When you have your Hybrid Cloud Enterprise Design ready in a Microsoft HUB-Spoke model and your Security in place, you can do your optimize on your Azure workloads and keep up-to-date for your compliancy. Microsoft Azure Security Center can support you in Security and Compliancy (GDPR). Here you see my former blogposts about Microsoft Azure HUB-Spoke model architecture and Security by design :
Security in software is always on the move and changing in this world, when you think you are ready something has changed already. That’s why I love Microsoft Azure Security Center to keep you posted and giving you advise on Security but also on Compliancy.
From here you see a high-level overview of these new possibilities in Microsoft Azure Security Center :
Security Center Overview
Microsoft Azure Security Center is working with the following navigation menu’s on the left :
General
Policy & Compliance
Resource Security Hygiene
Advanced Cloud Defense
Threat Protection
Automation & Orchestration
Microsoft Azure Secure Score Dashboard
Microsoft Azure Security Center is working with Overall Secure Score. In my Test LAB we have some work to do 😉
The Azure secure score reviews your security recommendations and prioritizes them for you, so you know which recommendations to perform first. This helps you find the most serious security vulnerabilities so you can prioritize investigation. Secure score is a tool that helps you assess your workload security posture. Improve your secure score in Azure Security Center
Azure Security Center Recommendations
Microsoft Azure Security Center gives you advise to make your Security Score higher and you can improve immediately.
Open Subnet without NSG.
From here you can Enable a Network Security Group (NSG) on the Subnet and make your network more secure.
Creating NSG from Azure Security Center.
A subnet with NSG.
Azure Security Center Advise on Disk Encryption
Description on Applying Disk Encryption on your Virtual Machines
General Information, with Impact and Implementation Cost.
Threats, what can happen when you don’t implement the security.
Security is a on-going process 24 hours -365 days to monitor, analyze, and prevent security issues. Working on Compliancy for your Business and making your own Security policies is important. Microsoft Azure Security Center can support you in this journey. When you Optimize your Azure workloads or make new solutions in Azure, keep it secure with Microsoft Azure Security Center.
“Humans are susceptible to social engineering. Machines are susceptible to tampering. Machine learning is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Singular machine learning models can be “gamed” leading to unexpected outcomes.”
In this talk, they compare the difficulty of tampering with cloud-based models and client-based models. Then discuss how they develop stacked ensemble models to make machine learning defenses less susceptible to tampering and significantly improve overall protection for customers. They talk about the diversity of base ML models and technical details on how they are optimized to handle different threat scenarios. Lastly, they describe suspected tampering activity they have witnessed using protection telemetry from over half a billion computers, and whether mitigation worked.
Hybrid security – Get a unified view of security across all of your on-premises and cloud workloads. Apply security policies and continuously assess the security of your hybrid cloud workloads to ensure compliance with security standards. Collect, search, and analyze security data from a variety of sources, including firewalls and other partner solutions. Advanced threat detection – Use advanced analytics and the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph to get an edge over evolving cyber-attacks. Leverage built-in behavioral analytics and machine learning to identify attacks and zero-day exploits. Monitor networks, machines, and cloud services for incoming attacks and post-breach activity. Streamline investigation with interactive tools and contextual threat intelligence. Access and application controls – Block malware and other unwanted applications by applying whitelisting recommendations adapted to your specific workloads and powered by machine learning. Reduce the network attack surface with just-in-time, controlled access to management ports on Azure VMs, drastically reducing exposure to brute force and other network attacks.
To add On-premises Servers
When your workspace is added :
+ Add Computers
Download the right agent for Windows or Linux
When you installed the agent you need the workspace ID and the key to finish the connection.
When your Server doesn’t have a Internet connection you can work with the OMS Gateway.
Microsoft Azure Security Center provides unified security management and advanced threat protection across hybrid cloud workloads. With Security Center, you can apply security policies across your workloads, limit your exposure to threats, and detect and respond to attacks.
You can select an existing Log Analytics workspace to store datacollected by Security Center. To use your existing Log Analytics workspace:
• The workspace must be associated with your selected Azure subscription.
• At a minimum, you must have read permissions to access the workspace.
You can edit the default security policy for each of your Azure subscriptions in Security Center. To modify a security policy, you must be an owner, contributor, or security administrator of the subscription. To configure security policies in Security Center, do the following:
1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
2. On the Security Center dashboard, under General, select Security policy.
3. Select the subscription that you want to enable a security policy for.
4. In the Policy Components section, select Security policy.
This is the default policy that’s assigned by Security Center. You can turn on or off the available security recommendations.
5. When you finish editing, select Save.
Azure Security Center provides unified security management and advanced threat protection for workloads running in Azure, on-premises, and in other clouds. It delivers visibility and control over hybrid cloud workloads, active defenses that reduce your exposure to threats, and intelligent detection to help you keep pace with rapidly evolving cyber attacks.
