Blog
/
/
May 21, 2020

Securing AWS Cloud Environments

Discover how self-learning AI in AWS environments detects and beats threats early with enterprise-wide analysis.
No items found.
Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
No items found.
Default blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog image
21
May 2020

Cloud platforms transform the way we build digital infrastructure, allowing us to create incredibly innovative environments for business – but often, it’s at the cost of visibility and control.

With complex hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures becoming an essential part of increasingly diverse digital estates, the journey to the cloud has fundamentally reshaped the traditional paradigm of the network perimeter, while expanding the attack surface at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, traditional security controls still only offer point solutions that rely on retrospective rules and threat signatures and fail to stop novel and advanced attacks.

To shoulder the weight of shared responsibility for cloud security, organizations require the approach offered by Darktrace DETECT & RESPOND. With Self-Learning AI, DETECT continuously learns what normal ‘patterns of life’ look like for every user, device, virtual machine, and container across an organization. By actively developing a bespoke understanding of ‘self,’ the DETECT can identify the subtle anomalies that point to an advanced attack, without any pre-defined assumptions of ‘good’ or ‘bad' and RESPOND can autonomously interfere to stop emerging threats without disrupting business operations.

As more and more businesses turn to AWS to leverage the benefits of cloud infrastructure, gaining visibility and security for AWS-hosted data and applications is absolutely crucial. The advent of AWS VPC traffic mirroring has allowed Darktrace to shine a light on blind spots in our customers’ AWS environments, ensuring that our Cyber AI security platform can stop any type of threat that emerges. With the AI-powered security securing your AWS environment, you can embrace all the benefits of the cloud with confidence.

Self-learning Cyber AI with granular, real-time visibility

VPC traffic mirroring gives our Self-Learning AI access to granular packet data, allowing DETECT to extract hundreds of features from the raw data and build rich behavioral models for our customers’ AWS cloud environments. This real-time visibility to the underlying fabric of AWS environments provided by VPC traffic mirroring helps Darktrace Cyber AI learn ‘on the job,’ continuously adapting as your business evolves. Darktrace provides the only security solution that learns in real time, a critical feature given the speed and scale of development in the cloud.

Unified control: Correlating patterns across infrastructure

Taking a fundamentally unique approach, DETECT actively correlates activity across AWS and beyond – whether your digital ecosystem includes other cloud environments, SaaS applications, or any range of on- and off-premise infrastructure. From a threat detection perspective, this is crucial, as security events detected in one part of an organization are often part of a broader security incident. This ensures that threats in the cloud are not siloed from monitoring of the rest of the infrastructure, nor are the implications for cloud security ignored when intrusions occur elsewhere in the network.

Neutralizing sophisticated and novel attacks

Legacy security controls miss novel and advanced attacks targeting cloud infrastructure. With VPC traffic mirroring supporting Darktrace Cyber AI’s understanding of an organization’s AWS environment, any slight changes from normal behavior that may indicate a potential threat can be detected immediately. This allows the DETECT to catch the full range of cloud-based attacks, from zero-day malware, to stealthy insider threats.

“Darktrace represents a new frontier in AI-based cyber defense. Our team now has complete real-time coverage across our SaaS applications and cloud containers.”

— CIO, City of Las Vegas

How it works: Using VPC traffic mirroring to analyze AWS traffic

For customers leveraging AWS within an IaaS model, Darktrace uses VPC traffic mirroring to collect metadata from mirrored VPC packets in a Darktrace probe known as a ‘vSensor’. The vSensor captures real-time traffic and selectively forwards relevant metadata to a Darktrace cloud instance or on-premise probe. From here, DETECT correlates VPC traffic with cloud, email, network, and SaaS traffic across a customer’s hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure for analysis.

