Container Security Guide

It is becoming more crucial for enterprises to evaluate their system's attack surface in order to pinpoint any potential points of vulnerability as security threats and opportunities to compromise organizations grow more serious. Making sure that anything you build consistently functions as planned and only as intended is the aim of cybersecurity.

A single file or collection of software files that contains all the files necessary to run an application is called a container. All of the code, dependencies, libraries, runtime, and system tools for the application are "contained" inside the container. Because of this, designing an application is now easier, faster, and more powerful than ever thanks to containers.

Because of their simplicity and contribution to increased development velocity, containers have gained popularity among businesses today. While security teams work to make sure container pipelines are secure and enhance the risk posture of applications when they are deployed, developers and DevOps relish this newfound speed to provide software and value to consumers more quickly.

Security for containers must be integrated, ongoing, and supportive of an organization's overall security posture. You should incorporate it into your development process, automate it to reduce the number of manual touchpoints, and extend it to the upkeep and operation of the underlying infrastructure. This entails safeguarding the runtime host, platform, and application layers, as well as the container images used in your build workflow. By integrating security into the continuous delivery life cycle, your company will be able to reduce vulnerabilities across an expanding attack surface and mitigate risk.

You may find the answers to the following queries concerning container security in this post.

• What is Container Security?

• Why is Container Security important?

• What are the Challenges of Container Security?

• What are the Advantages of Container Security?

• What are the Best Practices for Container Security?

• How do I secure a Container Image?

• What are the Types of Container Security?

• What are the Types of Container Security Solutions?

• What are the Best Container Security Tools?

• How can I prevent the most frequent failures in Container Security?

What is Container Security?

Implementing tools and procedures to ensure that container infrastructure, apps, and other container components are secure throughout their whole attack surface is known as container security.

A thorough security assessment must include container security. The practice of using a combination of security technologies and rules ensures that containerized applications are protected from potential risks. Risks in the environment are managed by container security, including those in the infrastructure, CI/CD pipeline, container runtime, and lifecycle management applications that use containers.

The fact that container security reflects the evolving nature of IT architecture itself is one of the most crucial things to understand. The development of applications has undergone a fundamental change as a result of cloud-native computing. As a result, we must fundamentally alter the way we safeguard them.

Cybersecurity used to mean securing a single "perimeter". By adding new complexity, containers have rendered this idea obsolete. To analyze, monitor, and safeguard these new applications in containerized environments, it is necessary to use specialist tools because these environments have many more abstraction levels.

Understanding how the many layers of a cloud-native computing environment interact with one another and then locating the appropriate tools to create a repeatable set of processes to protect each layer will be difficult for enterprises to accomplish.

Continuous container security for the company generally entails:

• Securing the application and the container pipeline

• Securing the infrastructure and environment for container deployment

• Securing the running containerized workloads

Why is Container Security Important?

Containers provide some built-in security benefits, such as improved application isolation, and expand the danger landscape for a company. Containers are a more tempting target for malicious actors and increase system demands as a result of the huge increase in container utilization in production systems. A single weak or compromised container could end up serving as a point of entry into the larger environment of an organization.

The importance of container security is highlighted by an increase in east-west traffic passing through data centers and clouds, as well as by the lack of adequate security measures observing this source of network traffic. Lateral assaults are not covered by conventional network security measures. To lower the security threats to your company, it's essential to develop particular container security procedures.

Scannable third-party software components are abundant in containerized application development, making it crucial to scan container images at every step of development. Every container that is deployed from an image inherits any vulnerabilities present in the image.

Running containers offer another attack surface since they are susceptible to attacks that get around the host-to-container separation. In doing so, attackers can both "break" from a container and hijack the host, and gain unauthorized access to additional containers.

Container security is becoming an essential part of every organization's cybersecurity strategy as mission-wise regulators and containers are more widely used to run critical systems and production applications.

What are the Challenges of Container Security?

