New Features THIS MONTH

Updated EC2 Monitoring

On April 15th, we deployed an update to the EC2 Monitoring service with the following changes:

Now that you are acquainted with HITRUST and have chosen to continue your journey, I want to thank you again for being proactive! If this is your first compliance series post, please start below:

• If you are new to HITRUST, start here.
  • To get a complete picture of the HITRUST Maturity Model and get some helpful tips from Cloudticity's experience, read this blog post.
• If you need more information on Cloudticity Oxygen, start here.

For everyone else, each month we look into at least one Cloudticity Oxygen service or feature, focusing on how it helps achieve HITRUST controls. This month we are diving into Cloudticity Oxygen alerts. Stay tuned next month for more Cloudticity Oxygen services.

New Features THIS MONTH

Realtime alerting for guardduty findings

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior in your AWS account. There are over 50 scenarios GuardDuty monitors.  Examples of these include Recon:EC2/Portscan, Recon:IAMUser/UserPermissions, and Stealth:IAMUser/CloudTrailLoggingDisabled. Oxygen integrates with GuardDuty by capturing any new findings and executing workflow. Our current workflow has been to store all findings data in our database and review for immediate action, false positives, and standard formats. After refining our process, we are now ready to turn on realtime alerting for new GuardDuty findings. Any new finding will generate a support ticket and will be reviewed by Cloudticity support to see if any action is required.  Potential actions may include: adding an exception for false positives, archiving, or executing remediation. In all cases, Cloudticity support will communicate the action taken.  

I want to thank you for being proactive by beginning or continuing your HITRUST journey!

• If you are new to HITRUST, start here.
• If you are new to Cloudticity Oxygen, start here.

For everyone else, each month I will introduce you to at least one Cloudticity Oxygen service or feature, focusing on how it helps achieve HITRUST controls. This month we need to dive into HITRUST's expectations (5 Areas of the HITRUST Maturity Model) and focus on the big picture (Cloudticity's Experience: Setting the Stage). Next month we will dive into Cloudticity Oxygen alerts and our workflow.

New Features THIS MONTH

Oxygen Deep Dive

At Cloudticity, we are constantly iterating to provide ever greater levels of security, compliance, and overall service. Lately, you may have noticed an increased number of requests from our technical team to review your accounts for proper tagging, open ports, and other concerns. This is due to a concerted effort to embark on a deeper dive into your accounts to identify and remediate the next level of all issues (not just critical), including identifying any gaps in coverage created by the introduction of new AWS services or requirements. We have complete our initial review and now are working on remediating any findings. Some remediations require working with you to determine a proper course, while others require development of new checks and workflows. Our goal is to have both of these completed by the end of this month.

Cloudticity's passion toward meeting security and compliance standards has led us down many paths over the past few years due to the ever-changing landscape of Healthcare and AWS. Let's reflect:

New Features

• Migration to Trend Micro Deep Security 11.3
• Last month we announced our intention to migrate to the latest version of Trend Micro Deep Security.  As this was a major upgrade we had to build a completely new Deep Security Manager to run in parallel with our existing installation.  This month we will begin the process of migrating our current Deep Security users to the new installation.  We will be reaching out in the coming days to schedule a maintenance window, and to provide any login information you will need to access the new installation.
• GuardDuty
  
