What is cloud incident response?
Cloud incident response is a strategic approach to detecting and recovering from cyberattacks on cloud-based systems. It comprises a coordinated series of procedures to help you detect threats, eradicate malicious actors and bounce back from an incident in an organized, efficient and timely manner.
It shares the same goals as incident response in a traditional IT setting. However, the approach to meeting those goals is different. This is down to differences in infrastructure, and differences in the ways in which threat actors target cloud-based applications .
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This means you have to adapt your incident response strategy to a different attack surface and different types of attack. And if you use more than one cloud service provider (CSP), which each have their own service concepts and native tools, you'll often need different sets of individually tailored measures for each platform.
As public cloud adoption continues to grow, cloud incident response is becoming increasingly important and rapidly emerging as the standard course of action for handling attacks.
Cloud vs. traditional incident response: a quick comparison
Incident response (IR) is a critical component of any organization’s cybersecurity strategy, enabling the detection, containment, and recovery from security incidents. While the core goals of incident response—minimizing damage, restoring normal operations, and preventing future incidents—remain consistent across environments, the strategies and tools used in cloud and traditional (on-premises) settings differ significantly. Understanding these differences is crucial for organizations operating in hybrid or fully cloud-based environments.
1. Infrastructure Characteristics
Traditional Incident Response: In a traditional IT setting, incident response occurs within a static and controlled infrastructure. This includes physical servers, storage devices, and networking hardware located on-premises. Security teams have direct physical access to these assets, which allows for straightforward monitoring, logging, and forensic analysis. Traditional environments often involve monolithic applications and a well-defined network perimeter, making it easier to apply security controls and detect breaches.
Cloud Incident Response: Cloud environments, by contrast, are dynamic and distributed. Resources are virtualized and can be spun up or down on demand, often across multiple geographic locations. This infrastructure is jointly managed by the organization and the cloud service provider (CSP), which means that security teams may not have direct control over or access to the underlying physical infrastructure. The cloud also introduces new architectures, such as microservices, containers, and serverless computing, which further complicate incident response efforts.
2. Visibility and Monitoring
Traditional Incident Response: In a traditional environment, visibility is generally easier to achieve due to the static nature of the infrastructure. Security teams can deploy monitoring tools at the network perimeter and within the internal network to capture and analyze traffic, detect anomalies, and gather forensic evidence. Access to physical devices allows for deep inspection and analysis, including disk imaging and memory analysis.
Cloud Incident Response: Visibility in the cloud is more challenging due to the ephemeral nature of cloud resources and the complexity of cloud architectures. Logs are a primary source of visibility, but these logs must be gathered from various sources (e.g., CSPs, virtual networks, application layers). Additionally, because cloud assets can be short-lived, logs must be collected and analyzed in real-time to avoid losing critical forensic data. Organizations rely heavily on CSP-provided tools and services for monitoring, which may not provide the same depth of visibility as on-premises solutions.
3. Tooling and Automation
Traditional Incident Response: Traditional incident response relies on a suite of well-established tools designed for static, on-premises environments. These include firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS), endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, and SIEM systems. These tools are typically deployed within the organization's data center and provide real-time monitoring, threat detection, and response capabilities.
Cloud Incident Response: In the cloud, traditional tools may not be fully compatible or effective due to the dynamic nature of cloud environments. Instead, cloud-specific tools are required to monitor, detect, and respond to incidents. These tools often focus on cloud-native security concerns, such as identity and access management (IAM), data loss prevention (DLP), and cloud workload protection. Automation is also more critical in cloud environments, where tools like Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) can help manage the scale and speed of cloud operations.
4. Attack Surface and Threats
Traditional Incident Response: In a traditional setting, the attack surface is typically confined to the organization's physical infrastructure. Threats often target the network perimeter, endpoints, and on-premises applications. Common attack vectors include malware, phishing, and ransomware, which primarily aim to compromise devices or steal sensitive data stored within the organization's data center.
