As Australian organisations embrace the cloud, adoption has accelerated with a growing reliance on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host critical workloads and data. According to the ABS, 59% of Australian businesses reported using cloud technology as of January 2024, with much of this data being stored by cloud giants such as AWS and Microsoft […]

The AWS Sydney Summit always delivers, and this year was no exception! What was once the third-largest AWS event globally, boasting 90 deep-dive sessions and 120 workshops, continues to be a highlight on the tech calendar. Last year marked a strong return to in-person events after the virtual years, and this year’s two-day summit felt […]

Cloud adoption has transformed how Australian businesses operate, empowering teams with flexibility, scalability, and real-time data access. But with this comes increased complexity in how cyber risks surface and evolve. As threat actors become more sophisticated, the conversation has moved beyond infrastructure alone, and it’s now about how effectively organisations detect and respond to cybersecurity [...]

Cyber threats in Australia seem to evolve every day, with a 39% increase in isolated compromises in FY2023-24 compared to the previous year, according to ACSC’s Annual Cyber Threat Report 2023-2024. While extensive compromises decreased slightly, low-level malicious attacks rose by 10%. Alarmingly, 30% of significant cyber incidents stemmed from exploiting public-facing applications, underscoring the […]

According to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), malicious or criminal attacks were responsible for 67% of all data breaches reported by Australian businesses in the first half of 2024. The financial impact of these breaches is equally concerning. IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that the global average data […]

RedBear IT is a Cloud Security Services company. We enable our customers to migrate to and innovate on Cloud. We are a growing Melbourne based company with large and small customers, both start-ups and established, commercial and government. RedBear IT is known for building high quality solutions for our customers. We also provide a managed […]

This week at AWS re:Invent, AWS released the Security Incident Response service. It’s an awesome service and are we are super excited to be a launch partner for the associated AWS Security Incident Response Specialization. Let’s step through what the service is and what is means for customers. We are one of only 13 launch […]

4th December 2024 – RedBear IT, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced partner specializing in cybersecurity services, announced today that it has achieved the AWS Security Incident Response Specialization. This Specialization recognizes that RedBear IT is validated for providing a streamlined incident response solution, backed by AWS security response experts through the Security Incident Response […]

AWS pre:Invent 2024? That's right, re:Invent is just around the corner. However, AWS have already softened us up with plenty of goodness in some pre-conference announcements. Here's our pick of the security related announcements. Resource control policies What is it? Resource Control Policies (RCPs)  are a new type of authorization policy aimed at providing fine-grained [...]

Time to re:Invent ourselves again! AWS's annual conference, re:Invent, is just around the corner. Hands up who is excited? This year will be RedBear's 9th visit to re:Invent, held in Las Vegas. Every year, the event gets bigger and better and every year AWS announce a whole swag of new and exciting innovations. It's morphed [...]

AWS Backup has been an essential tool for protecting non-reproducible data in AWS accounts for many years. Recently, the ability to perform “logically” air-gapped backups was added. This new capability allows you to automatically copy backups to an air-gapped vault in a different account. This is an extension of the ability to copy backups between […]

re:Inforce is AWS’s security focussed conference, offering 2 days of in depth discussion on all things Cloud security. It’s a super interesting and exciting event stacked full of some great talks, ideas and inspiring stories. We found the keynote from Philadelphia particularly engaging this year. As always, it came with some interesting announcements. Let’s dive […]

Yes, we are more than halfway through an on-point crazy re:Invent. Let's cover the key AWS re:Invent 2023 security announcements, taking a first look at new services and features announcements. We've still got 2 more days to go but here's the ones that caught our attention. Amazon GuardDuty runtime protection What is it? The first [...]

AWS re:Inforce 2023 is done! It was a packed couple of days in Anaheim! Between all the sessions and meeting familiar faces, it was an blur of a couple of days. Now that the event has settled in my mind (and no more Californian sun!), it’s time to reflect on the key takeaways. Security of [...]

At RedBear, we assess a lot of AWS environments. As you might expect, from a security perspective, we have seen pretty much everything. From super locked down, to raw and open, there's a full spectrum of security maturity out there. What are the top 5 most common security mistakes in AWS environments we have seen [...]