  • In October we announced the implementation of GuardDuty in our customer accounts.  GuardDuty provides real-time security anomaly detection in your account including events for Route53, VPC Flowlogs, and Cloudtrail.  Because GuardDuty provides Flowlog anomaly detection we are deprecating our current Oxygen Flowlog service.  This will impact your service in two ways. First, you will see a decrease in your billing, for Kinesis and Lambda.  Second, you will no longer have access to the Flowlog view in your Oxygen dashboards.  We understand many of our customers use this dashboard to get some insight into geographical originations of their traffic.  If you still wish to view this data please contact Cloudticity support and let us know.  If we don't hear from you we will remove the Oxygen Flowlog service on January 29th, 2019.
• New Service: Automated AMI updates for AutoScaling
  • We have identified a use case that may cause Autoscaling groups to become out of sync with the instances that are running. Once an instance is patched with the latest OS patches and/or security updates, it is no longer in sync with the AMI that is driving the ASG. If a scaling event occurs after the OS patching is complete, the newly launched instance will not have the latest OS patches since it was launched from an AMI that did not have those patches. The same issue may present itself for CodeDeploy deployments. To resolve this issue, we developed a service that subscribes (using CloudWatch Rules) to a successful SSM OS patching event and a successful CodeDeploy deployment. Once any of the CloudWatch Rules fire, the service automatically creates a new AMI from the latest instance and updates the ASG to use the new AMI. If a scaling event occurs after the OS patching is complete (or CodeDeploy deployment is complete), the newly launched instance will have the latest OS patches and/or code since it was launched from an AMI that was built using an instance that had the most recent OS patches or application code.  If you are interested in this service please reach out to Cloudticity support for more details, or to schedule installation.

Coming Soon

• Unified Server Access Logging
• A common request we receive from our customers is to provide a logging solution that captures server access and security events and aggregates them in a single storage location for querying and visualization.  We are working on this solution now with an official release in Q1 of 2019.  We are leveraging native AWS services such as Kinesis, S3, Athena, and QuickSight to provide an end-to-end system for monitoring, alerting, and visualizing server access logs.  If you are interested in being a beta tester, or have any question regarding this feature, please reach out to our support desk.

Within the HIPAA Security Rule are Administrative, Physical, and Technical Safeguards. These safeguards are as important to understand as they are to implement, so let’s dive into one:

164.312(e)(1) - Transmission Security . Implement technical security measures to guard against unauthorized access to electronic protected health information that is being transmitted over an electronic communications network.

Today's risk management reality

Serving the healthcare industry can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, healthcare vendors have the privilege to participate in something that actually makes the world a better place - helping people lead healthier lives, and helping them get better when they're sick. On the other hand, the healthcare industry rightfully comes with a significant responsibility toward privacy, security, and governance. Vendors are saddled with filling in yet another 250-line Excel security questionnaire every time they want to be considered for a new project, and often have to execute multiple assessments for various regulatory frameworks as HIPAA, SOC 2, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, and MARS-E, to name just a few.

New Features

• Migration to Trend Micro Deep Security 11.2
• We are in the process of migrating current Trend Micro users to the latest version of Trend Micro Deep Security.  The latest version of Trend Micro Deep Security offers an exciting set of features including: support for containers, improved api interaction, improvements in event notifications, inactive agent cleanup, and automatic malware agent updates.  Along with these improvements, we will be offering deeper integration between server agent events and our support ticket system, giving you immediate feedback and potential resolution for critical events.  We will also be adding new dashboards to provide a quick summary of your EC2 security posture. 
• EC2 Inventory
  • We have created a process for gathering high-level information on your fleet of EC2 instances.  This process runs from the Cloudticity management account every 12 hours and collects the latest information on your EC2 instance configuration including: tagging, SSM agent status, installed services, OS platform type, and OS version.  We are currently using this information in our internal processes used to track SSM installations and proper tagging.   Future plans include adding alerts for new instances (if requested), compliance-based configuration issues, and outdated OS platforms.  

Coming Soon

• Unified Server Access Logging
• A common request we receive from our customers is to provide a logging solution that captures server access and security events and aggregates them in a single storage location for querying and visualization.  We are working on this solution now with an official release in Q1 of 2019.  We will be leveraging native AWS services such as Kinesis, S3, Athena, and QuickSight to provide an end-to-end system for monitoring, alerting and visualizing server access logs.  If you are interested in being a beta tester, or have any question regarding this feature, please reach out to our support desk.