Gavriel Fried

This second part of the blog series continues the path to understanding principals and identities in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Audit Logs. Part one introduced core concepts around GCP logging, the different identity types, service accounts, authentication methods, and impersonation.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) continues to expand its offerings and remains a top-tier cloud infrastructure service provider. It offers a wide range of services, including Compute Engine (VMs), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and Cloud AI Platform. However, in recent years, several vulnerabilities have been reported in some of GCP's services, such as privilege escalation in GKE and CloudSQL.

GitLab, a cloud-based, open-source Git repository used by over 38,000 companies around the globe, plays a pivotal role in modern software development. For the organizations that rely on it, it’s a vital collaboration tool and innovation enabler, allowing developers to swiftly test, monitor, and deploy code and housing the full CI/CD pipeline.

There’s been a recent surge in cloud ransomware attacks. Examples of such attacks were observed by Sophos X-Ops, which detected the ransomware group BlackCat/ALPHV using a new Sphinx encryptor variant to encrypt Azure storage accounts by employing stolen Azure Storage account keys. The BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware group is the same entity that claimed responsibility for infiltrating MGM’s infrastructure and encrypting more than 100 ESXi hypervisors.