Securing management ports with JIT VM access
Internet attackers are always hunting for connected systems with open management ports. Once a target has been identified, it can be scanned for vulnerabilities that could be exploited, or a brute-force login attack could be performed. If the host is successfully compromised, it can be used as the entry point to proceed further in an attack chain or even used as a landing zone to compromise other victims!
To reduce this attack surface, the recommendation is to keep management ports such as RDP and SSH closed and only open them when needed for administrative tasks. This is exactly what JIT VM access allows us to do, without the management overhead of closing and opening these ports manually.
To use JIT, we need to enable the Azure Defender pricing tier of Azure Security Center (you will be doing this in the following hands-on exercise). To enable JIT for a VM, you must be a resource manager VM (classic VMs are not supported), the VM...