A logical packaging technique for removing applications from the environment they operate in is provided by containers. No matter if the target environment is a private data center, the public cloud, or even the developer's laptop, this decoupling enables simple and reliable deployment of container-based apps. Development teams can work on an unprecedented scale using containerization, deploy software efficiently, and move at breakneck speed. As a tactic, containers are becoming increasingly popular and used. However, containers have not been architected or created with safety in mind, like so many other new technologies. Therefore, there are certain difficulties. It would be impossible to list all of these difficulties here. However, the following list includes the most typical forms of container security risks:

• Using Insecure Images: When creating containers, either a base image or a parent image is used. Because you may reuse the various parts of an image rather than developing a container from the start, these images are very helpful for building containers. However, pictures or their dependencies could have security flaws just like any other piece of code.
• Malware in Containers: Malware is harmful software that has been installed inside a container. It can enter containers at various times throughout the container lifecycle. Malware could be inserted into the source code repositories that are eventually used to create container images, for example, by an attacker who gains access to your CI/CD infrastructure. Alternatively, an attacker may gain access to your container registry and swap out your original images for corrupt ones that have malware. Users are misled into downloading malicious container images from outside sources in a third form of container malware attack. Malware will always infiltrate your runtime environment if it is not recognized before a container is launched, which could result in a variety of security problems like stealing private information from an application or interfering with other containers.
• Containers Bearing a Special Flag: Anyone who has even a basic understanding of containers may be familiar with the concept of a privileged container. A container that has the privileged flag enabled can access the host's device and do almost any task that the host is capable of. If a hacker infiltrates a container running with the privileged flag, they can cause havoc.
• Privileges for Unsecured Containers: Containers should typically operate in unprivileged mode, meaning they should not have access to any resources in the containerized environment that is not directly under their control. Unless the containers have a specific need to communicate with one another, such as if you are running a sidecar container that gathers logs from an application container, communications between containers should also be limited. Security issues occur when containers are given access to more resources than they actually need. Typically, issues with the container orchestrator's configuration lead to insecure privileges. For instance, if Kubernetes security contexts and network policies are not properly set, Kubernetes-managed containers may have greater access than they should.
• Open Connection Between Containers: For containers to succeed, communication between them is essential. It can be difficult to implement networking/firewalling rules that follow the least privilege principle due to the number of containers and microservices you may be running as well as the ephemeral nature of containers in general. However, in order to reduce the surface of your attack, you should only permit communication between containers that is absolutely necessary.
• Sensitive Data Containers: Data storage is not intended to be done with containers. However, businesses occasionally make the error of putting confidential data inside container pictures. For instance, Vine's full source code was made public when a container registry that Vine believed to be private but that was actually open to the public was found to be storing pictures that contained the source code. To be fair, this occurred in the early days of the container era before container image management best practices had been solidified. It makes sense how a mistake like this may have happened.
• Running Rogue and Harmful Processes Inside Containers: With an average container lifespan of hours or even minutes, monitoring active container operations in a large environment might be difficult. In other words, the constant turnover of containers makes it nearly impossible for regular people to keep track of which processes are active at any given time, much less recognize erroneous or malicious ones.
• Not Properly Segregated Containers from the Host: It has two sides when it comes to container safety. They have a short lifespan, limited adaptability, and several security advantages due to their immutability. However, containers are a means of attack against the host that they are running on. Containers with the privileged flag present this risk. The underlying host could be threatened by numerous additional setup errors.

What are the Advantages of Container Security?

Container security shot to the top of the list of priorities as the use of containers to run, transfer, and deploy software surged. And rightfully so, container security tends to enhance overall IT security in addition to covering all facets of protecting containerized software and its supporting infrastructure.

When businesses require continuous security monitoring across development, testing, and production environments (DevSecOps), security is often strengthened.

With container security, you can benefit from a number of security advantages, like enhanced application isolation, which helps you prevent mistakes like exposing important data.

The advantages of container security are listed below.

