News | Cloud Storage Security

AWS celebrated 16 years since the launch of Amazon S3 with AWS Pi Day on March 14, 2022. Since the beginning of the year, some incredible announcements have been made including improvements to file integrity, the new Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class, general availability of AWS Backup, and much more. With over 200 trillion files being stored (that’s 29,000 files per person on earth) and more than 100 million requests per second for files, S3 is used now more than ever. However, there’s still one aspect of storage security that continues to be overlooked — the topic of antivirus scanning.

It is well known that malware can disrupt the availability of critical assets and data, impairing an organization’s ability to operate. It is key that organizations remain vigilant and defend against malware across all potential entry points.  

Recently, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a joint cybersecurity advisory to raise awareness regarding destructive malware and provide preventative recommendations.

Customer Challenge

As a fast-growing learning management solution, MindEdge was receiving a growing number of questions from existing and potential customers about their security practices. MindEdge determined that the best route for elevating customer confidence was to achieve SOC 2 compliance. While preparing their roadmap for making their system and processes SOC 2 compliant, they found themselves in need of additional security controls to ensure that objects stored and shared from Amazon S3 buckets were scanned and clean from malware. The team identified three main requirements that needed to be met:

Customer Challenge

ADEC Innovations hosts an application on AWS that collects environmental data, charts, and assets from public sources and aggregates these resources as elements in a pdf report for environmental professionals. The reports are stored in Amazon S3 buckets and delivered to customers via automated email.

Occasionally, customers would report that the delivery of the file had been blocked by their firewall or that the local device’s endpoint solution warned the user of potential malicious code embedded in the report.

Customer Challenge

Workvivo is a workplace employee communication platform that allows organizations to keep their employees engaged and up to date with what their colleagues are doing. Like many solutions hosted on AWS, Workvivo utilizes Amazon S3 as the data store for ingesting and sharing files with its application users. Since employees using the platform can upload videos, images, documents, and other files, Workvivo realized there was a need to ensure that uploaded files are scanned for viruses and malware before they are shared with downstream application users.

According to a release from the U.S. Department of Justice, “Roughly $350 million in ransom was paid to malicious cyber actors in 2020, a more than 300% increase from the previous year”. With Amazon S3 buckets continuously being the storage medium for uploaded files by most organizations, the attack surface is only increasing when an S3 bucket is left misconfigured and storing infected files.

Customer Challenge

Also Announces Investment Funding from Mistral Venture Partners

There is no doubt that as each day goes by, more and more data is migrating into cloud storage. The public cloud, or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as some call it, has become the new normal. Out of all the data store service providers out there like Azure Blob Storage and Google Cloud Storage, the largest by far is Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). It has gotten so large that AWS acknowledged their store capacity in the excess of exabytes of storage and trillions of objects. Imagine the size of the earth is measured as one gigabyte. Then the size of the sun would be equivalent to an exabyte.  It’s hard to imagine... 

The Shared Responsibility Model for Object Storage

As malware attack vectors continue to grow and more and more security features are built above and below the delineation of “Security of the Cloud” (provided by AWS) and “Security in the Cloud” (your job), security teams will need to ensure a proper framework to protect their applications and data.