By utilizing VPC traffic mirroring in this way, the Immune System can perform deep packet inspection on traffic in the customer’s AWS cloud environment, up to and including the application layer. Hundreds of features are extracted from the raw data, ranging from high-level metrics of data flow quantities, to peer relationship meta-data, to specific application layer events. These features allow Darktrace Cyber AI to build rich behavioral models that let it understand normal patterns of life for the organization and detect malicious activity. It is important that Darktrace is able to construct these metrics from the raw data rather than relying on flow logs alone, as flow logs don't provide the required level of granularity or real-time events within connections.

For non-Nitro AWS instances, we deploy lightweight agents known as ‘OS-Sensors’ that feed relevant traffic to a local vSensor and, in turn, to a Darktrace cloud instance or on-premise probe. Once configured, OS-Sensors can easily be scaled as new instances are spun up. Darktrace also offers a specialized OS-Sensor that provides coverage in containerized systems like Docker and Kubernetes.

Richer context with AWS CloudTrail logs

In addition to analyzing data with VPC traffic mirroring, the DETECT also monitors management and data events within AWS. It does so via HTTP requests for logfiles generated by AWS CloudTrail, which monitors events from all AWS services, including:

  • EC2
  • IAM
  • S3
  • VPC
  • Lambda

Different event types produced via CloudTrail are organized by Darktrace into categories based on the action type and the AWS services that generate it. These different categories show up as metrics in the DETECT user interface, the Threat Visualizer. This information is used to provide even richer context in connection with mirrored traffic in VPCs, as well as all cloud, network, email, and SaaS traffic across a customer’s entire digital environment.

Darktrace deployment scenarios for AWS customers

For IaaS environments, Darktrace deploys a vSensor in each cloud environment. Within AWS environments, the vSensor captures real-time traffic with AWS VPC traffic mirroring. The receiving vSensor processes the data and feeds it back to the cloud-based Darktrace instance. AWS customers additionally have the option of deploying a ‘Darktrace Security Module’ to monitor IaaS management and data events at the API level, such as logins, editing virtual servers, or creating new access credentials.

Figure 1: A cloud-only deployment scenario — Darktrace manages a master cloud probe which receives traffic from sensors and connectors in IaaS and/or SaaS environments.

For hybrid IaaS deployments, Darktrace will similarly deploy vSensors, and OS-Sensors as appropriate. Cloud traffic and event data from AWS and any other cloud environments is then fed to a Darktrace probe in the cloud or on-premise network. For the latter scenario, Darktrace will deploy a physical appliance that ingests real-time network traffic via a SPAN port or network tap, allowing it to correlate patterns across the entire digital ecosystem.

Figure 2: A hybrid cloud deployment scenario, with multi-cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure and GCP

For hybrid SaaS deployments, Darktrace will deploy provider-specific Darktrace Security Modules on either a physical or cloud-based Darktrace probe, in addition to any other relevant vSensors and OS-Sensors in place. SaaS data is then analyzed and correlated with traffic and user behaviors across AWS, other cloud environments, and any on- and off- premise cyber-physical infrastructure.

Figure 3: A hybrid SaaS deployment scenario

Defense against the full range of threats in the cloud

With the deep insight and powerful reaction capabilities of Cyber AI, Darktrace DETECT & RESPOND are the only proven technologies to stop the full range of cyber-threats in the cloud, including:

  • Critical misconfigurations
  • Insider threat
  • Compromised credentials
  • Novel and advanced malware
  • Password brute-force attacks
  • Data exfiltration
  • Lateral movement
  • Man-in-the-middle attacks
  • Crypto-jacking
  • Violations of policy

Case Studies

Crypto mining malware inadvertently installed

Darktrace detected a mistake from a junior DevOps engineer in a multinational organization with workloads across AWS and Azure and leveraging containerized systems like Docker and Kubernetes. The engineer accidentally downloaded an update that included a crypto miner, which led to an infection across multiple cloud production systems.

After the initial infection, the malware started beaconing out to an external command and control server, which was immediately picked up by Darktrace. With the external connection established and the attack mission instructions delivered, the crypto malware infection was then able to rapidly spread across the organization’s expansive cloud infrastructure at machine speed, infecting 20 cloud servers in under 15 seconds.

