Why are businesses shifting to the cloud?
Businesses are increasingly migrating to cloud, due to its potential to streamline operations, reduce costs, and enhance scalability and flexibility. By shifting their infrastructure to the cloud, either as a whole or, more commonly in a hybrid model, organizations can access a wide array of services, such as storage, compute and software applications, without the need for extensive on-premises hardware. However, this transition isn't without challenges.
Security challenges of cloud migration
Data security, compliance, integration with existing systems, and ensuring consistent performance are critical concerns that need to be addressed. Therefore, companies must develop robust oversight, implement comprehensive security measures, and invest in staff training to successfully navigate the transition to the cloud all while minimizing potential disruptions.
Implementing security measures within a company, however, is a complex endeavour that involves coordination among numerous internal stakeholders two of the most pivotal players involved in cloud security investment, are the security team, entrusted with crafting a business's defensive strategy, and the DevOps engineering team, architects of the infrastructure underpinning the organization's business operations.
Key questions to ask when securing the cloud
Which team is responsible for maintaining the application?
What do they consider normal?
How are potential misconfigurations increasing the potential risk of an incident?
Best practices of cloud security
Contextual awareness of the business is a crucial facet for securing a company's cloud infrastructure, as it enables organizations to align security measures with specific business objectives, risks, and regulatory requirements. Understanding the context of the business operations, its goals, critical assets, and compliance obligations, allows security teams to tailor their strategies and controls accordingly.
How does Darktrace help secure the cloud?
In response to the difficulties outlined above, Darktrace has adopted a holistic approach to security with an ActiveAI security platform that is context-aware. This platform enables stakeholders to effectively detect and respond to threats that may arise within their cloud or on premises environments.
By monitoring your network and identity activity, Darktrace can identify what is considered “normal” within your organization. This however doesn’t tell the whole story. It is also important to understand where these actions are occurring within the context of the business.
Visibility in the cloud
Without visibility into the individual assets that make up the cloud environment, how these are configured, and how they operate at run time, security is incredibly difficult to maintain. Visibility allows security teams to identify potential vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or unauthorized access points that could be exploited by malicious actors. It enables proactive monitoring and rapid response to security incidents, ensuring that any threats are promptly identified and mitigated before they can cause significant damage.
Building architecture diagrams
The cornerstone of our strategy lies in the architecture diagrams, which serve as a framework for organizing resources within our cloud environment. An architecture comprises of interconnected resources governed by access controls and network routing mechanisms. Its purpose is to logically group these resources into the applications they support.
Achieving this involves compiling a comprehensive inventory of the cloud environment, analyzing resource permissions—including both outbound and inbound access—and considering any overarching organizational policies. For networked devices, we delve into route tables, firewalls, and subnet access control policies. This information is then utilized to build a graph of interconnected assets, wherein each resource constitutes a node, and the possible connections between resources are represented as edges.
Once we have built up an inventory of all the resources within your environments, we can then start building architectures based on the graph. We do this by selecting distinct starting points for graph traversal, which we infer from our deep understanding of the cloud, an example would be a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) - A VPC is a virtual network that closely resembles a traditional network that you'd operate in your own data center.
All networked devices are usually housed within a VPC, with applications typically grouped into one or more VPCs. If multiple VPCs are detected with peering connections between them, we consider them as distinct parts of the same system. This approach enables us to comprehend applications across regions and accounts, rather than solely from the isolated viewpoint of a single VPC.
However, the cloud isn’t all about compute instances, serverless is a popular architecture. In fact, for many developers serverless architectures offer greater scalability and flexibility. Reviewing prevalent serverless architecture patterns, we've chosen some common fundamental resources as our starting point, Lambda functions and Elastic Container Service (ECS) clusters are prime examples, serving as crucial components in various serverless systems with distinct yet similar characteristics.
Prioritize risk in the cloud
Once we have built up an inventory of all the cloud asset, Darktrace / CLOUD utilizes an ‘outlier’ detection machine learning model. This looks to categorize all the assets and identifies the ones that look different or ‘odd’ when compared with the assets around it, this is based on a wide range of characteristics some of which will include, Name, VPC ID, Host Region etc, whilst also incorporating contextual knowledge of where these assets are found, and how they fit into the architecture they are in.
Once outliers are identified, we can use this information to assess the potential risk posed by the asset. Context plays a crucial role in this stage, as incorporating observations about the asset enables effective scoring. For instance, detecting a misconfiguration, anomalous network connections, or unusual user activity can significantly raise the asset's score. Consequently, the architecture it belongs to can be flagged for further investigation.
Adapting to a dynamic cloud environment
The cloud is incredibly dynamic. Therefore, Darktrace does not see architectures as fixed entities. Instead, we're always on the lookout for changes, driven by user and service activity. This prompts us to dive back in, update our architectural view, and keep a living record of the cloud's ever-changing landscape, providing near real-time insights into what's happening within it.
Darktrace / CLOUD doesn’t just consider isolated detections, it identifies assets that have misconfigurations and anomalous activity across the network and management plane and adjusts the priority of the alerting to match the potential risk that these assets could be leveraged to enable an attack.
While in isolation misconfigurations don’t have much meaningful impact, when they are combined with real time updates and anomaly detection within the context of the architecture you see a very important and impactful perspective.
Combining all of this into one view where security and dev ops teams can collaborate ensures continuity across teams, playing a vital role in providing effective security.