Hear that? That's the sound of my head spinning after 2 days of re:Invent (half way!). Let's cover the key AWS re:Invent 2022 security announcements, looking at new services and features from the first two days. We've still got 2 more days to go but here's the ones that caught our attention. Amazon CloudWatch Logs [...]

AWS’s re:Invent kicks off next week with a mix of keynotes, boot camps and technical sessions. As ever, there’s a huge catalog of sessions to chose from but you can’t attend them all! Here we pick out 6 security sessions that we think are essential viewing for everyone. They are relevant to those who cares [...]

Following on from the Optus breach learnings blog, we look at how you can implement the learnings in your AWS environment. The AWS Cloud is ideally suited to enable you to use these modern techniques to help secure your services. Let's step through each of the learnings. Control changes to your endpoints All access to [...]

On 22nd September, Optus was the victim of a cyber security event that resulted in millions of customer's data being exfiltrated from Optus. What do we know about the event? What can we learn from the Optus breach? In this post, we concentrate on the technical learnings from the breach. We aren't going to delve [...]

AWS re:Inforce 2022 is a wrap. It was a whirlwind 2 days in Boston, only the second time (since the first edition in 2019) that it has been held in person! Between sessions and New England IPA, it was an exhausting and exhilarating time. Now that the dust has settled (and we are back in [...]

Today, RedBear are proud and excited to announce that it has achieved the Specialization for Modern Compute Security. This new award is an extension to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Level 1 MSSP Competency. RedBear has successfully met additional technical and operational requirements for providing customers with a deep level of Modern Compute security.  This [...]

The OWASP Top 10 aims to provide security awareness to developers and to web applications. It consists of the 10 most important controls to consider in order to reduce risk to your application. However, the themes aren't just relevant to your applications. They can also be applied to your AWS environment configuration. Let's have a [...]

The OWASP Top 10 aims to provide security awareness to developers and to web applications. It consists of the 10 most important controls to consider in order to reduce risk to your application. However, the themes aren't just relevant to your applications. They can also be applied to your AWS environment configuration. Let's have a [...]

A few weeks ago, I needed to setup a public bucket to host some images for a business service. Using CloudFormation, I setup the bucket and ensured it was publicly available. I then uploaded a test image. Pointing my browser at the object URL, I was dismayed to receive an access denied error! After a [...]

When you look to move or adopt the AWS Cloud, you need to think about your approach to the security of your workloads. With the shared responsibility model for AWS Cloud Security, you are responsible for the security of your workloads in the Cloud. Like any other project, there's plenty to consider. Of course, you [...]

In the first of our AWS re:Invent 2021 announcements round up, we look at new services and updates from the first 2 days. These are our top 5 favourites for our customers, selected from a bunch of very exciting new services and announcements that could really help your business! We've left one out intentionally as [...]

AWS's re:Invent kicks off this week with a mix of keynotes, bootcamps and technical sessions. As ever, there's a huge catalog of sessions to chose from but you can't attend them all! Here we pick out 3 security sessions that we think are essential viewing for everyone who cares about securing their workloads on the [...]

Time to re:Invent ourselves again! AWS's annual conference, re:Invent, is just around the corner. Hands up who is excited? This year would have been RedBear's seventh visit to re:Invent, held in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, travel restrictions mean that we will be following from afar. Every year, the even gets bigger and better and every year [...]

Today, we are excited and proud to announce that we has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Level 1 Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) Competency status. This designation recognises that RedBear IT has successfully met AWS’s requirements for a baseline of managed security services to protect and monitor essential AWS resources 24/7, known as Level 1 [...]

VPC Flow Logs is a feature you can use to monitor network traffic flow within your AWS VPC.  It captures the network flow metadata (source, destination etc.) not the contents of the network packets. If you want to do that, AWS offers VPC Network Mirroring to gain insight into individual packets. While Flow Logs can [...]

In this bonus blog of our AWS Security Foundation series, we focus on the AWS Backup service. You might ask why we put backups as a capability to think about under security? Read on to find out more! Background AWS Backup has been available as a service for a number of years. Recently, the service [...]

