Traditional EDR solutions typically focus on physical and virtual endpoints and servers; cloud detection and response solutions specialize in discovering hidden risks related to data breaches by monitoring VMs, containers, serverless apps, and SaaS apps – helping organizations uncover previously hidden vulnerabilities and risks leading to data breaches.
CDR provides full visibility into complex multi-cloud environments and prioritizes alerts based on criticality while eliminating false positives, providing SOC teams with real-time visibility into threats they need to identify and mitigate in real-time quickly.
Threat Detection
Adapting on-premises detection and response models to cloud environments has proven challenging. Cloud detection and response (CDR) fills any gaps this challenge leaves by continuously monitoring and protecting their multi-cloud attack surfaces.
CDR solutions such as Orca provide security teams full visibility, precise attack understanding, and context-rich alerts to recognize threats and investigate incidents quickly. This is accomplished by collecting, normalizing, enriching, and visualizing the configurations, accounts, privileges, and activities from SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS cloud services into one view, which powers machine learning for anomalous behavior analysis as well as threat intelligence to uncover misconfigurations that indicate compromise as well as insider activity from insider threats that indicate compromise.
Modern CDR solutions provide an in-depth understanding of complex cloud environments by mapping effective permissions for all identities – human and machine – across any layers of permission inheritance present, helping security teams detect only suspicious access. Furthermore, CDR solutions integrate seamlessly with SOC ticketing systems and SIEM solutions to streamline investigation workflows.
SOC teams also employ these tools to identify complex exposure chains and lateral movement paths leading to primary assets like administrator identities, business data, or IP. This enables SOC teams to detect attacks in progress quickly, blocking them before costly consequences of data breaches occur.
Detection of Incidents
Security teams are responsible for keeping an eye on cloud environments, yet cannot rely on cloud providers alone to handle alerts and threats that arise in their cloud infrastructures. Instead, IRTs need to take an aggressive stance towards monitoring threats in their environment by conducting regular risk assessments and audits to detect misconfigurations and potential breaches that might become incidents in due course; additionally, having tools in place that detect and respond swiftly to threats such as automation to identify issues quickly is also key in this regard.
An integral aspect of effective cloud incident response is understanding its unique challenges. This is important since various cloud services and applications require different security needs; for instance, storage solution compromise can differ from virtual machine deployment compromise in terms of their effects. Tools and training to handle these differences effectively are vital in mastering cloud IR.
IRTs should also use diagramming tools and map out their cloud architecture to keep an overview of the components that make up their environment to reduce silos and ensure all team members are on the same page. Lucidscale offers cloud mapping capabilities that help organizations visualize their infrastructure quickly while quickly seeing how different pieces fit together.
Detection of Vulnerabilities
Discovering cloud-related vulnerabilities and threats requires constant monitoring and an in-depth knowledge of how attackers target these environments. Threat detection must also scale with the increasing complexity of cloud architectures and vectors of attack. At the same time, vulnerabilities must quickly identify risks according to severity so security teams can focus on the most pressing risks first.
CDR provides comprehensive visibility of cloud attack surfaces and infrastructures, monitoring cloud configurations, events, network traffic, and user activities for suspicious behavior or potential threats. Its scalable analysis, alert prioritization, and automation capabilities help organizations defend against known and unknown threats.
CDR provides comprehensive protection for AWS, Azure, and GCP virtual machines (VMs), containers, serverless and Kubernetes clusters, APIs, and networking services using threat intelligence, contextual knowledge, and out-of-the-box response playbooks. Security teams can easily detect hidden attacks using real-time signals correlated to cloud activity logs, activity patterns in real-time, and audit logs correlated into one view to uncover hidden attacks as they reveal attacker paths such as lateral movement, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration or use heuristics rules which then enrich with intelligence from cloud providers as well as other sources.
Response
CDR tools provide organizations an invaluable way to detect threats and safeguard sensitive data in the cloud. Cyber attacks continue to rise, placing organizations that use cloud services at greater risk of data breaches and other security incidents. CDR helps organizations detect suspicious activity quickly, respond promptly, and mitigate damage effectively – three important goals.
Protecting the cloud requires quickly detecting and analyzing various data points – including logs, metadata, and APIs. CDR solutions offer solutions capable of prioritizing alerts based on severity for effective remediation orchestration with seamless integration into SIEMs, SOARs ticketing systems, or other existing technologies.
CDR solutions can also increase the efficiency of security teams by offering deep visibility into multi-cloud environments, decreasing the time and resources required to respond to threats, and showing compliance with regulatory standards such as PCI DSS.
CDR also monitors deployment parameters to detect any changes that could signal an attack or security threat, such as misconfigurations. In doing so, organizations can ensure all potential vulnerabilities are properly addressed to limit the attack surface.