Pricing tiers Security Center is offered in two tiers:
• The Free tier is automatically enabled on all Azure subscriptions, and provides security policy, continuous security assessment, and actionable security recommendations to help you protect your Azure resources.
• The Standard tier extends the capabilities of the Free tier to workloads running in private and other public clouds, providing unified security management and threat protection across your hybrid cloud workloads. The Standard tier also adds advanced threat detection capabilities, which uses built-in behavioral analytics and machine learning to identify attacks and zero-day exploits, access and application controls to reduce exposure to network attacks and malware, and more. The Standard tier is free for the first 60 days. Read here more…….
What are OS Security Configurations?
Azure Security Center monitors security configurations using a set of over 150 recommended rules for hardening the OS, including rules related to firewalls, auditing, password policies, and more. If a machine is found to have a vulnerable configuration, a security recommendation is generated.
Customization of the rules can help organizations to control which configuration options are more appropriate for their environment. This feature enables users to set a customized assessment policy and apply it on all applicable machines in the subscription.
Note • Currently OS Security Configuration customization is available for Windows Server 2008, 2008R2, 2012, 2012R2 operating systems only. • The configuration applies to all VMs and computers connected to all workspaces under the selected subscription. • OS Security Configuration customization is available only on Security Center’s Standard tier.
Download the Baseline configuration JSON file
You can make a Custom Baseline with Visual Studio Code and Upload to Azure
Planning guide
This guide covers a set of steps and tasks that you can follow to optimize your use of Security Center based on your organization’s security requirements and cloud management model. To take full advantage of Security Center, it is important to understand how different individuals or teams in your organization use the service to meet secure development and operations, monitoring, governance, and incident response needs. The key areas to consider when planning to use Security Center are:
Security Roles and Access Controls
Security Policies and Recommendations
Data Collection and Storage
Ongoing non-Azure resources
Ongoing Security Monitoring
Incident Response
Integrated Azure security solutions
Security Center makes it easy to enable integrated security solutions in Azure. Benefits include:
Simplified deployment: Security Center offers streamlined provisioning of integrated partner solutions. For solutions like antimalware and vulnerability assessment, Security Center can provision the needed agent on your virtual machines, and for firewall appliances, Security Center can take care of much of the network configuration required.
Integrated detections: Security events from partner solutions are automatically collected, aggregated, and displayed as part of Security Center alerts and incidents. These events also are fused with detections from other sources to provide advanced threat-detection capabilities.
Unified health monitoring and management: Customers can use integrated health events to monitor all partner solutions at a glance. Basic management is available, with easy access to advanced setup by using the partner solution.
Identity and Access Overview in Azure Security Center
Application Whitelisting
Just in time virtual machine (VM) access can be used to lock down inbound traffic to your Azure VMs, reducing exposure to attacks while providing easy access to connect to VMs when needed.
Attack scenario
Brute force attacks commonly target management ports as a means to gain access to a VM. If successful, an attacker can take control over the VM and establish a foothold into your environment.
One way to reduce exposure to a brute force attack is to limit the amount of time that a port is open. Management ports do not need to be open at all times. They only need to be open while you are connected to the VM, for example to perform management or maintenance tasks. When just in time is enabled, Security Center uses Network Security Group (NSG) rules, which restrict access to management ports so they cannot be targeted by attackers.
Azure Security Center’s advanced detection capabilities, helps you identify active threats targeting your Microsoft Azure resources and provides you with the insights needed to respond quickly
Security Center has a set of predefined security alerts, which are triggered when a threat, or suspicious activity takes place. In some scenarios, you may want to create a custom alert to address specific needs of your environment.
Custom alert rules in Security Center allow you to define new security alerts based on data that is already collected from your environment. You can create queries, and the result of these queries can be used as criteria for the custom rule, and once this criteria is matched, the rule is executed. You can use computers security events, partner’s security solution logs or data ingested using APIs to create your custom queries.
What is security playbook in Security Center?
Security playbook is a collection of procedures that can be executed from Security Center once a certain playbook is triggered from selected alert. Security playbook can help to automate and orchestrate your response to a specific security alert detected by Security Center. Security Playbooks in Security Center are based on Azure Logic Apps, which means you can use the templates that are provided under the security category in Logic Apps templates, you can modify them based on your needs, or you can create new playbooks using Azure Logic Apps workflow, and using Security Center as your trigger.
With Microsoft Azure Cloud Services you can make a lot of resources using for your Business. Think about Storage, Compute, Databases, Networks and
applications. Microsoft Azure Security is there to keep your resources and data as save as possible against cybercrime.
Microsoft Azure Security Center
Security Center Overview
Microsoft Azure Secure Score Dashboard
Azure Security Center Recommendations
Open Subnet without NSG.
Creating NSG from Azure Security Center.
A subnet with NSG.
Security Center – Regulatory Compliance
PCI DSS 3.2
ISO 27001
SOC TSP