Extensive visibility into the organization’s AWS environment via VPC traffic mirroring was a key factor allowing Darktrace Cyber AI to identify the scale of the attack. With the dynamic and unified view across the company’s sprawling hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure provided by Darktrace, the company’s security team was able to contain the attack within minutes, rather than hours or days. Even though the attack moved at machine speed, by leveraging solutions like VPC traffic mirroring to continuously analyze behavior in the cloud, Darktrace caught the threat at an early enough stage – well before the costs could start to mount.

Developer misuse of AWS cloud infrastructure

At an insurance group, a DevOps Engineer was attempting to build a parallel back-up infrastructure within AWS to replicate the organization’s data center production systems. The technical implementation was perfect, and the back-up systems were created – however, the cost of running the system would have been several million dollars per year.

The DevOps Engineer was unaware of the costs associated with the project and kept management in the dark. The cloud infrastructure was launched, and the costs started rising. Yet with real-time access to the company’s AWS environment provided by VPC traffic mirroring, Darktrace’s Cyber AI was immediately alerted to this unusual behavior, allowing the security team to take preventative action immediately.

With Darktrace Cyber AI, embrace the benefits of AWS

As organizations increasingly turn to the cloud and the threat surface continues to expand, security teams need self-learning AI on their side to gain the strongest insights, illuminate every blind spot, and stop all attacks.

By providing an enterprise-wide Cyber AI platform, Darktrace helps teams overcome the traditional security challenge of manually piecing together incidents across disparate corners of an organization. The unified visibility and control offered by Darktrace PREVENT, DETECTRESPOND, & HEAL reduces the complexity and dashboard fatigue that many teams continue to struggle with, while the system’s multi-dimensional insight enhances its decision-making and threat confidence. Darktrace further augments this process with the Immune System’s AI Analyst capability, which takes the additional step of automatically investigating threats detected by Darktrace and producing concise, AI-generated reports that communicate the full scope of an incident.

With the granular, real-time visibility of VPC traffic mirroring Darktrace, you can be certain your AWS cloud environments are always protected.

No items found.
Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
No items found.

More in this series

No items found.

Blog

/

/

September 23, 2025

It’s Time to Rethink Cloud Investigations

Default blog imageDefault blog image

Cloud Breaches Are Surging

Cloud adoption has revolutionized how businesses operate, offering speed, scalability, and flexibility. But for security teams, this transformation has introduced a new set of challenges, especially when it comes to incident response (IR) and forensic investigations.

Cloud-related breaches are skyrocketing – 82% of breaches now involve cloud-stored data (IBM Cost of a Data Breach, 2023). Yet incidents often go unnoticed for days: according to a 2025 report by Cybersecurity Insiders, of the 65% of organizations experienced a cloud-related incident in the past year, only 9% detected it within the first hour, and 62% took more than 24 hours to remediate it (Cybersecurity Insiders, Cloud Security Report 2025).

Despite the shift to cloud, many investigation practices remain rooted in legacy on-prem approaches. According to a recent report, 65% of organizations spend approximately 3-5 days longer when investigating an incident in the cloud vs. on premises.

Cloud investigations must evolve, or risk falling behind attackers who are already exploiting the cloud’s speed and complexity.

4 Reasons Cloud Investigations Are Broken

The cloud’s dynamic nature – with its ephemeral workloads and distributed architecture – has outpaced traditional incident response methods. What worked in static, on-prem environments simply doesn’t translate.

