Good guy Russia gives enterprises, cloud platforms a free brute-force security test using Kubernetes clusters

US and UK intelligence and law enforcement agencies on Thursday issued a joint cybersecurity advisory [PDF] warning that Russian military intelligence is using Kubernetes clusters cloaked by various VPN services and Tor relays to conduct brute force attacks on enterprise and cloud environments. Kubernetes is an open source …

[amanfromMars 1]

Have some folk nothing better to do in these very strange spaces/overly complicated places ‽

So, apart from Mama Bear Russia, yet again we are led to believe is having ready access to all of the Honey from the Magic Money Tree, it's just another day in the Paradise Office Suite delivering Hell and High Water to Any and All in the Market Place Prepared to Accept and Dump, Pimp and Pump it into IT and AI .

Are US and UK intelligence and law enforcement agencies aware of the expression .... A One Trick Pony Stuck Fast in a Heavenly Rut is Just A.N.Others' Beast of Burden and Diabolical Trojan Horse.

[Potemkine!]

They note that the brute force authentication attempts often get routed through Tor and commercial VPN services, including CactusVPN, IPVanish , NordVPN , ProtonVPN, Surfshark, and WorldVPN, to conceal their point of origin.

Does that mean that these agencies are able to see through these VPNs?. Did they hack the providers? How did they trace back to Russia?

Thanks, Vlad, for the cyber-check-up and the containerization case study

Vlad will impale you for free!

[Will Godfrey]

Meanwhile

The belettered agencies who are (of course) the good guys, would never dream of such shenanigans, would they?

er... Would they?

[ScampMichael]

Sue those responsible

This is capitalism. You will get nowhere until those that are responsible have to pay. If Microsoft products are being breached then they should be sued until they provide adequate protection. Letting them off the hook by allowing them to blame others allows them to produce more Revenue making trash. The Producers will only step up to the plate and hire more costly intelligence and stop disseminating products that cannot be secured when it cost them less than not doing so. Maximizing profits is a fiduciary responsibility.

[Robert Grant]

Re: Sue those responsible

What are you talking about? The products are vulnerable because they and the internet are complex.

I agree Capitalism is at fault, but only because we wouldn't have access to this technology under any other system. Not because it's an irresponsible way of progressing, but because it's the only real way.

[Muppet Boss]

Some agencies have nothing better to do?

Kubernetes is all about getting traffic _inside_ the cluster and orchestrating the workload among the nodes. Which mostly scales well only inside the public cloud because there is no load balancer implementation in the public Kubernetes code base (something that MetalLB is trying to address).

If someone is stating that someone else is using Kubernetes to orchestrate a massive workload with lots of _outbound_ connections, I would love to get my hands on the implementation because out-of-the-box Kubernetes is simply not good at it, this is not what it is designed to do.

If the only reason to use Kubernetes is to dynamically scale the number of workers, they could have chosen quite a few options that are easier to deploy, support and maintain. Could the proverbial Russians simply PAYG and run managed Kubernetes in AWS, GCP or Azure clouds? That would explain this weird choice quite well!

[ronkee]

Re: Some agencies have nothing better to do?

They're probably padding their CVs.