Today we’ll be talking about one of AWS's more recent addition to the EC2 landscape, the AWS Resource Data Sync. What it is, what does it do and why you should care?. Get ready for some terrible sinking puns. Glub, glub, glub! Time is a real drain… With COVID and the end of 2020, it [...]

In this series, we have covered many AWS services that can enhance your security posture in the AWS Cloud. In most of these, we have talked about how you gain visibility of any findings of interest. But what if you want a way a single way to monitor your AWS environment? In this final blog [...]

So far in this series we have looked at a number of foundational services. We have discussed how you can make sure that they are securely configured and generating insights. Having visibility of your AWS resources is one thing. Managing threats to your workloads is another thing all together! Fortunately, AWS has a number of [...]

How do you keep track of changes to your AWS Cloud based solutions? In our latest AWS Cloud Foundations post, we look at configuration management. Specifically, we will focus on AWS Config, a service that allows you to continuously monitor the configurations of AWS resources and be notified off changes. Configuration Management? Configuration Management manages [...]

Whether you in the Cloud or on on-premises, the need for solid network security doesn't stop. Fortunately, there are a whole heap of services in AWS that you can use to manage your networks. For this post, we are focussing on key approaches and configurations that you can adopt. Network design The same principles of [...]

Today we are starting an infrequent blog series called AWS Tips and Tricks. This series will focus on useful lessons learned throughout our AWS journey ranging from the simplest tricks to more sophisticated solutions that we feel might be useful to the everyday Cloud enthusiast. To kick off this series, we take a look at [...]

One of the big benefits of a Cloud environment is the access to almost unlimited storage. Cloud storage comes in a variety of flavours, depending on your use case. Like any AWS service though, it's up to you to make sure that you configure your storage to meet your security requirements. In this post, we [...]

In the second blog of our AWS Security Foundations series, we concentrate on managing your identities and their access to your AWS Cloud environments. According to Gartner, by 2023 75% of cloud security failures will result from insufficient management of identities, access and associated privileges. AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) is a fundamental tool [...]

Knowing what is going on in your environment is security 101. It applies as much to AWS Cloud environments as it does to any other environment (including SaaS solutions you may use). It's why it's the number one pick in our AWS Security Foundations series! Fortunately AWS has a solution, AWS CloudTrail. For your on-premises [...]

This week we are launching a short blog series on AWS security foundations. We have worked with many customers to help them use best practice to optimise the security of their AWS based solutions. This series will focus on some foundational approaches in bite size pieces that everyone organisation can and should adopt. We hope [...]

The AWS Cloud The explosive growth of AWS services has unleashed unparalleled opportunities for developing new products and applications with reach into global markets. Never before has it been so quick to enable new services and environments. However, with great power, comes great responsibility. Are you building and configuring those services the right way? How [...]

At re:Invent 2020, AWS announced many new services and service enhancements. One service that caught our eye was CloudShell. This feature added one of few services missing in AWS, direct access to a CLI based shell (this feature has been available in Azure and GCP for over a year). AWS CloudShell is a browser-based, pre-authenticated […]

Whilst many things were affected, the rate of innovation in the AWS Cloud wasn't one of them! One of the unexpected highlights from re:Invent 2020 was being able to watch sessions from the comfort of home. No 15 hour flights to Las Vegas were harmed in the making of this blog. No hangovers were required. [...]

Another year, another re:Invent. In what has proved to be a year of change for everyone, AWS showed that cloud computing is no exception. There was no slowing in the pace of innovation by the leading public Cloud provider. New services and features abound. Amid a myriad a new service names, one stands out as being exceptionally silly. [...]

When AWS Proton was announced during Andy Jassy's re:Invent keynote, we were intrigued. We initially thought of it as a tool that could potentially change the way we build and manage platforms. As an organisation that does that for our customers, we understand the pain involved in creating and managing CloudFormation templates. We usually start [...]

This week, RedBear IT moderated a panel discussion webinar on Cloud Security priorities for 2021. The crazy year that is 2020 has been hugely challenging for security professionals with the sudden shift to remote working and the continued increase in cyber attacks. The expert panel reflected on the year. They also discussed their core priorities [...]