Here’s why:

  1. Ephemeral workloads
    Containers and serverless functions can spin up and vanish in minutes. Attackers know this as well – they’re exploiting short-lived assets for “hit-and-run” attacks, leaving almost no forensic footprint. If you’re relying on scheduled scans or manual evidence collection, you’re already too late.
  2. Fragmented tooling
    Each cloud provider has its own logs, APIs, and investigation workflows. In addition, not all logs are enabled by default, cloud providers typically limit the scope of their logs (both in terms of what data they collect and how long they retain it), and some logs are only available through undocumented APIs. This creates siloed views of attacker activity, making it difficult to piece together a coherent timeline. Now layer in SaaS apps, Kubernetes clusters, and shadow IT — suddenly you’re stitching together 20+ tools just to find out what happened. Analysts call it the ‘swivel-chair Olympics,’ and it’s burning hours they don’t have.
  3. SOC overload
    Analysts spend the bulk of their time manually gathering evidence and correlating logs rather than responding to threats. This slows down investigations and increases burnout. SOC teams are drowning in noise; they receive thousands of alerts a day, the majority of which never get touched. False positives eat hundreds of hours a month, and consequently burnout is rife.  
  4. Cost of delay
    The longer an investigation takes, the higher its cost. Breaches contained in under 200 days save an average of over $1M compared to those that linger (IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2025).

These challenges create a dangerous gap for threat actors to exploit. By the time evidence is collected, attackers may have already accessed or exfiltrated data, or entrenched themselves deeper into your environment.

What’s Needed: A New Approach to Cloud Investigations

It’s time to ditch the manual, reactive grind and embrace investigations that are automated, proactive, and built for the world you actually defend. Here’s what the next generation of cloud forensics must deliver:

  • Automated evidence acquisition
    Capture forensic-level data the moment a threat is detected and before assets disappear.
  • Unified multi-cloud visibility
    Stitch together logs, timelines, and context across AWS, Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments into a single unified view of the investigation.
  • Accelerated investigation workflows
    Reduce time-to-insight from hours or days to minutes with automated analysis of forensic data, enabling faster containment and recovery.
  • Empowered SOC teams
    Fully contextualised data and collaboration workflows between teams in the SOC ensure seamless handover, freeing up analysts from manual collection tasks so they can focus on what matters: analysis and response.

Attackers are already leveraging the cloud’s agility. Defenders must do the same — adopting solutions that match the speed and scale of modern infrastructure.

Cloud Changed Everything. It’s Time to Change Investigations.  

The cloud fundamentally reshaped how businesses operate. It’s time for security teams to rethink how they investigate threats.

Forensics can no longer be slow, manual, and reactive. It must be instant, automated, and cloud-first — designed to meet the demands of ephemeral infrastructure and multi-cloud complexity.

The future of incident response isn’t just faster. It’s smarter, more scalable, and built for the environments we defend today, not those of ten years ago.  

On October 9th, Darktrace is revealing the next big thing in cloud security. Don’t miss it – sign up for the webinar.

darktrace live event launch
Continue reading
About the author
Kellie Regan
Director, Product Marketing - Cloud Security

Blog

/

/

September 22, 2025

Understanding the Canadian Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act

Default blog imageDefault blog image

Introduction: The Canadian Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act

On 18 June 2025, the Canadian federal Government introduced Bill C-8 which, if adopted following completion of the legislative process, will enact the Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act (CCSPA) and give Canada its first federal, cross-sector and legally binding cybersecurity regime for designated critical infrastructure providers. As of August 2025, the Bill has completed first reading and stands at second reading in the Canadian House of Commons.

Political context

The measure revives most of the stalled 2022 Bill C-26 “An Act Respecting Cyber Security” which “died on Paper” when Parliament was prorogued in January 2025, in the wake of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation.

The new government, led by Mark Carney since March 2025, has re-tabled the package with the same two-part structure: (1) amendments to the Telecommunications Act that enable security directions to telecoms; and (2) a new CCSPA setting out mandatory cybersecurity duties for designated operators. This blog focuses on the latter.

If enacted, Canada will join fellow Five Eyes partners such as the United Kingdom and Australia, which already impose statutory cyber-security duties on operators of critical national infrastructure.