Cloud Incident Response: The cloud expands the attack surface considerably, as organizations are responsible for securing data, applications, and services across multiple cloud environments. In addition to traditional threats, cloud-specific attack vectors include misconfigurations, insecure APIs, and compromised credentials. Attackers may also target cloud resources for cryptojacking or seek to exfiltrate data from cloud storage services. The shared responsibility model in the cloud means that organizations must be vigilant about securing their portion of the cloud stack, while relying on the CSP to secure the underlying infrastructure.
5. Response and Recovery
Traditional Incident Response: In traditional environments, response and recovery processes are well-defined and often involve manual intervention. Security teams can isolate affected devices, restore from backups, and apply patches directly to on-premises systems. Recovery times can be relatively predictable, depending on the severity of the incident and the availability of recovery resources.
Cloud Incident Response: Cloud incident response requires a more agile approach due to the speed and scale at which cloud environments operate. Automated playbooks and scripts are often used to quickly isolate compromised resources, rotate credentials, and restore services. Recovery in the cloud can be more complex due to the potential need to coordinate across multiple cloud platforms or regions. However, the cloud's inherent redundancy and scalability can also enable faster recovery if incident response processes are well-integrated with cloud-native tools and services.
6. Skills and Expertise
Traditional Incident Response: Incident responders in traditional environments typically possess expertise in on-premises technologies, networking, and endpoint security. Their skill sets are often focused on physical infrastructure and the use of legacy security tools.
Cloud Incident Response: Cloud incident response requires a different skill set, including knowledge of cloud architectures, CSP-specific security tools, and automation technologies. As cloud environments evolve rapidly, incident responders must continuously update their skills and stay informed about the latest cloud security practices and threat landscapes. The shortage of cloud security expertise can be a significant challenge for organizations transitioning to the cloud.
The importance of logging in cloud incident response
Logging plays a pivotal role in cloud IR, serving as the primary source of evidence when detecting, investigating, and responding to security incidents in cloud environments. Due to the ephemeral and distributed nature of cloud resources, traditional methods of incident investigation, such as forensic imaging and memory analysis, are often inadequate.
Instead, logs provide the necessary visibility into cloud activities, offering detailed records that help incident responders understand the scope, impact, and root cause of a cybersecurity incident.
1. Enhanced visibility
In cloud environments, assets can be dynamically created, modified, or destroyed within minutes. Without logging, it's challenging to track these changes, making it difficult to detect unauthorized actions or suspicious activities. Logs provide continuous visibility into the operations of cloud resources, enabling organizations to monitor their environment in real-time and respond promptly to incidents.
2. Forensic analysis
Logs are crucial for reconstructing events during a forensic investigation. They help incident responders build a timeline of activities, identify compromised resources, and trace the attacker’s steps. This level of detail is necessary to determine the root cause of an incident, assess the extent of the damage, and develop an effective containment and eradication strategy.
3. Compliance and reporting
Many regulatory frameworks require organizations to maintain logs for a specified period and be able to produce them during audits or investigations. Logging is essential for demonstrating compliance with these requirements and providing evidence in case of legal disputes.
Types of logs needed for cloud incident response
Different types of logs serve various purposes in cloud incident response. Here are the key categories of logs needed:
1. Audit logs
Purpose: Audit logs track administrative and access-related actions, providing a record of who did what, when, and where.
Examples: AWS CloudTrail logs, Azure Activity Logs, Google Cloud Audit Logs.
Importance: These logs are critical for identifying unauthorized access, privilege escalation, or changes to configurations that could indicate a breach.
2. Network logs
Purpose: Network logs capture data about traffic flowing within and across cloud networks.
Examples: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) flow logs, network security group logs.
Importance: Network logs are vital for detecting unusual traffic patterns, such as data exfiltration attempts or lateral movement by attackers.
3. Application logs
Purpose: Application logs record activities and events related to specific cloud-based applications.
Examples: Web server logs, database query logs, application error logs.
Importance: These logs help identify vulnerabilities exploited in an attack and provide insight into how the application was compromised.
4. Security logs
Purpose: Security logs capture events related to the security of the cloud environment, including firewall activities, intrusion detection/prevention system (IDS/IPS) alerts, and cloud detection and response (CDR) events.
Examples: Web Application Firewall (WAF) logs, security group logs.