• Simple to Install: Hosting your company's setup is significantly simplified by container security, which includes the management and storage of security tools, schedulers, and monitoring systems.
• Automatization: Container security enables you to automate and manage your IT activities that are created to safeguard the integrity of your network, from load balancing to orchestration.
• Simpler Process Administration: Your IT team's ability to manage and maintain their containerized environments is facilitated by effective container security management. It cuts down on the time and materials needed for DevOps tasks.
• Scalability: On several hardware platforms and operating systems, containerized applications can be set up. The development, testing, and production cycles will move more quickly as a result.

What are the Best Practices for Container Security?

Container adoption by developers will grow and with it the potential security flaws that could enter your apps. The fact that the majority of containerization operations take place in the cloud, with AWS (78%), Azure (39%), and Google Cloud Platform (35%) supporting a sizable part of native cloud container deployments, furthers this issue.

There are nine best practices to follow to make sure you receive the greatest benefit from your containers and can properly create and execute apps using them. The use of specialist technologies is another option you have for lowering container security threats.

In order to avoid paying a premium for the advantages of container technology, you must adhere to the necessary security best practices. Best practices for container security are outlined below::

1. Shorten the lifespan of containers to reduce the attack surface: A permanent virtualized place where you may constantly add data/code, extract information, and update only occasionally every few months was not how containers were initially intended to be used. Any inherent code vulnerabilities are virtually impossible to establish themselves in temporary containers because of their extremely brief lifespans. To facilitate application development while preventing security issues, keep the number of objects inside a container to a minimum and keep them concise.
2. Give your microservices' supporting containers extra consideration: Microservices are often consistent, continuing operations that can be scaled up or decommissioned in accordance with business needs. To effectively handle traffic spikes, an e-commerce website, for instance, could run on microservices. Microservices are vulnerable to assaults since they must operate with a lot of network exposure. These microservices' underlying containers could have problems. There are two approaches to this. In order to identify the source of a vulnerability before the container is automatically removed (due to its typically limited lifespan), you must first implement a real-time log analytics system. Second, grant limited user privileges to any container hosting microservices so that even in the event of a virus attack, it cannot change any data.
3. Take care when sourcing your container pictures: With only a little manual work, you can start using container technology thanks to image files. However, it's possible that you're inheriting other people's image flaws, setup errors, and maybe undetected malware. The provenance of a container picture is crucial because of this. To ensure that an image you download is from a reputable source, look for the digital signature. To reduce the hazards of open source, choose picture registries that are widely recognized whenever possible.
4. Invest time in setting up user privileges: User privileges and restricted access are what actually make containers secure, and we cannot emphasize this enough. This characteristic can be improved by defining the "least privileges" for each container. It is important to namespace the user proactively because it is not the default. In such circumstances, an attack cannot obtain root-level privileges even if it manages to cross the container barrier and reach the host OS. Spend some time defining roles for specific users or groups of users as opposed to distributing cluster rights according to a one-size-fits-all methodology. Limiting resource usage is essential. The other processes in your infrastructure may become resource-starved if an attacker runs resource-intensive programs like torrent peers or Bitcoin mining within the container.
5. Use a host that is specifically intended for deploying containers: Security for containers is a two-way street. The host operating system must be strong enough to withstand an assault and prevent its effects from spreading outside of its boundary, just as the container shell must be hardened to prevent any internal vulnerabilities from leaking. Therefore, it is a good idea to containerize your application development process while using a relatively lightweight Linux distribution. Each host only supports a few containers, so even if one is compromised, the other hosts and the containers they host are unaffected.
6. Make troubleshooting externally accessible: There is a danger of exposure every time a developer or member of the DevOps team opens the container to configure its internal components. In other words, attempting to increase container security could actually make the container's intrinsic strength weaker. By using external troubleshooting, a developer can keep an eye on and examine performance logs without logging in, which may reduce this risk. Platforms for container security will be useful in this situation since they provide an outside-in perspective on container performance. You don't even need to open a damaged or susceptible container to replace it; you may just deploy a new one in its place.
7. Avoid using a container host to run mission-critical processes: In regards to container security, always err on the side of caution. Assume that a container's level of isolation is never perfect and that some porousness may still exist. On the basis of this supposition, it is easy to understand why mission-critical operations (such as payroll, e-commerce websites, etc.) require their own host. Containers have unique security needs that do not match business-specific security guidelines. It is advisable to avoid combining the two.
8. Keep the container environment tidy: It is challenging to carry out a post-attack forensic investigation because of the transient nature of containers. A conventional root cause analysis exercise is prevented since the container deletes itself automatically. Do not further this complexity by failing to remove inactive/defunct user roles. Continually keep an eye on how access to containers is being used, and get rid of any unused roles. When troubleshooting or conducting a security investigation, this will make it easier to identify the precise function of the responsible user.
9. Benefit from immediate threat identification and action: Running a container is one of the main benefits since it provides a secure environment for an application to test out any potential problems, vulnerabilities, or setup errors. However, you need to be able to spot it before it causes any lasting harm and respond quickly. Real-time threat detection opens a new window, notifying you of a security event before it progresses to a more serious level and maybe deleting the container. You can connect your detection systems to a response system, which enables you to quickly raise a ticket, alert staff, or start an automated process without any delays.

