Hardening Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – Part 2: Remediation

In the first blog part, I wrote that’s not so easy to identify risk in your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure account. CIS – Center of Internet Security – has a free benchmark which supports you in hardening your account. And with Palo Alto Prisma or OCI Cloud Guard, there are two tools which provide information too. But I want to have an easier way to identify and remediate dangers. select * from cloud; Steampipe.io provides a powerful CLI tool, where you can query cloud account by API. Instead if clicking actions in the user interface to find out who has no MFA enabled, just execute this query: steampipe query “select name, is_mfa_activated from oci_identity_user where is_mfa_activated=false;” +———————————————————+——————+ | name | is_mfa_activated…

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Hardening Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – Part 1: Identification

Cloud Security When you search with the term “Cloud Breaches 2022” in one of the search engines, there is a almost endless list of breaches. In this 2-part blog post I show you an easy way, to level up your security in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. For example listed on https://www.immuniweb.com/blog/top-10-cloud-security-incidents-in-2022.html: As you can see here, these are all issues related to security settings done by the owner of the accounts. No special hacking methods, no social engineering. Just wrong settings. Sure, there are also technical bugs possible, this one has happened in summer 2022 in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and was called #AttachMe: https://www.wiz.io/blog/attachme-oracle-cloud-vulnerability-allows-unauthorized-cross-tenant-volume-access Cloud Security Risks – Items These items are all configurable by customer, like roles not according least-privilege…

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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – A short Blog Post about a secure and small Development Setup

For an internal project I had the pleasure to setup a new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environment for an APEX development team. Here is a short overview about the setup. Requirements VPN Access from everywhere – 2 people are working maximal at same time on the environment Oracle Standard Edition 2 – no license available in project Small monitoring to verify server stats Instances can be started and stopped from the developers to save costs for example over night, weekend, holiday etc. Architecture Diagram Resource Network Usage Remarks Open VPN Access Server Public Subnet VPN client access and traffic routing OCI Cloud Marketplace Image – OpenVPN Access Server (2 FREE VPN Connections) – OpenVPN Inc. – Oracle Cloud Marketplace Management Server…

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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Safe – How to burn down 201.44 Swiss Francs in 30 Seconds…

Is Data Safe really for free? In the last autumn, the new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure feature called Data Safe was released. For sure, new features has to be tested. I have tested the Data Safe feature too and added a cloud database to Data Safe. But in my enthusiasm about this cool feature – or maybe it was just too late in the evening –  I did a mistake by adding the database target. Four days later, I recognized that Data Safe is charged in my account. Mmm, but should it not be for free? First reaction: I raised an SR and described the case. The nice guy from My Oracle Support realized the situation quickly: Dear Mister Berger, you…

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Let’s IPSec VPN – How to connect your Unifi Security Gateway to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

When I connect from home to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure normally I used a Bastion Host, an Open VPN compute instance or Public IPs.  Some of the cool stuff like MV2OCI (which transfers data from on-premises to OCI) or integration of an ADB instance in my local running Oracle Enterprise Manager are referred to direct cloud connections. A SSH reverse tunnel works fine, but this cannot be a permanent solution for my lab environment. At home I have an Unifi Security Gateway (USG) up an running at home. This gateway has the capability, to create site-to-site VPN connections. Good: The Oracle Cloud Infrastruicture VPN service is for free, and I don’t expect over 10 TB outbound traffic. Time to create…

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