The good, the bad and the ugly of hybrid attacks targeting AWS
For businesses today, adopting the cloud is not an option, but a necessity. With that being said, as enterprises continue to move applications, workloads and data into hybrid and multi-cloud environments — attack detection, investigation and response has become increasingly siloed and complex. According to Vectra AI’s 2023 State of Threat Detection report, 90% of SOC analysts express a lack in confidence that they can keep pace with the increasing volume and variety of threats — 71% fearing that their organization has already been compromised, and they just don’t know about it yet.
The Good
- Enable modern SOC teams to optimize their workflows.
- Support the remote work force so your organization can grow and scale.
- Migration to the cloud supports more innovation to help organizations meet their goals.
The Bad
- Expanded attack surface means more vulnerabilities for hybrid attackers to penetrate your organization.
- Lack of visibility across the entire hybrid cloud attack surface including on-premises, public cloud, identity and SaaS.
- Increased mean-time-to detect and respond to threats continues to increase for SOC teams. According to the IBM Security Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022, it takes organizations on average of 9 to 10 months ot identify and contain a breach.
The Ugly
- More SOC analyst burnout directly contributing to more analyst turnover.
- More expertise needed for public cloud such as AWS, as managing and maintaing on-premises networks is not the same as public cloud.
- Increased risk of hybrid attacks containing lateral movement, account misuse and ransomware amongst others – can take place and cause severe damage of business operations.
Fortunately, Vectra Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) for AWS addresses the challenges mentioned above by empowering SOC teams with the needed threat, detection, investigation and response (TDIR) to combat hybrid cloud attacks.
Vectra CDR for AWS safeguards your data where it lives
Vectra CDR for AWS enables SOC teams to keep pace with the ever-growing speed and scale of sophisticated hybrid attacks by providing:
Complete hybrid attack coverage:
- AI-driven detections: Purpose-built AI detection models eliminate the need for writing custom detection rules. The CDR for AWS portfolio brings together the best of Vectra's security research and data science to surface multi-step sophisticated attacker behavior across an AWS footprint.
- Real-time visibility: Alerts that reduce threat detection latency, providing SOC analysts with real-time visibility and the steps to remediate cloud-based risks.
- Expansive coverage in minutes: Provides coverage for enterprise scale AWS deployments (IaaS, PaaS) across regions and accounts delivering a complete view of AWS security risk in mere minutes.
Integrated signal for the highest-fidelity signal clarity:
- AI prioritization: Prioritizes cloud threat actors alongside those from identity, network and SaaS environments — separating the urgent from the ordinary across hybrid deployments.
- Entity-driven analysis: Unlike other tools, CDR for AWS shifts the focus from individual events to AWS entities (hosts and accounts), reducing the time and resources needed to correlate behaviors and accurately assess associated risk.
- Complements existing security investments: With AI-driven coverage for sophisticated attacks, CDR for AWS complements investments in native tooling such as Amazon GuardDuty (which relies on anomalies and signatures) as well as preventative posture tools to strengthen the SOC's arsenal.
- AI-driven intelligence powers human intelligence: AI optimizes existing SOC analyst time and talent by freeing them of manual alert rules, and tuning so they focus their time on investigating and responding to real hybrid attacks.
AI-driven intelligence coupled with intelligent controls:
- AI-driven intelligence powers human intelligence: AI optimizes existing SOC analyst time and talent by freeing them of manual alert rules, and tuning so they can focus their time on investigating and responding to real hybrid attacks.
- Automatically see hybrid attack progression and lateral movement: Pinpoints attacker progression and lateral movement from data center networks to AWS or AWS to data center networks.
- Native response actions to isolate contain attacks: AWS lockdown capabilities provide SOC analysts and incident responders the means to automatically or manually isolate and contain accounts known to be compromised.
Vectra CDR for AWS extends on the trusted Vectra NDR technology with Attack Signal IntelligenceTM — providing integrated signal to strengthen your XDR against hybrid attacks. Vectra CDR for AWS provides SOC teams with the necessary insights to make informed decisions through an entity-focused approach to drastically minimize the time and effort needed to correlate, score and rank multiple and concurrent detections as events unfold. Thus, enabling SOC teams with better intelligence to make informed decisions from a holistic perspective, to think like attackers and mitigate risks.
What’s Next?
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