And we are off! The re:Invent 2020 keynote has kicked off this year's rather different AWS re:Invent. In a normal year, upwards of 50 000 people would have descended on Las Vegas for a 4 day deep dive into the AWS platform and services. This year, we are all stuck behind our screens watching online! [...]

The AWS Network Firewall was announced last week. It’s a new service for AWS VPCs that provides a high availability, managed network firewall. It’s features include stateful inspection, intrusion prevention and detection, and web filtering to protect your virtual networks on AWS. It is delivered as a fully managed service. This means that it automatically scales with [...]

It’s that re:Invent time of year again. Like everything 2020, it’s all a little different this year. re:Invent 2020 has gone virtual! At RedBear we would normally be scurrying around getting ourselves ready for our annual trip to Vegas. re:Invent 2020 would have been our seventh visit to the event, having first attending the second ever running [...]

Last week I was updating an AWS Landing Zone environment to the latest version. It was late on a Thursday and I was running the upgrade in my own environment and having a few minor issues so I decided to come back in the morning to finish it off. Come the next morning, I re-ran [...]

Last week the Australian government announced that government services had been under a sustained cyber attack. They said it had been happening for a while and had the footprint of a nation state level attack. No breaches were revealed. Don't cyber attacks happen all the time? Well, yes, but this one was different. The key [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant changes to working patterns for most organisations, with a more geographically dispersed workforce than ever before. Many organisations are making more and more user of Microsoft 365 (formally known as Microsoft Office 365) for collaboration. Security of a Microsoft 365 tenant starts with visibility of operations, yet many [...]

Last week, Rapid7 announced its intention to acquire DivvyCloud. DivvyCloud will cost Rapid7 a cool $145 million. The acquisition is expected to complete in the second quarter of 2020. It’s a significant investment. It comes hard on the heels of the Trend acquisition of Cloud Conformity, a solution that plays in a similar space to DivvyCloud. At RedBear, we are [...]

The Australian federal government released the COVIDSafe app this week. It’s a contact tracing app designed to help find close contacts of COVID-19 cases. The app is intended to assist health officials to quickly contact people who may have been exposed to COVID-19. In Australia, use of the app is completely voluntary. However, it has [...]

With a move to remote working as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations are looking for solutions that can provide a secure and simple experience. One of the common ways to ensure secure communications when home working is through a VPN solution. It also has the advantage of providing an “on the corporate network” [...]

With a move to remote working as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations are looking for solutions that can streamline the experience. Some of the challenges of remote working often start with having the appropriate end user device. It might be a corporate managed laptop but equally it might be an uncontrolled personal device. [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic is resulting in significant concern and uncertainty in our communities and globally. Many organisations are moving to adopt a remote working approach so as to avoid the chance for transmission between teams and reduce the spread of the disease. The challenge for organisations is how to stay digitally safe from the kitchen [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic is resulting in significant concern and uncertainty in our communities and globally. RedBear want to reassure our customers that the security of your environments remains our top priority today and every day. We are fully operational and are available to respond to your security and business continuity needs as this situation evolves. [...]

The principle of least privileged is king when it comes to managing access. It's a simple approach. You give your users access to the services and the actions on those services that they need and nothing more. Importantly, this approach is critical for regulated environments, such as PCI DSS. However, when we adopt an everything [...]

The re:Invent keynotes for 2019 have wrapped up with Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, focussing on the platform they have build for the builders. It was light on announcements but heavy on fascinating insight. You can read about the tsunami of major announcements here.   Midnight Madness; Keynote part 1; Keynote part 2. Werner focussed [...]

This is part two of our round up of the announcements from Andy's AWS re:Invent 2019 keynote! You can find part one here.   "I can't move from on-premises" Let AWS help you with that. Sometimes, it can be really hard to move from on-premises. It may be due to legacy support (see the announcement [...]

Andy Jassy delivered a ripping AWS re:Invent 2019 keynote. The key theme was around transformation. Of course, there were heaps of exciting announcements. Strap in for our wrap up! As there's a lot to cover, it's split into two parts with this being the first.   Transformation So, following the theme, if you are going [...]