Importance: Security logs are essential for identifying and mitigating threats, monitoring the effectiveness of security controls, and detecting anomalies.
5. Container and orchestration logs
Purpose: These logs track the activities of containers and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
Examples: Kubernetes audit logs, container runtime logs.
Importance: In environments utilizing microservices or containers, these logs are critical for tracking container activities, detecting unauthorized changes, and understanding how the orchestration environment was manipulated.
Top sources of incident response logs
To effectively manage cloud incident response, it's crucial to know where to source the relevant logs. Here are the top sources of logs for cloud IR:
1. Cloud service provider (CSP) logs
Examples: AWS CloudTrail, Azure Monitor Logs, Google Cloud Logging.
Importance: CSP logs provide comprehensive visibility into the operations and security events within the cloud infrastructure. They are the primary source of audit logs, access logs, and security-related events.
2. Security information and event management (SIEM) systems
Examples: Splunk, IBM QRadar, Azure Sentinel.
Importance: SIEM systems aggregate logs from multiple sources, including CSPs, applications, and network devices, providing a centralized platform for monitoring, analyzing, and responding to security events.
3. Cloud-native security tools
Examples: AWS GuardDuty, Azure Security Center, Google Cloud Security Command Center.
Importance: These tools provide specialized logging and alerting capabilities tailored to cloud environments, offering insights into potential threats and vulnerabilities specific to cloud infrastructure.
4. Application performance management (APM) tools
Examples: Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics.
Importance: APM tools provide logs that offer deep insights into application performance and behavior, which can be crucial for detecting and investigating security incidents at the application level.
5. Container orchestration logs
Examples: Kubernetes audit logs, Docker logs.
Importance: In environments using containers and microservices, orchestration logs provide visibility into container deployments, scaling events, and configuration changes, which are critical for incident response.
The response lifecycle
In this section, we look at incident response considerations and best practices in the cloud throughout the different stages of the response lifecycle.
Preparation
Given the current shortage of expertise, it's essential you provide training to everyone involved in incident response to ensure they have a good understanding of the public cloud and the cloud technologies you use. It also makes sense to have the appropriate role-based access policies in place ahead of time so the incident response team can go about its duties without delay.
Ensure that processes to gather traditional forensic artifacts, like disk and memory snapshots, are as automated as possible. Since these artifacts will be gathered via API rather than by physical access, you should set up automated playbooks that incident responders can run immediately to ensure critical data is gathered before it disappears.
And don't forget that logs will play a much more important role in cloud-based incident investigation. These can be particularly wide-ranging—from CSP audit logs and network flow logs (VPC) to container orchestration logs provided by technologies such as Kubernetes.
You should collect relevant logs and store them securely for immediate analysis when needed. However, you should give due consideration to the cost of log collection and enable only those logs you're likely to use in an incident. Also be aware that many logging services are disabled by default. So also don't just assume you have all necessary telemetry in place.
Detection and investigation
Cloud-native deployments are generally made up of a myriad of different components. As a result, incident investigation can often be an exceptionally complex undertaking.
At the core of incident investigation is the construction of an incident timeline - you’ll need to know exactly who did what and when to get the full picture of an attack. Due to the complexity of cloud environments, you'll therefore need to call upon a much wider array of new and existing tools to construct this timeline. The timeline will help you piece together event data and determine the:
Root cause of an incident
Blast radius
Likely impact of the attack
Most appropriate corrective action
Such tools typically include:
Asset discovery and inventory mapping
Security information and event management (SIEM)
Digital forensics and machine timelining
At a more granular level, you'll be performing tasks such as:
Understanding the behavioral pattern of the affected identity
Determining what else that identity has access to
Identifying misconfigurations
Taking and reviewing snapshots
Containment
Just as with incident investigation, the distributed and dynamic nature of the public cloud can make it far more difficult to contain and ultimately eradicate a threat.
Furthermore, the way in which you'd contain a cloud-based incident is often different. For example, an endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution is often the quickest method of isolating a compromised machine from a conventional network. By contrast, in cloud environments, often the most efficient option would be to change its security group settings through the control plane.