How do I Secure a Container Image?

A secure container image is created using three essential procedures, which are summarized as follows:

• Code and its dependencies should be secured.

• Start with a basic representation from a reliable source.

• Throughout the development lifecycle, keep track of the tools and packages you add to images.

To better understand how this method can produce secure container images, we will look at procedures for securing container images in greater depth.

1. Make sure your code and its dependencies are secure: Your cloud-native applications are the lifeblood of your business, so one of the main reasons you're building a container in the first place is probably to provide them more quickly. Historically, application security started with the code and ended there. While containers and other contemporary development techniques have broadened the definition of "application code," this specific area of concern still exists. Fortunately, this is the area of container images that developers can directly control and, ideally, understand best. However, finding all of your code dependencies and figuring out how to resolve security vulnerabilities are not simple tasks. Assuming you have access to the source code, you should do software composition analysis (SCA) and static application security testing (SAST) on your code and its dependencies using specialized tools, such as Snyk Open Source. The majority of a modern application's lines of code frequently come from dependence on third-party open-source software. Automation of this process, irrespective of the containerization stage, is possible by identifying problems early in development and integrating security tools with your source code. While some types of code can be scanned and analyzed, identifying these problems directly in your Git commits, pipelines, and repositories will probably work better for developers.
2. Begin with a basic photograph from a reliable source: What's so special about tiny images? One of the most crucial factors in security is the base image, which is the 'FROM' line in your Dockerfile. Fortunately, a lot of reliable merchants offer information that is simple to use. The most well-liked place to start when looking for container base images is by far Docker Hub. It has different features in Docker Hub; they have over 3.8 million images and over 7 million repositories. About 11 billion pull requests are made each month on Docker Hub, which is quite active. Some of these images are Official Images, which are curated collections of open-source and "drop-in" solution repositories issued by Docker. Additionally, Docker provides images that have been released by Verified Publishers. These top-notch images are directly published and maintained by a business that Docker has approved as a Verified Publisher. For establishing your own internal container image best practices, Docker's recommendations for these recognized publishers to follow are a wonderful place to start. Finding a publicly accessible image on Docker Hub that fits your use case is simple, but you should be aware of the images' origin. Similar to how you wouldn't download and install software from an untrusted website, you probably wouldn't want to use images that unknown, untrusted individuals have uploaded to the Docker Hub. In order to increase the level of quality assurance, you'll need to select images that are part of Docker's Official program, or know and verify the source and content of third-party images - perhaps using something like a Notary to check digital signatures. However, you should go a step further and select minimum base images tailored to your needs in order to further limit the number of vulnerabilities and increase control over what is packaged inside your containers.
3. Take care of all the layers between the base image and your code: Base images need to be handled with particular care. As you add your own layers on top of the base image, you inherit whatever is in it, and a thin image frequently minimizes the security burden. What about the numerous layers you've added to the container, though? Starting with a slim image increases the likelihood that you'll need to add tools and libraries, as well as your code and other components, in order for things to function. All of these components need to be checked for vulnerabilities. The good news is that these middle layers-what we refer to as everything following the first FROM line and the last Dockerfile lines where you configure your code to run are directly under your control. The RUN, COPY, and ADD commands in Dockerfiles are of particular relevance to us because they are the ones that install things. Technically, your code may be included in one of these intermediary levels as well, but conceptually, we're going to refer to it as the final layer since we already dealt with it in Step 1. Prioritizing what to focus on at different points in the lifecycle is one of the most challenging aspects of addressing vulnerabilities in these intermediary layers. As images progress toward production, you should get rid of anything that isn't strictly necessary to run your program because the tools you need at each step may vary. It is very simple to remove these tools later by simply removing them from the Dockerfile and rebuilding when you customize your images by starting with a minimal base and adding your tools later. Multi-stage builds are even better because they capture all of these stages in a single, automated build process.

