Security Advice: Best Practices For Daily Maintenance And Permission Management Of Hong Kong Alibaba Cloud Native IP

This article provides targeted actionable recommendations for operations and security teams using Alibaba Cloud public network addresses in the Hong Kong region, covering key aspects such as daily inspections, access and permission policies, logging and alerts, network protection, and emergency response, aiming to reduce risks associated with public network exposure while ensuring business availability.

Routine inspections are conducted on Hong Kong Alibaba Cloud native IPs (such as elastic public IP/EIP): verifying IP binding relationships, confirming unnecessary public network bindings have been released, checking whether system patches and security group rules of the IP instance are up to date, and verifying that SSH/RDP only allows whitelist access. Regularly update operating systems and dependencies, use configuration management tools to uniformly execute patches and compliance checks, and reduce manual configuration drift.

The wider the authority, the higher the risk. Alibaba Cloud RAM implements role separation and the principle of least privilege, avoiding direct use of the main account; Enable temporary credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) for operations involving permission management; Implement approval and multi-person review processes for highly sensitive operations (unbinding EIP, modifying security groups, deleting instances) to reduce the risk of misoperation and abuse of privileges.

Specific roles should be detailed: only the network or cloud platform administrator role has EIP allocation and reclamation permissions, while development and business teams use restricted views or read-only permissions. For cross-account or cross-project EIP changes, use role delegation (RAM Role) and record all operations to ensure accountability and minimal permissions.

At the VPC level, configure subnet isolation and combine security groups with network ACLs to achieve internal and external network separation; Use load balancing and WAF for public network entrances, and centrally manage public network traffic through the NAT gateway when necessary, avoiding the direct binding of many instances to public IPs. Enable DDoS protection and traffic cleaning services, and purchase protection levels based on business risk assessment.

Enable CloudMonitor to monitor instance and EIP traffic, connection count, and abnormal port access; Integrates ActionTrail and log services to collect control planes and network logs, setting real-time alerts for critical events (such as EIP unbinding, permission changes, abnormal traffic surges); Logs are centrally stored and compliant retention cycles and regular audit processes are set.

Recommendation: Automated inspections should be performed daily/weekly (patches, port exposures, unauthorized public network bindings), and fully manual audits once a month; Conduct semi-annual emergency drills for key business operations (including recovery processes for IP blocks or abuse), and revise strategies and SOPs based on the drill results.

Establish emergency SOPs: immediately debind affected EIPs from business instances and replace them with backup IPs or intranet access, enable traffic black holes or traffic restriction policies, trace sources based on logs and temporarily tighten relevant permissions in RAM, then review and fix root causes (such as open ports, weak passwords, or expired patches).