Your security team will therefore need to adopt new approaches to containment. This also means they'll need to familiarize themselves with the range of built-in CSP capabilities to support containment, such as simplified network configuration and cloud entitlements management.
Eradication
Similarly, you'll need to employ new methods of removing a threat from your cloud-based environment.
Typical measures include:
Rotating secrets such as API tokens, encryption keys, and passwords
Blocking points of entry
Rolling back resources to their pre-infected state
Purging infected container and machine images
Sanitizing infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates
Removing malicious code injected into serverless functions
Patching vulnerabilities
Performing these tasks at scale is highly labor-intensive—just at a time when you need to act quickly. This highlights the importance of security technologies such as security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), which can help you speed up your response time through built-in automation capabilities.
And don't forget that eradication is the complete removal of the threat so that it's no longer present anywhere within your network. So, as part of the eradication phase, you should subsequently monitor your cloud for malicious activity, such as unusual API calls, which could be the potential sign of persistence.
Cloud IR best practices for multi-cloud environments
Managing incident response (IR) in a multi-cloud environment introduces a unique set of challenges. Organizations often leverage services from multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) to take advantage of various features, pricing models, and geographic availability. However, this approach can complicate incident response efforts due to the differing tools, architectures, and security controls offered by each CSP. To effectively handle incidents in a multi-cloud environment, organizations should adopt the following best practices:
Centralized logging and monitoring
Implementing centralized logging and monitoring is crucial for effective incident response in multi-cloud environments:
Aggregate logs from all cloud providers into a central repository for unified visibility.
Use cloud-native monitoring tools as well as third-party solutions that can integrate data from multiple clouds.
Establish consistent logging standards across all cloud environments to facilitate analysis.
Unified incident response plan
Develop a comprehensive incident response plan that covers all cloud environments:
Define clear roles and responsibilities for the IR team across different cloud platforms.
Establish standardized procedures for incident detection, containment, and remediation.
Regularly update and test the IR plan to ensure its effectiveness in a multi-cloud setting.
How to Draw Up an Incident Response Policy: An Actionable Checklist for Cybersecurity Professionals
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Automated response capabilities
Leverage automation to improve incident response efficiency:
Implement automated alert systems that can detect and notify about potential security incidents across all cloud environments.
Use orchestration tools to automate initial response actions, such as isolating affected resources or revoking compromised credentials.
Develop playbooks for common incident types that can be executed automatically or with minimal human intervention.
Cloud-specific security controls
Tailor security controls to each cloud provider's unique features and capabilities:
Implement strong Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies specific to each cloud platform.
Utilize cloud-native security services offered by each provider, such as AWS GuardDuty or Azure Security Center.
Ensure proper configuration of network security groups, firewalls, and other security controls for each cloud environment.
Cross-platform visibility
Maintain comprehensive visibility across all cloud environments:
Implement tools that provide a unified view of security posture across multiple clouds.
Regularly conduct asset inventory and vulnerability assessments across all cloud platforms.
Use cloud security posture management (CSPM) solutions to identify misconfigurations and compliance issues.
Incident response training
Ensure the IR team is well-prepared to handle incidents in a multi-cloud environment:
Provide training on the specific tools and services used in each cloud platform.
Conduct regular tabletop exercises and penetration testing that involve scenarios spanning multiple cloud environments.
Keep the team updated on the latest cloud-specific threats and attack vectors.
Data Protection and Recovery
Implement robust data protection and recovery mechanisms:
Encrypt data at rest and in transit across all cloud environments.
Implement consistent backup and disaster recovery procedures for all critical data and systems.
Regularly test data recovery processes to ensure they work effectively across different cloud platforms.
The Next Step in Your Incident Response Preparations
This post is just a quick-start guide to cloud incident response, taking you through some of the challenges you'll face and practices you'll need to adopt in the cloud. However, there are many other aspects of incident management you'll need to consider.
That's why Wiz recently published an incident response plan template aimed specifically at security operations teams responsible for protecting public cloud, hybrid-cloud, and multicloud deployments. It is a comprehensive guide to what you should include in your own incident response plan, outlining the measures you should have in place for handling security incidents affecting your cloud.
Download your copy of the template today.
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