Incident readiness

Effective incident readiness hinges on comprehensive visibility into cloud environments and meticulous planning. In this context, visibility refers specifically to the SecOps team's view of telemetry collection, any drift from expected baselines, and how that telemetry maps to detection coverage and overall incident readiness. 

By ensuring clear visibility and developing comprehensive incident response plans, organizations can significantly improve their detection, response, and recovery times, ultimately reducing the potential damage from security incidents. 

Eliminating visibility blind spots 

 Common gaps in cloud visibility that hinder incident response include: 

• Incomplete logging: Missing critical log sources, coverage, or insufficient log retention periods. 

• Lack of centralized monitoring: Siloed visibility for SecOps on changes in telemetry collection over time. 

• Insufficient IAM visibility: Limited insight into user activities and permissions changes. 

• Inadequate network traffic visibility: Blind spots in understanding traffic patterns, especially east-west traffic within cloud environments. This includes limited or non-existent VPC flow logs, which can obscure internal network communications and potential lateral movement. 

• Container and serverless opacity: Limited visibility into ephemeral compute environments. 

Strategies for comprehensive monitoring and logging: 

1. Implement a centralized, continuous visibility of telemetry sources and coverage mapped to detection capabilities, covering single or multi-cloud environments.

2. Enable verbose logging for critical services, ensuring all relevant API calls, data access events, and network traffic are captured. 

3. Use cloud-native security services (e.g., AWS CloudTrail, Azure Monitor) in conjunction with third-party tools for comprehensive coverage. 

4. Deploy cloud detection and response or network traffic analysis tools designed for cloud environments. 

5. Implement container and serverless-aware security solutions to gain visibility into ephemeral compute resources. 

6. Regularly review logging configurations to ensure continued comprehensive coverage as your cloud environment evolves. 

Mapping telemetry to MITRE ATT&CK framework 

Aligning cloud telemetry to the MITRE ATT&CK framework provides a structured approach to threat detection and response. This alignment helps security teams: 

1. Identify gaps in detection capabilities 

2. Prioritize security investments 

3. Improve threat hunting and incident response processes 

4. Facilitate communication about threats across the organization 

Examples of cloud-specific attacker tactics and techniques mapped to MITRE ATT&CK: 

1. Initial Access: T1190 - Exploit Public-Facing Application 

• Telemetry: Web application firewall logs, load balancer logs 

2. Persistence: T1098 - Account Manipulation 

• Telemetry: IAM activity logs, user account creation/modification events 

3. Privilege Escalation: T1078 - Valid Accounts 

• Telemetry: Authentication logs, IAM role assumption events 

4. Defense Evasion: T1562.008 - Impair Defenses: Disable Cloud Logs 

• Telemetry: Cloud trail modification events, logging configuration changes 

5. Lateral Movement: T1210 - Exploitation of Remote Services 

• Telemetry: VPC flow logs, security group modification events 

Actionable recommendations for improved cloud detection and response  

1. Enhance cloud telemetry coverage: 

• Implement comprehensive logging across all cloud services, including API calls, network flows, and user activities. 

• Enable detailed logging for critical services such as IAM, storage, and compute resources. 

2. Implement real-time threat detection: 

• Deploy cloud-native detection and response solutions for centralized log analysis. 

• Utilize machine learning-based anomaly detection to identify unusual patterns in cloud resource usage and user behavior. 

3. Establish multi-layered monitoring and detection: 

• Monitor and detect across the infrastructure, platform, and application layers for a comprehensive view of your cloud environment. 

• Implement continuous monitoring of cloud configurations to detect and alert on misconfigurations or policy violations.   

4. Develop cloud-specific detection use cases: 

• Create and regularly update detection rules based on common cloud attack techniques (e.g., using the MITRE ATT&CK Cloud Matrix). 

• Implement behavioral analytics to detect anomalies in cloud resource access and usage patterns.   

5. Improve investigation capabilities: 

• Implement robust log correlation and analysis tools to quickly identify the root cause of security incidents. 

• Utilize cloud-native tools to gain deep insights into resource performance and behavior. 

6. Enhance incident response for cloud environments: 

• Develop automated playbooks for common cloud incident scenarios (e.g., compromised credentials, data exfiltration attempts). 

• Implement security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) tools integrated with your cloud environments for faster incident triage and response. 

• Build collaboration between Developers, CloudSec and SecOps  

8. Establish continuous vulnerability management: 

• Implement automated vulnerability scanning for cloud workloads and containers. 

• Integrate security scanning into CI/CD pipelines to catch vulnerabilities before deployment. 

9. Improve network traffic visibility: 

• Implement and analyze VPC flow logs to understand network traffic patterns and detect anomalies. 

• Use cloud-native network security groups and web application firewalls (WAFs) for granular traffic control and monitoring. 

10. Enhance container and serverless monitoring: 

• Implement runtime security monitoring for containers and serverless functions. 

• Utilize cloud-native container security services for real-time threat detection in containerized environments. 

11. Establish comprehensive IAM monitoring: 

•  Implement real-time monitoring of IAM policy changes and privilege escalations. 

• Use cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools to continuously assess IAM configurations against best practices. 

12. Improve data protection monitoring: 

• Implement data detection and response solutions tailored for cloud environments. 

• Monitor and alert on unusual data access patterns or large-scale data transfers. 

By implementing these recommendations, organizations can significantly enhance their ability to detect, investigate, and respond to security incidents in real-time across their cloud environments. Remember to regularly review and update these measures to keep pace with evolving cloud technologies and threat landscapes.