AWS's re:Invent 2019 is off and running with Midnight Madness kicking off the fun. It's not all play, though. There's a number of interesting new announcements already. Here's our pick for day zero at re:Invent.   IAM and S3 access analyser This is probably our favourite announcement from Midnight Madness! IAM and S3 access analyser [...]

Did you know you can power a light bulb off of a potato? The chances are you can't power all your compute off even a field of potatoes. So how can you keep your compute costs lean? AWS compute on demand is a fantastic model and Reserved Instances have been around for a while as [...]

AWS’s re:Invent 2019 doesn’t start until next week but the pre re:Invent announcement keep on coming. Here’s the second part of our round up of the key announcements before the week that is re:Invent. It’s about all of the things If you are dealing with distributed edge devices, the chances are IoT is a significant […]

AWS’s re:Invent is still almost a week away but the pre re:Invent announcement have started. Here’s the first of our round ups of the key announcements. CloudFormation Two key updates were announced for CloudFormation, a key tool in enabling infrastructure as code. StackSets add support for drift detect. Drift detect can be used to identify […]

Time to re:Invent ourselves again! AWS's annual conference, re:Invent, is just under a month away. Hands up who is excited? This year will be RedBear's sixth visit to re:Invent, held in Las Vegas. Suffice to say, we have seen it grow and grow since our first year in 2013. Every year it gets bigger and [...]

Last month, as an AWS APN Global Ambassador, I was privileged to attend the first Ambassador global meet up in Seattle. One of the deep dive sessions was on AWS Outposts. This service was announced as under development at re:Invent 2018. This radical new solution brings the AWS experience to you own data centre in […]

The debut running of the AWS security conference re:Inforce 2019 has wrapped up in Boston today. RedBear were on the ground to soak up the event. Here is our wrap-up from the 2 day event. Key themes There were a number of reoccurring themes from the conference. Securing automation. Being able to adapt and respond […]

It’s no coincidence that security was the first specialist global conference that AWS announced. Re:Inforce was first introduced back at re:Invent in late 2018 (although it was pipped at the post time wise by the Machine Learning conference, re:MARS, held earlier this month). The first re:Inforce event is in Boston this week and RedBear are […]

The AWS Summit Sydney rolled into town this week. With over 26 000 registered participants across 3 days, its Australia's largest tech conference. It's a chance for customers and prospective customers to learn about the latest innovations in the AWS eco-system. After a successful 2018, RedBear was back as exhibitors at the event. There were [...]

2019 is flying by and the AWS Sydney Summit is almost on us again! After a hugely crazy but successful time last year, we are back! You will find RedBear IT in the Cloud Zone Expo. This year’s event runs over three days at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in Darling Harbour, starting on Tuesday […]

In late January, AWS announced that it had been awarded the ability to host government workloads classified at the Protected level DLM in the Sydney AWS region The certification applies to 42 AWS services (46 if you include the different RDS database engines!). The official announcement is on the AWS Security blog. AWS haven’t had [...]

Wow, the week has gone quick. Today is the last full day of re:Invent 2018. Tonight is the big re:Play party, always one of the highlights of the week. Before that, however, we have a number of highlights to share along with catching up from yesterday. Buckle up! Lambda as a target for ALB We [...]

Wow, what another massive day at re:Invent 2018. There's been so many announcements, I'm not sure where to start. Here's a whistle-stop tour of our highlights! Object Store Enhancements S3 is AWS's infinitely scalable, low cost object based storage solution. It has a number of tiers providing varying speeds of access at progressively cheaper prices. [...]

It's only Tuesday here at re:Invent 2018 in Las Vegas but with all the action and announcements, it feels like we have been here a month. Our coverage continues today with more announcements. CloudWatch Log Insights CloudWatch has been a mainstay of the AWS Cloud for a long time. It provides access to metrics and [...]

