Trapped in the Cyber Security Gym with Broken Gear?
April 11, 2025
As an IT worker you can fall into more pitfalls than a road that needs repaving. Mac Chaffee shared a new trap on his blog, Mac’s Tech Blog and how he handled: “Avoid Building A Security Treadmill.” Chaffee wrote that he received a ticket that asked him to stop people from using a GPU service to mine cryptocurrencies. Chafee used Falco, an eBPF-powered agent that runs on the Kubernetes cluster, to monitor the spot and deactivate the digital mining.
Chaffee doesn’t mind the complexity of the solution. His biggest issue was with the “security treadmill” that he defines as:
“A security treadmill1 is a piece of software that, due to a weakness of design, requires constant patching to keep it secure. Isn’t that just all software? Honestly… kinda, yeah, but a true treadmill is self-inflicted. You bought it, assembled it, and put it in your spare bedroom; a device specifically designed to let you walk/run forever without making forward progress.”
One solution suggested to Chaffee was charging people to use the GPU. The idea was that if they charged people more to use the GPU than what they were making with cryptocurrencies than it would stop. That idea wasn’t followed of reasons Chaffee wasn’t told, so Falco was flown.
Unfortunately Falco only detects network traffic to host when its directly connected to the IP. The security treadmill was in full swing because users were bypassing the Internet filter monitored by Falco. Falco needs to be upgraded to catch new techniques that include a VPN or proxy.
Another way to block cryptocurrency mining is blocking all outbound traffic except for those an allowed-user list. It would also prevent malware attacks, command and control servers, and exfiltration attacks. Another problem Chaffee noted is that applications doesn’t need a full POSIX environment. To combat this he suggests:
“Perhaps free-tier users of these GPUs could have been restricted to running specific demos, or restrictive timeouts for GPU processing times, or denying disk write access to prevent downloading miners, or denying the ability to execute files outside of a read-only area.”
Chaffee declares it’s time to upgrade legacy applications or make them obsolete to avoid security treadmills. It sounds like there’s a niche to make a startup there. What a thought a Planet Fitness with one functioning treadmill.
Whitney Grace, April 11, 2025
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