What are the Types of Container Security?

There are various container security types which are explained below:

• Security for Container Networks: Network security in a conventional architecture was based on IP addresses. Workloads are ephemeral and have IP addresses that are assigned dynamically in a containerized environment, making them more challenging to secure. Network security for containers proactively blocks undesired communication and stops risks from hitting your deployed applications. Next-generation firewalls that are containerized can shield organizations' containers from network-based dangers. The majority of network-based assaults are form factor-independent. Because of this, network-based attacks like cryptojacking, ransomware, BotNetC2, and many others that affect bare metal and VM-based apps affect containerized applications. Containerized next-generation firewalls block malicious inbound connections used in data exfiltration and command-and-control (C2) attacks, in addition to stopping malware from entering and spreading within the cluster. Next-generation firewalls that are containerized offer protection against unknown and unpatched vulnerabilities, while shift-left security technologies offer deploy-time defense against known vulnerabilities. Comprehensive container network security is provided by micro-segmentation technologies and modern firewalls. While containerized next-generation firewalls perform layer-7 deep packet inspection and scan all the allowed traffic to identify and block known and new threats, identity-based micro-segmentation aids in limiting communication between applications at layers 3 and 4, respectively.
• Security for Container Runtime: When a container enters production, the tools and procedures required to protect it from threats and vulnerabilities are referred to as container runtime security. Developers and security teams handle container configurations and live environment scanning for vulnerabilities and configuration drift as part of container runtime security techniques, which often incorporate a significant automation component. In order to create behavioral baselines for their container environments in a typical, secure state and to detect abnormalities and assaults, organizations adopting containers must use enhanced runtime protection. Runtime container security is able to spot and stop malicious processes, abnormal file and network activity, and other deviations from the norm. Defense-in-depth tactics should be used by organizations to safeguard their containers. Container runtime protection can act as an extra layer of security to thwart malware in addition to the container network security provided by containerized next-generation firewalls. Runtime protection consists of embedded web applications and API security to counter HTTP-based layer 7 threats, such as the OWASP Top 10 or bots.
• Security for Container Orchestration: The process of implementing appropriate access control measures to guard against threats from overly privileged accounts, network attacks, and unwanted lateral movement is known as container orchestration security. Security and infrastructure teams can make sure that users can only execute commands based on suitable responsibilities by utilizing Identity Access Management (IAM) in cloud security and a least-privileged access paradigm, where Docker and Kubernetes activity is expressly whitelisted. Organizations must safeguard communications between pods, prevent attackers from moving laterally through their environment to do damage and safeguard any front-end services from intrusions.
• Host OS Security: Protecting your operating system (OS) from a cyberattack is known as host OS security. The demand for host security is increasing along with cloud native app development technology. Choosing the host's operating system is the first step in securing it. Use a distributed operating system that is designed to execute containers wherever possible. If you're using Microsoft Windows or stock Linux distributions, be sure to disable or delete unused services and generally harden the operating system. To make sure your host is operating as you would expect, add a layer of protection and monitoring tools. In this circumstance, tools like application control or an intrusion prevention system (IPS) are particularly helpful. Perhaps the most crucial layer in terms of security is the OS that runs your container environment. All other regions of your stack could be accessed by an intrusion that affects the host environment. Hosts must be checked for vulnerabilities, made more secure using specialized CIS Benchmarks, and shielded from unauthorized access (using sudo, docker, or other commands), file tampering, and other threats.

