97 Things Every Information Security Professional Should Know

Chapter 27. New World, New Rules, Same Principles

Guillaume Blaquiere

In the last decade, the world of information technology has pivoted from servers to virtualization to now cloud and serverless. However, most skilled security engineers understand that threats have been around even before servers were connected to the internet—remember when threats came by way of the floppy disk?

Bad actors and their teams are more organized, and the rapid evolution of tech has also created new attack possibilities. Threats have evolved.

With the introduction of the internet, the most significant threats no longer came from floppy disks but outside sources; this means that security teams have had to create and adapt their patterns continuously, for example, filtering and blocking external traffic with a firewall, sanitizing it, and then letting the traffic live in the internal DMZ (demilitarized zone).

Servers are now virtual machines, yet routers and firewalls are still the best defense methods for protecting IT resources. Virtualization in the cloud has not changed this; in fact, most if not all cloud providers propose IaaS (infrastructure as a service) with, at least, firewalls, routers, NAT, and VPNs. The old yet reliable DMZ pattern is still alive and well. The basics of IT security do not change as fast as the threats do—the tried and true formulas still work!

And then there was serverless. ...