The case for new cybersecurity legislation in Canada

The Canadian cyber threat landscape has expanded. The country's national cyber authority, the Canadian Centre for Cybersecurity (Cyber Centre), recently assessed that the number of cyber incidents has “sharply increased” in the last two years, as has the severity of those incidents, with essential services providers among the targets. Likewise, in its 2025-2026 National Cyber Threat Assessment, the Cyber Centre warned that AI technologies are “amplifying cyberspace threats” by lowering barriers to entry, improving the speed and sophistication of social-engineering attacks and enabling more precise operations.

This context mirrors what we are seeing globally: adversaries, including state actors, are taking advantage of the availability and sophistication of AI tools, which they have leverage to amplify the effectiveness of their operations. In this increasingly complex landscape, regulation must keep pace and evolve in step with the risk.

What the Canadian Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act aims to achieve

  • If enacted, the CCSPA will apply to operators in federally regulated critical infrastructure sectors which are vital to national security and public safety, as further defined in “Scope” below (the “Regulated Entities”), to adopt and comply with a minimum standard of cybersecurity duties (further described below)  which align with those its Five Eyes counterparts are already adhering to.

Who does the CCSPA apply to

The CCSPA would apply to designated operators that deliver services or systems within federal jurisdiction in the following priority areas:

  • telecommunications services
  • interprovincial or international pipeline and power line systems, nuclear energy systems, transportation systems
  • banking and clearing  
  • settlement systems

The CCSPA would also grant the Governor in Council (Federal Cabinet) with powers to add or remove entities in scope via regulation.

Scope of the CCSPA

The CCSPA introduces two key instruments:

First, it strengthens cyber threat information sharing between responsible ministers, sector regulators, and the Communications Security Establishment (through the Cyber Centre).

Second, it empowers the Governor in Council (GIC) to issue Cyber Security Directions (CSDs) - binding orders requiring a designated operator to implement specified measures to protect a critical cyber system within defined timeframes.

CSDs may be tailored to an individual operator or applied to a class of operators and can address technology, process, or supplier risks. To safeguard security and commercial confidentiality, the CCSPA restricts disclosure of the existence or content of a CSD except as necessary to carry it out.

Locating decision-making with the GIC ensures that CSDs are made with a cross-government view that weighs national security, economic priorities and international agreement.

New obligations for designated providers

The CCSPA would impose key cybersecurity compliance and obligations on designated providers. As it stands, this includes:

  1. Establishing and maintaining cybersecurity programs: these will need to be comprehensive, proportionate and developed proactively. Once implemented, they will need to be continuously reviewed
  2. Mitigating supply chain risks: Regulated Entities will be required to assess their third-party products and services by conducting a supply chain analysis, and take active steps to mitigate any identified risks
  3. Reporting incidents:  Regulated Entities will need to be more transparent with their reporting, by making the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) aware of any incident which has, or could potentially have, an impact on a critical system. The reports must be made within specific timelines, but in any event within no more than 72 hours;
  4. Compliance with cybersecurity directions:  the government will, under the CCSPA, have the authority to issue cybersecurity directives in an effort to remain responsive to emerging threats, which Regulated Entities will be required to follow once issued
  5. Record keeping: this shouldn’t be a surprise to many of those Regulated Entities which fall in scope, which are already likely to be subject to record keeping requirements. Regulated Entities should expect to be maintaining records and conducting audits of their systems and processes against the requirements of the CCSPA

It should be noted, however, that this may be subject to change, so Regulated Entities should keep an eye on the progress of the Bill as it makes its way through parliament.

Enforcement of the Act would be carried out by sector-specific regulators identified in the Act such as the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, Minister of Transport, Canada Energy Regulator, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the Ministry of Industry.

What are the penalties for CCSPA non-compliance?

When assessing the penalties associated with non-compliance with the requirements of the CCSPA, it is clear that such non-compliance will be taken seriously, and the severity of the penalties follows the trend of those applied by the European Union to key pieces of EU legislation. The “administrative monetary penalties” (AMPs) set by regulation could see fines being applied of up to C$1 million for individuals and up to C$15 million for organizations.

Continue reading
About the author
The Darktrace Community
Your data. Our AI.
Elevate your network security with Darktrace AI