In the spirit of New Year’s resolutions like eating healthy and hitting the gym, maintaining compliance is much like sticking to a strict diet. It’s essential for long-term success but not always the most enjoyable task.
Organizations face constant security risks when configuring or updating systems, from unsecured ports and redundant programs to cloud misconfigurations. While cloud providers secure infrastructure, applications and data often remain vulnerable due to improper configurations. Furthermore, manual audits of permissions, configurations and logging are time-consuming and error-prone.
According to a 2020 research study conducted by global intelligence firm IDC, “security misconfiguration/lack of system hardening” was one of the top security concerns indicated by 67% of the 300 CISOs surveyed.
To further illustrate the challenge, Gartner Group predicts that over the next five years, “at least 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.” Many of these are errors resulting from misconfigurations or lack of system hardening.
Progress Chef Compliance automates these processes, enabling faster detection and remediation of misconfigurations while improving system hardening. By leveraging Chef Cookbooks and InSpec Compliance Profiles, teams can protect against threats such as malware and unauthorized access, allowing engineers to focus on core development.
In this blog, we’ll go through everything you need to know about Centre for Internet Security (CIS) and DISA STIG benchmarks and how Chef can help you maintain them. We’ll also throw in a few culinary puns for good measure.
With the welcome drinks out of the way—let’s start with the appetizers.
What Is CIS and DISA STIGs?
Installing and adding new servers, users or applications puts businesses at extremely high risk of cyberattacks.
CIS Benchmarks and DISA Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) provide globally recognized best practices for securely configuring systems, applications and devices. Developed through consensus, these standards are widely adopted by governments, businesses and academic institutions as trusted frameworks for reducing security risks.
By following CIS Benchmarks and DISA STIGs, organizations can improve their security systems, minimize vulnerabilities and shrink their attack surface.
CIS Benchmarks are also closely aligned with major regulatory frameworks like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the International Standard on requirements for information security management (ISO/IEC) 27001.
This alignment enables organizations in regulated industries to achieve significant compliance adherence while enhancing their overall security posture.
How Do You Implement CIS and DISA STIG Security in Your Organization with Chef?
Chef Compliance enables you to develop and test Chef configuration Cookbooks and InSpec Compliance Profiles aligned with CIS and DISA STIG benchmarks. This allows for rapid issue identification, swift triage and effective remediation, helping safeguard against malware, unauthorized access and remote intrusion.
Chef Compliance includes 70+ relevant CIS Benchmarks, with new updates and profiles added every two weeks to help enterprises maintain security and compliance. Learn more about CIS and DISA STIG Curated Content for Auditing and Remediation.
Most CIS benchmarks include multiple configuration profiles, which describe and define the configurations associated with the different benchmark recommendations.
- The Level 1 profile has the least impact on operations and performance and is regarded as the most fundamental need. The goal is to reduce the attack surface while considering the effect on overall business requirements and functionality.
- The Level 2 profile, which CIS refers to as "defense in depth," aims to optimize the security posture where security is essential to the organization's overall viability and business survival.
The following list includes some of the CIS and DISA STIG benchmarks covered by Chef:
Now for the entrée...
System Hardening with Chef
System hardening helps prevent cyberattacks by reducing vulnerabilities across servers, applications, firmware and cloud environments.
Chef Compliance is built on Chef core technology proven in large, complex environments over the past 10+ years. It’s designed to help enterprises maintain compliance while mitigating security incidents across heterogeneous hybrid and multi-cloud environments while improving speed and efficiency.
Chef has structured its compliance development process around the five phases of the compliance lifecycle:
- Acquire: Customers select required CIS and STIG benchmarks. The Chef development team converts controls into Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) format, develops high-quality automated cookbooks and performs quality checks.
- Define: Customers customize baselines by selecting or skipping controls and applying waivers with business justifications, wrapped into cookbooks.
- Detect: Chef cookbooks are uploaded via the Workstation. Users scan nodes, monitor results in Automate, and maintain continuous compliance.
- Remediate: Chef creates remediation cookbooks for failed controls. Users upload these cookbooks, remediate nodes and re-audit to verify compliance.
- Report: Automate provides real-time compliance visibility across nodes. Results can be exported to tools like ServiceNow, Splunk and Kibana.
Chef enables organizations to deliver secure, hardened infrastructure and applications to nearly any environment. We do this by incorporating compliance processes into every stage of the development cycle using the following core Chef technologies:
- Chef InSpec allows developers and systems engineers to replace lengthy and opaque security specification documents—written in PDF or Excel—with unambiguous tests easily readable by all parties involved, including security engineers, auditors, systems administrators and others.
- Chef Automate provides standard security baselines that you can easily customize and extend. Examples of included baselines are CIS Compliance Benchmarks and several DISA STIGs. It also provides a single pane of glass view for your entire infrastructure’s status and reports.
- Chef Infra Configuration Management helps remediate any findings and keep systems in their correct, remediated state while maintaining continuous compliance.
This helps provide your organization with a secure and reliable compliance automation process that is:
Ready to Use: Provides pre-certified content for audits aligned with CIS and DISA STIG benchmarks, along with remediation content for immediate implementation.
Automated: Automates vulnerability assessments and patching, reducing manual effort and the risk of human error, while speeding up the hardening process.
Customizable: Enables the customization of profiles and remediation content to meet specific corporate needs with minimal code changes.
Highly Performant: Optimizes system configurations and helps eliminate unnecessary services to boost efficiency.
Continuously Compliant: Maintains a system’s compliance with CIS and DISA STIGs through continuous auditing and remediation, without disrupting business operations or requiring extensive coding.
That was our carefully curated menu of strategies to achieving success in maintaining compliance and adhering to industry standard benchmarks such as CIS and DISA STIG. But like any full-course meal...there’s always room for dessert!
Learn more about how you can achieve a compliant and secure infrastructure today. Harden your systems using CIS and DISA STIGs Benchmarks.
Find out how Haventec achieved a faster deployment while maintaining continuous PCI DSS compliance with Chef. Read the case study.
Don’t leave your infrastructure half-baked! Perfect your compliance and security recipe today. Contact us.