How do I run a GCP security scan to find misconfigurations?

☁️ Cloud infrastructure offers benefits such as flexibility, scalability, high performance, and affordability.

When you subscribe to a service like Google Cloud Platform (GCP), you don’t have to worry about the high capital and maintenance costs of comparable in-house data centers and related infrastructure. However, traditional on-premises security practices cannot provide sufficient and rapid security for virtual environments.

Unlike on-premises data centers, where perimeter security protects the entire facility and resources, the nature of cloud environments with diverse technologies and locations requires a different approach. The distributed and dynamic nature of cloud environments typically increases the attack surface.

In particular, misconfigured cloud platforms and components can expose assets and increase hidden security risks. In some cases, developers open a data store when developing software and leave the data store open when releasing the application to market.

Therefore, in addition to following security best practices, you must ensure proper configuration and provide continuous monitoring, visibility, and compliance.

Fortunately, several tools can help you improve security by detecting and preventing misconfigurations, gaining visibility into your GCP security posture, and identifying and addressing other vulnerabilities.

Update: Check this post for AWS security scanners.

Google Cloud SCC

Google Cloud SCC is an integrated risk analysis and dashboard system that enables GCP customers to understand their security posture and centrally take corrective actions to protect their cloud resources and assets.

Cloud SCC (Security Command Center) provides visibility into assets running in your Google cloud environment and dangerous misconfigurations, allowing your team to reduce their exposure to threats. Additionally, comprehensive security and data risk management tools help GCP clients implement security best practices.

The basic command center consists of several of Google’s security tools. However, it is a flexible platform that integrates with a wide range of third-party tools to enhance security and expand coverage around components, risks, and practices.

Features

• View and address misconfigured firewall, IAM rule, and other issues.
• Detect, respond and prevent threats and compliance issues
• You can identify most vulnerabilities and risks such as mixed content, flash injection, etc. and easily investigate the results.
• Identify public assets such as VMs, SQL instances, buckets, and datasets.
• Asset discovery and inventory, identification of vulnerabilities, sensitive data, anomalies,
• Integrate with third-party tools to better identify and respond to compromised endpoints, network attacks, DDoS, policy and compliance violations, instance security vulnerabilities, and threats.

In general, a security command center is a flexible solution to meet the needs of any organization. This tool integrates with various Google security tools such as Cloud Data Loss Prevention and Web Security Scanner, as well as third-party security solutions such as McAfee, Qualys, and CloudGuard.

Forsetti

Forseti is open source and helps you gain visibility into your GCP environment, address vulnerabilities, and monitor and understand policy and compliance. It consists of various core modules that can be easily enabled, configured, and run individually.

There are also several add-on modules to enhance Forseti’s functionality and customization.

Features

• Monitor your Google Cloud resources to ensure that security features such as access controls are in place to protect against unauthorized changes.
• Take inventory of your resources and track your GCP environment.
• Understand and apply security and firewall policies and rules
• Evaluate your configuration, ensure compliance, and avoid exposing GCP resources.
• In addition to showing what access users have to resources, you can gain visual insight into your Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM) policies.
• It features visualizers that help you understand the GCP security structure and identify policy compliance and violations.

cloud guard

CloudGuard is a cloud-native, agentless security solution that assesses and visualizes the security posture of GPC platforms, enabling teams to protect their cloud assets and environments. The solution analyzes a variety of assets, including compute engines, databases, virtual machines, other services, network firewalls, and more.

Features

• Continuously monitor security policies and events to detect changes and check compliance.
• Identify and address misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and associated security risks.
• Strengthen security and ensure compliance and best practices.
• Powerful visibility and security posture of your GCP network assets
• It seamlessly integrates with GCP as well as other public clouds such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
• Apply governance policies tailored to your organization’s unique security needs.

cloudsploit

Cloudsploit is a powerful solution that checks and automatically detects security configuration issues in Google Cloud Platform as well as other public cloud services such as Azure, AWS, Github, and Oracle.

The security solution connects to your GCP project and provides monitoring of various components. This helps detect security misconfigurations, malicious activity, exposed assets, and other vulnerabilities.

Features

• Easy-to-deploy and use security configuration monitoring solution with alerting capabilities
• Fast and reliable to-the-point scanning and reporting
• Provides insight into your security posture and compliance
• Check your system by analyzing permissions, roles, networks, certificates, usage trends, authentication, and various settings.
• Provides an account-level overview to help you see and easily identify trends and relative risk levels over time.
• The API-based design allows the tool to easily integrate with various CISO dashboards and other reporting systems.

prisma cloud

Prisma Cloud is an integrated cloud-native solution for ensuring the proper implementation and maintenance of security and compliance for your GCP environments, applications, and resources.

This comprehensive tool has an API that seamlessly integrates with GCP services to provide continuous insights, protection, and reporting in addition to compliance enforcement.

