Remediate security recommendations in 1 click

Azure Security Center provides unified security management and advanced threat protection across hybrid cloud workloads. Using advanced analytics, it helps you detect potentially malicious activity across your hybrid cloud workloads, and recommends potential remediation steps, which you can then evaluate, and take the necessary action.

One of the main features of Azure Security Center is that offers prioritized and actionable security recommendations so you can remediate security vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by attackers. To simplify remediation of security issues now allows you to remediate a recommendation on multiple resources with a single click.

• Quick access to 1-click fix
  The 1-click fix label is shown next to the recommendations that offer this faster remediation tool.
• Logging for transparency
  All remediation actions are logged in the activity log.

How to use 1-click remediation

Look for the “1-click Fix !” Label at the recommendations!

Once you click the “1-click Fix !” Label, the recommendation information page will pen. Select the affected resources and click Remediate

A final window will open that will inform you about the action that will be performed and what will affect. Check the information and if you agree click the final “Remediation” button

Current 1-click remediation availability

Remediation is available for the following recommendations in preview:

• Web Apps, Function Apps, and API Apps should only be accessible over HTTPS
• Remote debugging should be turned off for Function Apps, Web Apps, and API Apps
• CORS should not allow every resource to access your Function Apps, Web Apps, or API Apps
• Secure transfer to storage accounts should be enabled
• Transparent data encryption for Azure SQL Database should be enabled
• Monitoring agent should be installed on your virtual machines
• Diagnostic logs in Azure Key Vault and Azure Service Bus should be enabled
• Diagnostic logs in Service Bus should be enabled
• Vulnerability assessment should be enabled on your SQL servers
• Advanced data security should be enabled on your SQL servers
• Vulnerability assessment should be enabled on your SQL managed instances
• Advanced data security should be enabled on your SQL managed instances

Single click remediation is part of Azure Security Center’s free tier.

Read more at: Azure Security Center single click remediation

Sources:

Azure Security Center single click remediation

Azure Security Center—1-click remediation for security recommendations is now available

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post ASC | Remediate security recommendations in 1 click appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

Azure Storage Advanced Threat Protection is a new security feature, currently in Preview. It monitors the Azure Blob Storage accounts. It detects anomalies and uncommon access to the Storage Account and notifies the admins through email.

All the Azure Storage Advanced Threat Protection monitoring and logs are integrated to the Azure Security Center, including the well known ASC recommendations.

It’s so easy to enable, just go to the Azure Portal, navigate to your storage account’s Advanced Threat Protection setting and switch it ON!

After that you can view the alerts at the Security Center, under Threat Protection’s Security Alerts.

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post Azure Storage Advanced Thread Protection appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

Continuing the Azure Security Center posts, today we will see a new feature of the Security Center, called Just in Time VM Access.

As best security practice, all the management ports of a Virtual Machine should be closed using Network Security Groups. Only the ports required for any published services should be opened, if any.

However there are many occasions that we are requested to open a management port for administration or a service port for some tests for short time. This action has two major problems, first it requires a lot of administration time, because the administrator must go to the Azure Portal and add a rule at the VM’s NSG. The second problem is that many time the port is forgotten open and this is a major vulnerability since the majority of the Brute Force attacks are performed to the management ports, 22 and 3389.

Here comes the Azure Security Center, with the Just in Time VM Access feature. With this feature we can use the RBAC of the azure Portal and allow specific users to Request a predefined port to be opened for a short time frame.

JIT Configuration

Lets see how we configure the JIT.  First we need to go to the Azure Security Center. Scroll down to the ADVANCED CLOUD DEFENSE and click the “Just in time VM Access”. Since it is at a Preview you need to press the “Try Just in time VM access”

After we enable JIT, the window displays tree tabs, the Configured, the Recommended and the No recommendation. The Configured tab displays the Virtual Machines that we have already enabled JIT. The recommended are VMs that have NSGs and are recommended to be enabled for JIT. The No recommendation are Classic VMs or VMs that don’t have attached NSG.

To enable JIT for a VM, go to the Recommended tab, select one or more VMs and press “Enable JIT on x VMs”

At the “JIT VM access configuration” the Security Center proposes rule with the default management ports. We can add other ports that we need and also remove any of them that are unnecessary.

At each rule we can configure the Port, the Protocol, the Source IP and the Maximum request time.

If we leave the “Allowed source IPs” to “Per request” then we allow the requester to decide. One very interesting setting here is that when a user requests access it has the option to allow only the Public IP that he is using at that time automatically.

With the last option, the “Max request time” we narrow down the maximum time that we will allow a port to be opened.

After we configure all the parameters we click Save and the VM moves to the Configured tab. At any time we can change the configuration by selecting the VM, press the three dots at the end of the line (…) and click Edit.

The Propertied button opens the VM’s blade, the Activity log shows all the users that requested access and the Remove of course disabled the JIT.

Behind the scene

What really happens to the VM? if you browse to the NSG that is attached to the VM you will see that all the port rules configured at the JIT are added as NSG Rules with lower priority than all the other rules. All other rules automatically changed priority to higher.

Lets see how we request access and what happens in the background. To request access go to the Security Center / JIT , select the VM and press “Request Access”

At the “Request access” blade switch on the desired port, select “My IP” or “IP Range” and the Timerange, all according to the JIT configuration of the VM. Finally press “Open Ports”

At the above example I select “My IP” so if you go to the VM’s NSG you will see that the 3389 port rule changed to “Allow” and for Source has my current Public IP. Also it moved at first priority.

After the expiration of the time rage the port will change to “Deny” and move back to its prior priority.

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post Bulletproof manage your Azure VMs appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.