.AWS’s re:Invent 2018 is back again, bigger and just plain crazier than ever. It’s only day one but already some significant new announcements have landed. This follows on from a slew of pre-event announcement. Let’s have a look at the most important for our customers AWS Transit Gateway Networking can get pretty complex. When you […]

AWS has been expanding their Systems Manager tool over the last year, adding a number of important features. Session Manager is the latest piece of the puzzle. It’s a seriously handy addition to the tool. In a nutshell, it allows anyone with the specific rights to access an EC2 instance without the private keys. Wait? […]

The AWS Sydney Summit 2018 rolled into town last week. Outside of re:Invent, AWS's flagship global summit, Sydney hosts the largest AWS summit in the world. Bigger than San Francisco. Bigger than New York. Bigger than London. Over 20 000 attendees registered for the event. This year, it expanded to 3 days and moved to [...]

Traditionally, security has been seen as a guardian against change. It has been thought of as a silo. It’s a box you need to tick. It’s a hurdle to overcome. Security inevitably comes as an almost after thought. Who hasn’t seen the penetration testing left until two weeks before go live on a 6 month project? […]

AWS's re:Invent may be over for another year but the announcements keep on coming! Our heads are still spinning from all the excitement and innovations (see our wrap up post) but AWS haven't stopped. This week AWS released their Single Sign On (SSO) service. A few years ago, this would have made the cut at re:Invent but [...]

AWS re:Invent 2017 has drawn to close and what a whirlwind week it was! We hardly had time to draw breath between the announcements, sessions and people to meet and greet. For us, it was the best yet. As our fourth re:invent participation, we like to think that we can say that with a good level of […]

Yep, it’s been another day of super interesting announcements at re:Invent today. Once again, we provide our highlights from the announcements. Inter-region peering For solutions that need to be global or need protection from the chance of region outages, the ability to natively peer VPCs between regions will be welcome. Until today, you had to [...]

There has been a heap of super exciting announcements at re:Invent today. It was really hard to pick only a few amongst a plethora of amazing new services and enhancements but here are our top picks. Kubernetes We knew this was coming. AWS is the most common used platform for Kubernetes container-based deployments. Before today, [...]

Is connecting over the internet a concern? Enter, PrivateLink For organisations that are ultra concerned about keeping their services private, especially Financial Services, one of the bug bears of using the AWS public Cloud environment is can be that all the AWS services need to be accessed over the Internet using public addressing. Not any more. Terry [...]

There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza... Recently, there have been a number of high profile leakages of data as a result of customer configuration of AWS S3 buckets. Let's be clear here, this is not a problem with the AWS S3 platform. Potentially sensitive data is being stored in S3 buckets that have been [...]

Early ideals in multi-cloud In the early days of Cloud, there was much talk of a multi-cloud approach. As the number of public Cloud providers grew, and then subsequently shrunk, solutions emerged to enable multi-cloud. “You can move workloads between Cloud providers” they promised. “Avoid vendor lock in”. Did they deliver what they promised, and, […]

For most people, Super is difficult to engage with. It’s too far away. It addresses something you don’t want to think about – ageing. It’s a problem for your parents. So how do Super Funds generate real interest in a majority of their customers? How can they build the engagement? What’s been holding back the […]

I’m sure you have heard it many times, but flexibility is really one of key drivers that can lead to many organisations adopting a cloud first approach. The ability to grow and shrink, spin up and spin down environments to meet business demand has truely become possible because of the availability of cloud services. Recently […]

A very common problem for businesses across all sectors is dealing with scale. In a traditional on-premises world, the infrastructure would be sized to deal with peak load. That may be only a few days a year. The “normal” load may be only 10% of that. Think about that for a moment. You purchase and […]

This week we received some recognition in CRN magazine for our innovative work on a disaster recovery solution for think Procurement. The article focused on the ‘hundreds of thousands’ of dollars that the solution saved think. think have been a successful consumer of AWS services but required a solution that would provide them an out of […]

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over – Richard Branson It really wasn’t that long ago that any new business idea or initiative in most organisations had to go through a whole process of internal justification, market research, business case and more. At this point, some kind of […]

As the skies cleared and the storm subsided, Sydney licked its wounds, assessed the damage and moved on with its life. Damage wasn’t limited to physical infrastructure. Many technology systems suffered outages including significant proportions of the cards processing network. AWS, the premier public Cloud provider, suffered a major power loss at one of its […]