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© 2021 Peak AI Ltd. All Rights Reserved Confidential
© 2021 Peak AI Ltd. All Rights Reserved
Senior Engineering
Manager @ Peak
7x AWS Certifications, inc.
Security Specialty
2x Linux certifications
Cyber Security Analyst
(CYSA+) certified
About Me Michael Pearce (Mike, for short)
Started with Linux
Chose a Computing course in final school years
Attended Computing for Business Applications @ University of Manchester
Made a friend at martial arts training > Summer work > Full time work - Network!
Systems configuration & Training > Web development > IT Infrastructure > Cloud
Currently building the Peak platform (https://peak.ai)

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Audience Survey

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Audience Survey

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Securing Cloud Infrastructure and applications - concepts and popular services
for managing traffic, detecting and preventing threats.
The cloud enables us to create enterprise grade infrastructure that is scalable,
highly available and fault tolerant, often deployed across multiple regions - this
needs to be secured with tools and services such as web application firewalls
(WAF), intrusion detection systems (IDS), intrusion prevention systems (IPS),
DDoS protection, and economic denial of service/sustainability (EDoS) to ensure
our data stays private and secure.
Module: Emerging
Technologies
Cutting-edge techniques
and their applications
Securing the Cloud
Agenda

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What is it?
● Keeping things functioning even
when where are errors and
faults
● Hardware or software
● Tied in with scalability and high
availability
Why do we need it?
● It is not useful, if it is not
accessible
● Some threats include sabotage
○ e.g. Data loss
Common Concepts
What is it?
● Elastic Scaling
○ Aided by virtual servers
○ Consider load balancing
Why do we need it?
● Making sure infrastructure can:
○ Handle high demands
■ Keep customer
service available
■ Keep security
tools available!
○ Reduce wasteful usage
■ Reduce attack
vectors
What is it?
● Making things available across
data centres, regions, countries
and continents
○ In disaster scenarios
● Part of the CIA Triad
○ Confidentiality, Integrity
And Availability
Why do we need it?
● It is not useful, if it is not
accessible
● Some threats include sabotage
○ e.g. Reputational risk
Scalability High Availability Fault Tolerance

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● Network security device
● Monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic
● Based on a set of security rules
● Establishes a barrier between your internal network and
incoming traffic from external sources (such as the
internet)
● In order to block malicious traffic like viruses and
hackers.
● More of Web based firewalls later…
Firewalls

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NACL (Network Access Control List)
Traffic Control
● Operates on the Instance (VM etc.)
● Only used to determine allowed traffic
● Is stateful: Return traffic is automatically allowed,
regardless of any rules
● Only applies to an instance if specified, deny by
default
Security Group
● An optional layer of security for your private
cloud
● Acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out
of one or more subnets
● You might set up Network ACLs with rules similar
to your security groups in order to add an
additional layer of security to your VPC
● Acts on the whole subnet
● Is stateless: Return traffic must be explicitly
allowed by rules

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Confidential
Private Endpoints
● AWS Private Link / Azure Private Link / Google
Service Connect
● Keeping traffic inside the virtual network
● Not out to the outside world and back
● Even when using cloud provider managed
services
● Marketplaces of private link compatible
services
○ Only within one providers network
● Less hops, less to manage - more stability and
security

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Confidential
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
● Protects applications from common web exploits,
attack patterns or unwanted traffic.
● Block well known threats such as SQL injection or
cross-site scripting, as well as custom rules based
on the request payload.
● Also used for Monitoring
AWS WAF, CloudFlare, Incapsula, Fortinet, Akamai, F5
Intrusion Detection & Prevention

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Confidential
Intrusion Detection System (IDS)
● Monitor a network for malicious activity or
policy violations
● Report it and/or collected centrally (SIEM)
● Network or Host based
● Signature of Anomaly based
● Working closely, or combined with IPS
● But there are evasion techniques
TrendMicro, Darktrace, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks

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Confidential
Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)
IPS may take action to shut down the threat!
● Restoring log files from storage
● Suspending user accounts
● Blocking IP addresses
● Killing processes
● Shutting down systems
● Starting up processes
● Updating firewall settings
● Alerting, recording, and reporting suspicious
activities
Checkpoint, Amour, TrendMicro, Palo Alto, CrowdSec

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< ALARMING QUOTE
ABOUT DDoS AND EDoS
HERE >
😱

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DDoS - Distributed Denial of Service
● Malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a
targeted server, service or network by overwhelming
the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood
of Internet traffic.
● Usually a network of machines - bots - botnets.
● 2.4 Terabytes PER SECOND attack sustained by
Microsoft in August 2021.
EDoS - Economic Denial of Service (or Sustainability)
● A new twist on the traditional denial of service model
● Attackers purposefully inflate the bills of cloud service
users until they can no longer afford service.
DDoS & EDoS

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Confidential
Peak
The Decision
Intelligence Company

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The Peak Platform
We recently announced the general availability of our platform
(called Peak) in January 2022.
It is a cloud based, multi-tenant platform to give you everything
you need to build and deploy Decision Intelligence Solutions at
pace and scale.
We can build solutions for you, build it with you or you can
build it yourself.
We are announcing our data science community (a waiting list
to find out more) - this will include events and early access to
the platform.
Go to https://peak.ai/community to sign up!
Dock - data management - everything you need to
make your data AI ready - includes data
connectors and data bridge.
Factory - an ML workbench designed by data
scientists, for data scientists to create a
centralised intelligence for companies.
Work - a way for commercial leaders to interact
with the intelligence created in Factory - used to
power great decisions.

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The Peak platform
Live Example

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Live Demo 🤞

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Workspace Service
Controlling access to internal resources

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Thank You!

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