The connection between detection and response (DR) techniques and cloud security has historically been tenuous. As global organizations increasingly move to the cloud, security strategies largely focus on “left shift” practices—protecting code, ensuring the cloud is properly deployed, and fixing misconfigurations. However, this approach has led to an over-reliance on a multitude of DR tools spanning cloud infrastructure, workloads, and even applications. Despite these advanced tools, organizations often need weeks or even months to discover and resolve incidents.
Add to that the challenges of tool proliferation, skyrocketing cloud security costs, and massive false positives, and it’s clear that security teams aren’t working. Many are forced to make difficult decisions about which cloud breaches they can realistically protect against.
By following these five targeted steps, security teams can significantly improve their real-time detection and response capabilities against cloud-based attacks.
Step 1: Add runtime visibility and protection
When security teams lack real-time visibility, they are essentially operating blind, unable to effectively respond to threats. While cloud-based monitoring tools, container security solutions, and EDR systems offer valuable insights, they tend to focus on specific layers of the environment. A more comprehensive approach is achieved with eBPF (advanced Berkeley packet filter) sensors. eBPF provides deep, real-time monitoring of the entire stack—network, infrastructure, workloads, and applications—without disrupting the production environment. Operating at the kernel level, it provides visibility without additional performance overhead, making it a powerful runtime security solution.
Here are some key opportunities to take advantage of at this stage:
- Topology graphs: Shows how hybrid or multi-cloud assets interact and connect.
- Full asset visibility: Demonstrates all assets in an environment, including clusters, networks, databases, secrets, and operating systems, all in one place.
- External connection information: Identifies connections to external entities, including country of origin details and DNS information.
- Risk assessment: Assess the risk level of each asset as well as its impact on the business.
Step 2: Use a multi-level discovery strategy
As attackers continue to evolve and evade detection, it becomes harder to find and stop breaches earlier they are deployed. The biggest challenge here is detecting cloud attack attempts, where adversaries operate stealthily and use multiple attack surfaces – from network exploitation to injecting data into a managed service – while evading detection with cloud detection and response (CDR), cloud detection workloads and response (CWPP/EDR), and solutions for application detection and response (ADR). This fragmented strategy proved insufficient, allowing attackers to exploit gaps between layers to remain undetected.
Cloud, workload and application layer monitoring on a single platform provides the most comprehensive coverage and protection. This provides the ability to correlate application activity with infrastructure changes in real-time, ensuring that attacks no longer slip through the cracks.
Here are some key opportunities to take advantage of at this stage:
- Full stack detection: Detects incidents from various sources in the cloud, applications, workloads, networks and APIs.
- Detection of anomalies: Uses machine learning and behavioral analysis to detect deviations from normal activity patterns that may indicate a threat.
- Detects known and unknown threats: Detects events according to signatures, IoC, TTP and known MITER tactics.
- Event Correlation: Correlates security events and alerts from multiple sources to identify patterns and potential threats.
Get started with multi-layered detection and response today.
Step 3: View vulnerabilities in the same dashboard as your incidents
When vulnerabilities are isolated from incident data, the potential for delayed responses and oversight increases. That’s because security teams end up lacking the context needed to understand how vulnerabilities are being exploited or the urgency of fixing them in light of ongoing incidents.
Additionally, when detection and response efforts use runtime monitoring (as explained above), vulnerability management becomes much more effective by focusing on proactive and critical risks to reduce noise by more than 90%.
Here are some key opportunities to take advantage of at this stage:
- Risk prioritization – Scores vulnerabilities according to the most important criteria – such as whether they are loaded into application memory, executable, public, exploitable or patchable – to focus on the threats that really matter.
- Identifying the root cause – Finds the root cause of each vulnerability (at the image level) to fix it as quickly as possible and fix multiple vulnerabilities at once.
- Checking for corrections – Uses a special image scan before deploying to ensure all vulnerabilities are fixed.
- Compliance with the rules – Lists all active vulnerabilities as SBOMs to maintain compliance and regional regulations.
Step 4: Include individuals to understand the “who”, “when” and “how”
Threat actors often use compromised credentials to carry out their attacks, engaging in credential theft, account hijacking, and more. This allows them to masquerade as legitimate users in the environment and remain undetected for hours or even days. The key is to be able to express that embodiment, and the most effective way to do this is to establish a baseline for each identity of a person or other. Once the typical identity access pattern is understood, detecting unusual behavior is easy.
Here are some key opportunities to take advantage of at this stage:
- Basic monitoring: Implements monitoring tools that capture and analyze the underlying behavior of both users and applications. These tools should track access patterns, resource usage, and data interactions.
- Personal security of a person: Integrates with credential providers for visibility into a person’s identity usage, including login time, location, device, and behavior, enabling quick detection of unusual or unauthorized access attempts.
- Security of Non-Human Identifiers: Tracks the use of non-human identification data, providing information about their interactions with cloud resources and highlighting any anomalies that may signal a security threat.
- Security secrets: Identifies every secret in your cloud environment, tracks how it’s used at runtime, and highlights whether it’s securely managed or at risk of exposure.
Step 5: Have multiple response actions available for contextual intervention
Every hacking attempt has its own unique challenges to overcome, so it’s important to have a flexible response strategy that adapts to the specific situation. For example, an attacker may launch a malicious process that requires immediate termination, while another cloud event may involve a compromised workload that needs to be quarantined to prevent further damage. Once an incident is detected, security teams also need context for rapid investigation, such as detailed attack histories, damage assessments, and response playbooks.
Here are some key opportunities to take advantage of at this stage:
- Plays: React to every detected incident to confidently intervene and stop the threat.
- Specialized Attack Intervention: Allows you to isolate hacked loads, block unauthorized network traffic or stop malicious processes.
- Root Cause Analysis: Identifies the root cause of the incident to prevent recurrence. This includes analyzing the attack vector, the vulnerabilities being exploited, and the weak points in the defense.
- Integration with SIEM: Integrates with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems to improve threat detection with contextual data.
By implementing these five steps, security services can improve their detection and response capabilities and effectively stop cloud breaches in real-time with complete accuracy. The time to act is now – Get started today with Sweet Security.
