As the Army embraces larger cloud services, some rapid software development tricks and simple solutions that work in the private sector, such as open code libraries, won't work for the military without additional security, a senior official warned.
We know that modern software development does depend on third-party libraries, and that's okay.
But we need to make sure that logging, access, and transparency give us ... the proper visibility of the data at runtime, especially as we move to virtualized and containerized environments,” U.S. Army Commander Maria Barrett will say.
The U.S. Army Cyber Command said Thursday at the TechNetCyber conference in Augusta, Georgia.
"We need to think about the pervasive use of open source libraries, especially after malicious cyber attackers quickly exploited the log4j vulnerability," Barrett said.
He was referring to a flaw in the Apache software library that Jen Easterly, director of the US Department of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security, called the worst flaw of her career.
But this is just one example of the cybersecurity dangers that arise when migrating large numbers of endpoints into large clouds.
Cybersecurity experts believe that moving to an enterprise cloud environment is more secure because administrators can more quickly spot and respond to breaches or theft.
An enterprise cloud by itself does not create a completely secure environment unless it is well designed and implemented, Barrett said.
Additionally, popular security features such as two-factor authentication are not enough to keep Army data safe.
I look at everything that happens, public disclosures, etc.
Most of the security issues we see are related to misconfiguration or abuse of features designed for collaborative sharing or integration. Multifactor authentication isn't enough, Barrett said.
Additional steps are also required, such as more automated checkpoints to re-authorize users in the environment.
Big data platforms, such as the Army's, are helping to reveal security incidents more quickly.
Barrett said the four-year-old Gabriel Nimbus platform is helping the Army understand what is actually happening in the environment, doubling the data feeds, expanding the types of data and doubling the amount of data that can be stored to Check for strange and potentially harmful situations and behaviors.
We did significantly change the number of events that can be processed per second by a factor of 200.