Defense-in-depth is key in securing your AWS environment, from scanning for software vulnerabilities to building an elegant workload architecture, applying IAM policies, or employing robust configuration management tools.
Your EDR solution should integrate smoothly with AWS and other security tools, minimizing friction and complexity while detecting threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks without interrupting workflows.
Cloud Visibility Acquisition
EDR’s continuous monitoring keeps an eagle’s eye on an array of endpoints – from EC2 instances and S3 buckets to Lambda functions – to detect threats early and stop attacks before they have an opportunity to expand further.
Investigation: Once EDR detects a threat, EDR dives deeper to understand it and provide vital insight. This allows businesses to assess the level of risk and prioritize responses accordingly.
Containment: Once an attack has been identified, EDR takes swift action to contain it by isolating affected endpoints and preventing further spread across the network. This helps mitigate damages while ensuring business operations stay uninterrupted for a short time.
Visibility is essential in creating an effective security solution but maintaining consistent visibility across various types of cloud infrastructure can be challenging. Organizations require a cloud-native solution that efficiently captures traffic traversing hybrid-cloud environments and generates Smart Data at its source.
Controls to EC2 Instances
AWS provides customers with a highly flexible and scalable cloud environment. EDR helps maintain security by constantly monitoring threats to respond accordingly – much like having an on-call security guard 24/7!
EC2 offers various instance types with varied CPU, memory, and (in certain instances) hardware configurations designed to accommodate diverse workloads. Yet regardless of their underlying platform, all EC2 instances face core security risks from vulnerabilities and insecure access controls that must be managed securely.
Customers must implement adequate security controls to reduce these risks, such as using security groups to restrict inbound traffic to EC2 instances and IAM roles to provide credentials so applications can retrieve from AWS resources without incurring extra costs when communicating. Instance-based attacks should also be detected quickly and stopped without creating significant, impactful attacks; additionally, customers should regularly update their operating systems with patches.
Obtaining Appropriate Security Controls
AWS EDR helps organizations secure their cloud resources by detecting threats like compromised accounts, at-risk assets, and runtime attacks. It combines data collected via its control plane solution with endpoint EDR solutions to detect and respond effectively.
Provide context to security analysts to efficiently triage alerts and prioritize evidence-based investigations, shortening time-to-find and responding to threats while decreasing false positives.
AWS EDR offers a holistic approach to threat detection and response, designed to give complete visibility across your cloud environment. This includes continuous workload monitoring and container visibility so that any stealthy attacks can be quickly identified. In addition, an effective EDR system should provide forensic analysis capabilities such as creating timelines, surface similar activities, or investigating live system memory of suspect endpoints for better pinpointing the origin or type of threat they represent.
MITRE Tagging
OpenEDR goes beyond identifying threat alerts by adding MITRE ATT&CK techniques to each event or alert. These techniques, which can be seen under the Alerts tab of the Carbon Black console, show how attackers were successful during an attack and provide an insightful timeline view.
An adversary often avoids detection by employing various strategies to mask their presence, such as delaying actions or altering attacker behavior to remain undetected by others in the environment. This allows them to move between various segments without detection and search out vulnerable assets, such as databases or application servers, that they could exploit as targets of attack.
Orca offers its customers resources and webinars to assist in understanding ATT&CK results, such as 2023 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluations: Decoding the Results. In addition, MITRE utilizes research and threat modeling methodologies from established organizations like Orca to enhance cloud points of view while increasing customer security posture.
Real-Time Vulnerability Reporting
EDR solutions give security teams access to real-time vulnerability reports to detect and remediate threats rapidly. Look for detection and response tools with broad visibility, advanced threat detection, and machine learning-based attack recognition; additionally, an ideal solution should undergo MITRE ATT&CK evaluation to assess its ability to detect attacks in real life.
An effective EDR solution should provide four general measures that help organizations reduce their attack surface: patching, shielding, mitigation, and telemetry collection. In addition to performing regular penetration testing to ensure the environment remains safe.
As part of an automated continuous assessment of AWS resources like EC2 instances, databases, and web applications, human and service identities should be regularly assessed for adequate privileges, exposed secrets, and exposed images via automated continuous assessment tools such as Kubernetes and container-based apps – without disrupting continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). This includes protecting images for download before deployment while monitoring runtime application behavior with runtime application behavior analysis providing a centralized view of risk across cloud environments.
Final Thoughts
EDR provides continuous monitoring of your environment to help minimize downtime by detecting anomalous activity that deviates from established patterns and warns you about possible threats.
Once a threat has been identified, the next step should be taking appropriate action against it. This might involve isolating it from other network resources or deleting it. Effective EDR solutions also gather important details about the source or type of application it targets to inform future protection measures, potentially helping stop similar attacks.