remediation guidance and IaC examples to help teams implement fixes more quickly. It currently covers CloudTrail, GuardDuty, IAM Access Analyzer, Config, Security Hub, S3, Inspector, and Macie, with plans to expand.

🔐 This AWS Security Blog post explains why long-term IAM access keys introduce exposure and operational risk, and outlines practical, more secure alternatives. It recommends browser-based CloudShell for CLI access, IAM Identity Center (with AWS CLI v2 and MFA) and IDE integrations for developer workflows, and IAM roles for compute and CI/CD. The post also covers external access options, emphasizes temporary credentials, and urges the principle of least privilege.

🔒 AWS completed the 2024 pooled audit run by the Collaborative Cloud Audit Group (CCAG) with major European financial institutions. The multi‑phase engagement (February–December 2024) was grounded in the CSA Cloud Controls Matrix and aligned to IIA IPPF and ISACA ITAF benchmarks, with on‑site fieldwork at two AWS locations. Assessments covered data confidentiality and sovereignty, incident detection and response, privileged access controls, operational resilience, API security, supplier governance, interoperability and centralized compliance oversight.

🔒 CISA's Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) is coordinating with major cloud providers and federal partners to strengthen core cloud identity and authentication systems against sophisticated, nation-state affiliated threats. Recent incidents have exposed risks from token forgery, compromised signing keys, stolen credentials, and gaps in secrets management, logging, and governance. On June 25, a technical exchange convened experts from industry and government to share best practices and explore mitigations such as stateful token validation, token binding, improved secrets rotation and storage, hardware security modules, and enhanced logging to better detect and respond to malicious activity.

🏆 The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) announced its 2025 Most Valuable Researchers (MVRs), recognizing security researchers who submitted valid vulnerability reports under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure. The Top 10 MVRs were ranked by total points earned for valid reports submitted between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025, and MSRC also highlights annual Technical Leaderboards by product area such as Azure, Office, Windows, and Dynamics 365. Awardees receive digital badges and MSRC swag boxes, and badges recognize achievements for Accuracy, Impact, and Volume.

🔒 Android's Advanced Protection extends Google's device-level security and integrates with Chrome on Android, enabling three core protections to guard high-risk users such as journalists and officials. It forces HTTPS via the Always Use Secure Connections mode, turns on full Site Isolation for devices with 4GB+ RAM, and reduces attack surface by disabling V8's higher-level JavaScript optimizers. Settings are available on Android 16 in Chrome 137+, and enterprises can control behaviors via policies while affected users should enable automatic updates and join the Advanced Protection Program for maximum defense. These measures trade some performance for stronger exploitation resistance.

🏆 Congratulations to the researchers recognized on the MSRC 2025 Q2 Leaderboard. The top three overall are wkai, Brad Schlintz (nmdhkr), and 0x140ce, with category leaders across Azure, Office, Windows, and Dynamics. The leaderboard reflects assessments completed April 1–June 30, 2025, and includes cases submitted earlier but assessed in Q2. MSRC also notes that Researcher Recognition points are now visible in the researcher portal to improve transparency.

🛡️ Google has open sourced its Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) libraries to accelerate privacy-preserving digital ID and age-assurance solutions. Developed with Sparkasse, the release enables people to prove attributes (for example, that they are over 18) without sharing any other personal data. By making a performant ZKP codebase available, Google aims to help developers, researchers, businesses, and governments integrate privacy-first flows, including use cases for the European EUDI Wallet.

🔐 Google and Germany’s Sparkasse announced a wallet-based EU age assurance service that lets customers prove age online without sharing personal data. Using the Credential Manager API, Google Wallet and zero-knowledge cryptography, Sparkasse will issue trusted credentials across its network of 343 regional savings banks serving 50 million customers. Integration with Android and Chrome enables one-click age checks for apps and sites and will roll out in the coming months.