Features

• A comprehensive, scalable, API-based security solution that provides insight, continuous monitoring, threat detection, and response.
• Complete visibility to identify and address misconfigurations, workload vulnerabilities, network threats, data leaks, unsafe user activity, and more
• Protect workloads, containers, and apps running on Google Cloud Platform.
• Custom enforcement of security policies based on application, user, or device.
• Easily enforce governance policies and compliance with a wide range of standards including, but not limited to, NIST, CIS, GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI.

cloud custodian

Cloud custodian is an open source, flexible, and lightweight rules engine for cloud security and governance. This solution allows you to securely manage your GCP accounts and resources. In addition to security, integrated solutions can optimize and save money by managing resource usage.

Features

• Real-time enforcement of security policies and compliance in access management, firewall rules, encryption, tags, garbage collection, automated after-hours resource management, and more.
• Provides integrated metrics and reporting
• Seamless integration with Google Cloud Platform features
• Automatically provision GCP AuditLog and other serverless features.

McAfee MVISION

McAfee MVISION is a security solution that integrates with Google Cloud SCC to give teams visibility into the security posture of their GCP resources, and to detect and address vulnerabilities and threats.

Cloud-native solutions also offer configuration audits that allow security teams to identify and address hidden risks. It has a cloud policy engine that powers Google Cloud queries to detect a variety of security misconfigurations on various Google Cloud services.

Features

• Provide insights to help your team identify and address security and compliance issues.
• Power comprehensive configuration audits to uncover hidden vulnerabilities and help your team implement best practices.
• Provides visibility to enable teams to investigate security incidents, anomalies, breaches, and threats, and enables rapid remedial action in a cloud security command center.
• Notifications when there are security threats or policy violations.
• Visualize vulnerabilities and threats with the Google Cloud SCC dashboard.

netscope

With Netskope, you can quickly identify and address security issues, threats, and misconfigurations that expose your digital assets to threats and attacks.

Netskope not only complements GSCC in protecting compute instances, object storage, databases, and other assets, but also provides deeper and broader insights into misconfigurations, advanced threats, and risks. .

Features

• Gain valuable real-time visibility into threats, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance on the Google Cloud Platform.
• Identify and address vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, compliance, and security risks.
• Continuously monitor your security configuration and check it against best practices. Identify issues and apply standards based on best practices and CIS benchmarks.
• Compliance reporting – Inventory your Google Cloud resources and identify and report misconfigurations and anomalies.

trip wire

Tripwire Cloud Cybersecurity is a comprehensive solution that enables organizations to implement effective security configurations and controls to prevent digital assets from being compromised. It combines configuration management, cloud management assessor (CMA), and file integrity monitoring capabilities to identify exposed resources and data on Google Cloud.

Main features

• Discover and take action on exposed GCP storage buckets or instances to ensure proper configuration and data security.
• Collect, analyze, and score data from your Google Cloud configurations so you can identify and address misconfigurations.
• Monitor configuration changes that compromise your GCP cloud or expose assets
• Tripwire Cloud Management Assessors monitor Google Cloud Platform misconfigurations and alert security teams to fix them.

scout suite

Scout Suite is an open source security auditing tool for GCP and other public clouds. This allows security teams to assess the security posture of their GCP environment and identify misconfigurations and other vulnerabilities.

The Scout Suite configuration review tool easily integrates with APIs published by Google to collect and analyze security posture data. It then highlights the identified vulnerabilities.

aqua security

Aqua Security is a platform that provides organizations with tangible insights into GCP and the rest of AWS, Oracle Cloud, and Azure. Helps simplify and enforce policy and compliance.

Aqua integrates with Google’s Cloud Security Command Center, other third-party solutions, and analytics and monitoring tools. This allows you to view and manage security, policy, and compliance from one place.

Features

• Scan, identify, and address misconfigurations, malware, and vulnerabilities on your images.
• Enforce image consistency throughout the application lifecycle
• Define and enforce privileges and compliance standards such as PCI, GDPR, and HIPAA.
• Enhance threat detection and mitigation for your GCP container workloads.
• Create and apply image assurance policies to prevent compromised, vulnerable, or misconfigured images from running in your Google Kubernetes Engine environment.
• Helps build audit trails for forensics and compliance.
• Continuously scans your configuration for vulnerabilities and anomalies.

GCP Bucket Brute

GCPBucketBrute is a customizable and effective open-source security solution for detecting open or misconfigured Google storage buckets. Generally, this is a script that enumerates your Google Storage buckets to check for insecure configurations or privilege escalation.

Features

• Detect open GCP buckets and dangerous privilege escalation on cloud instances on your platform.
• Check the permissions of all discovered buckets to determine if they are vulnerable to privilege escalation.
• Suitable for Google cloud penetration testing, red team engagement, etc.

cloud security suite

Security FTW Cloud Security Suite is another open source for auditing the security posture of your GCP infrastructure. An all-in-one solution that helps you audit the configuration and security of your GCP accounts and helps you identify a wide range of vulnerabilities.

conclusion

Google Cloud Platform provides flexible and highly scalable IT infrastructure. However, like any cloud environment, vulnerabilities can exist if not configured correctly. Malicious parties can exploit it to compromise your system, steal data, infect you with malware, or perform other cyber-attacks.

Fortunately, businesses can protect their GCP environments by following good security practices, using reliable tools to protect, continuously monitor, and gain visibility into their configuration and overall security posture. .