What are the Types of Container Security Solutions?

These are the various types of container security solutions:

• Firewalls for Containers: Container firewalls are security technologies that shield host environments and containerized applications from threats and malicious traffic. Containers are a portable, lightweight method of packaging and deploying software that has grown in popularity in recent years for use in cloud and hybrid settings. However, containers can be exposed to security risks including malware, network assaults, and unauthorized access, just like any computing system. By examining and regulating network traffic to and from containers, container firewalls are a particular kind of network firewall created to solve these security threats. They can be set up to block or issue alerts for harmful or unauthorized traffic while allowing only authorized traffic to flow through. This helps to ensure that the containerized application is not interrupted or compromised and that attackers cannot access the container or host environment. Firewalls for containers are crucial for various reasons:
  • Security: Container firewalls assist in shielding host environments and containerized applications from harmful traffic and other threats.
  • Compliance: By adding an extra degree of protection for containerized applications, container firewalls can assist enterprises in adhering to legal and compliance obligations.
  • Visibility: Network traffic to and from containers is visible through container firewalls, which enables businesses to monitor what is happening in their containerized environments.
  • Efficiency: By only allowing necessary traffic to flow through, container firewalls can assist enterprises in improving the performance of their containerized environments.
• Container Monitoring: The performance of an application can be monitored by security teams using a container monitoring tool. Containers are sophisticated and hence more difficult to monitor than a conventional application that runs on VMs or real servers because of their transient nature. Even when workloads and clusters scale up and down, monitoring tools can gather and analyze performance indicators at scale across massive containerized environments. Applications that use containers have an impact on business processes, so maintaining their health is crucial. Application performance monitoring enables the company to monitor the health of its infrastructure and container-based apps. Continuous monitoring, which enables DevOps and security teams to identify and address problems before they become serious, is essential for sustaining optimum performance. In order to aid analysts in identifying tendencies that can lead to recurrent bottlenecks or other problems, some technologies additionally keep an eye on previous data or CPU usage. These metrics can help with accurate resource forecasts, resource allocation, and resource deployment. To reduce hazards at the production level, it's critical to monitor the entire container environment. You can set up several monitoring procedures, such as:
  • Implementing protocols to prevent container failure is proactive monitoring.
  • Reactive monitoring-when containers fail to notify users, these processes issue events.
  • Adaptive monitoring continuously evaluates the effectiveness of your containers and the effects of new parts. Organizations can utilize these technologies to identify the root causes of certain occurrences and avert catastrophic failures on a large scale. Tools for container monitoring can also improve software-defined networks and resource distribution.
• Policies Engines: On the same operating system kernel, container engines can execute numerous, independent instances that are referred to as containers. Operating system-level virtualization is performed using containers, which offer a manageable, controllable environment for running applications and dependencies. By separating programs, apps, and code from other applications operating on the same physical host, container isolation can also improve security. The Open Container Initiative (OCI) container image format is used by the majority of current container engines. OCI container images are a representation of a container and the software that should execute inside of it, enabling the predictable, repeatable creation of new containers. The container runtime, which interacts with the operating system kernel to conduct containerization and set access and security parameters for running containers, is a crucial part of a container engine.

What are the Best Container Security Tools?

