Security should always be built with an understanding of who might be attacking and how capable they are. Typical threat modeling exercises are done with a static group of threat actors applied in “best guess” scenarios. While this is helpful in the beginning, the real data eventually tells the accurate story. The truth is that your threat landscape is constantly shifting and your threat model should dynamically adapt to it. This adaptation allows teams to continuously examine controls and ensure they are adequate to counter the current threat actors. It helps create a quantitative risk driven approach to security and should be a part of every security teams tools.

Are you using or moving to AWS? Have you considered how you organize and secure your AWS environments? The growing push to cloud providers has allowed us to move faster and tackle problems more efficiently. The same freedoms that have allowed us to move faster have also created scenarios where security issues are exposed by accident and/or without proper management and review. As companies move toward more and more cloud usage, teams are pushed harder to ensure the same compliance and security requirements that exist in slower moving private environments. This has the potential to put us right back where we came from.