Using the best container security technologies is the best approach to protecting the security and integrity of the container. The best method to guarantee that the business solutions you implement stay in place and perform as intended is to do this.

Containers provide a means of guaranteeing that software solutions, whether commercial or not, function without interruption in any setting.

They are useful, for instance, for transferring these solutions from a testing environment to a production one or from a physical environment to the cloud.

Enforcing container security guards against the compromise of these solutions while they are in the migration process and when residing on temporary hosts.

The following items top our list of container security tools:

• Wiz: Everything that businesses create and use in the cloud is secured by Wiz. Wiz, a 2020 startup that grew from $1 million to $200 million in annual revenue in just two years, is the fastest-growing software firm in the world. Wiz is a CNAPP that unifies container and Kubernetes security, vulnerability management, IaC scanning, CIEM, and DSPM into a single platform. Wiz makes it possible for hundreds of businesses around the world, including 35% of the Fortune 100, to quickly discover and eliminate crucial risks in cloud environments. Its clients include Slack, Salesforce, Mars, BMW, Priceline, Avery Dennison, Cushman & Wakefield, Plaid, DocuSign, and Agoda, among others. Sequoia, Index Ventures, Insight Partners, Salesforce, Blackstone, Advent, Greenoaks, Lightspeed, and Agla are among the investors in Wiz.
• Lacework: The first and best data-driven cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) is provided by Lacework. Nearly 1,000 international innovators rely on Lacework to protect the cloud from conception to operation. Customers are given the tools they need by Lacework to prioritize risks, identify known and undiscovered threats more quickly, achieve continuous cloud compliance, and write secure code quickly. Since its establishment in 2017, Lacework has been perfecting a single cloud-native platform to ingest and comprehend as much data as is necessary to guarantee the highest security, using either agent-based or agentless methods. The frequent cloud use cases of posture management, workload protection, vulnerability management, compliance, container security, and more are then accomplished using this data by our unified platform. Customers count on Lacework to increase sales, speed up and secure the product launch process, and combine point security solutions into a single platform. On average, a platform replaces 2 to 5-point tools. Thanks to its innovative anomaly detection technology, customers typically experience a 100:1 decrease in alert noise. Additionally, our context-rich warnings have resulted in 80% faster investigations for Lacework users.
• PingSafe: The integrated platform from PingSafe contains all the elements required to protect your multi-cloud environment and secure your company. The CNAPP platform supports a variety of use cases, including Cloud setup errors - Security for Kubernetes and containers Defense Engine Offensive - Vulnerability Management - IaC Scanning - Security for Serverless Secret Scanning across Docker Images, CWPP, and SBOM.
• Cloud Trend Micro: Trend Micro Cloud One lets you protect your cloud infrastructure with clarity and simplicity, and is a security services platform for cloud creators, with the most comprehensive and in-depth cloud security offering in a single solution. Trend Micro Cloud One is able to ensure strong security while you take full advantage of all the advantages and efficiencies the cloud has to offer your business by taking your cloud projects and objectives holistically into account. Trend Micro Cloud One provides adaptability to solve your problems now and innovation to grow with your cloud services in the future. It is comprised of a set of services tailored to meet specific needs in terms of cloud security. You no longer need to use the processes you've already put in place or discover point goods that fit the particular needs of your infrastructure. Trend Micro Cloud One secures all components of your environment on a single, user-friendly platform with a full range of services created especially for the cloud. The Trend Micro Cloud One platform is made to give you the flexibility you require without impeding the performance of your business or the delivery of your applications, with support for all major cloud platforms and solutions that integrate seamlessly into your DevOps processes and toolchain.
• Snyk: Snyk, which is pronounced sneak, is a platform for developer security that secures cloud infrastructure, containers, open-source dependencies, and bespoke code all from one location. Snyk's developer security solutions make it simple to build contemporary applications and provide remediation guidance and code verification. Integrate a repository to detect issues, prioritize them based on context, repair them, and merge them in order to protect applications.
• Anchore: Anchore Enterprise is a security and compliance solution for companies that need to increase the security of their development environment and is targeted at the software supply chain. Any container environment, whether on-site or in a public cloud, can run Anchore. It concentrates on policy-based compliance for containers and the analysis of those containers; to put it simply, container images are examined and either pass or fail. Anchore is developer-focused and supports DevOps teams in their early efforts to secure apps. Additionally, Anchore provides two free container security tools: Syft, which creates software bills of materials (SBOMs) and allows users to view dependencies via a command line interface (CLI) tool; and Grype, which scans container images and generates a list of vulnerabilities. The Anchore community Slack channel is open to users.
• Aqua Security: Container security, Kubernetes security, serverless security products, and other cloud-native services are all provided by Aqua Security, commonly known as Aqua or AquaSec. Aqua offers both on-premises and cloud deployment options, and it supports both Linux and Windows containers. Businesses can view scans of container images and a ranking of the severity of their susceptibility using Aqua. Additionally, they have access to audit information for Kubernetes runtime environments, improving compliance. A program called Aqua Dynamic Threat Analysis (DTA) examines photos for behavioral irregularities and detects sophisticated malware before putting them in a secure environment. Additionally, it may stop the deployment of images in a working environment. DTA provides activity information on risks like cryptocurrency miners and backdoors for code injection. Teams that wish to conduct sophisticated threat analysis and sandboxing on their containers should consider Aqua Security.

How can I prevent the most frequent failures in Container Security?

Because they represent the traditional flaws of operating systems and applications, the majority of container and orchestrator vulnerabilities are well-known to many cybersecurity specialists. The following is a list of frequent container security issues, along with tips on how to avoid them:

• Forgetting fundamental security best practices: Containers are typically seen as a new technology, necessitating the deployment of new security measures. However, some security concepts continue to be relevant. For instance, it's important to keep operating systems and container runtimes patched and current.
• Both authorization and access: The point is that developers must pay extra attention to customizing and safeguarding all access and authorization by locking down access and staying up to date with security patches, just as with any program or operating system.
• Failure to configure and harden tools and environments: Platforms for container orchestration provide a variety of special security features. However, you must correctly set them up for each environment in order to assure security. Running security setups with a platform's default settings is never a good idea. For instance, just give containers the permissions they require to function. By doing this, the dangers posed by privilege escalation attacks can be considerably reduced.
• Access to API servers: Focusing on access and authorization to the API server is especially crucial due to its essential function. The orchestrator's automated front end is the API server. Imagine it as a front door set to only permit particular applications with the appropriate credentials to enter. The door may swing wide open due to fake or faked credentials, allowing unauthorized access to the containers. Therefore, a key area of attention for any access and authorization initiatives should be safeguarding the API server.
• Failure to monitor, test, and log: You might not have access to information about the state of your application and surroundings when you first use containers in production. If this happens and you don't recognize the problem right away, you could face serious hazards. This is particularly crucial for highly distributed systems using both on-premises infrastructure and different clouds. Make sure that your monitoring, logging, and testing are correctly configured. This can reduce other blind spots and the number of undiscovered vulnerabilities.
• Vulnerability to images: Images are the orchestrator's genetic code; they are the blueprints from which containers are constructed. Malware can be introduced into the photos by a cunning hacker, creating "poisoned containers" that can be harmful. A particularly skilled hacker may even modify the orchestrator's health-monitoring components to prevent them from spotting the poisoned containers. Infected photos may be hidden by damaged image registries, which are databases of all stored images. Therefore, it's crucial to be able to manage both the containers themselves and the capacity to detect and handle changes to pictures.
• Failure to protect the CI/CD pipeline at all stages: Other parts of your software development pipeline shouldn't be disregarded. By adopting a "shift left" mindset, which involves integrating security early in the development cycle, you can prevent this problem. This frequently calls for implementing pertinent tools and regulations uniformly across the pipeline and making necessary adjustments.