Level Up Cloud Incident Response from Experts in 2024

Traditional Incidents plan not always work with Cloud Security which requires it's own approach

Author

Shilpi Bhattacharjee
August 29, 2024

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This week’s Cloud Security Newsletter Topic is Mastering Incident Response in the Cloud (continue reading)

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Mastering Incident Response in the Cloud

Incident Response has been a key emerging theme in 2024 in Cloud Security. As cloud environments mature and become more complex, it is becoming even more important to build, implement, and optimise robust incident response strategies for cloud environments. We'll be drawing insights from conversations with industry experts:

📚 Definitions and Core Concepts

  1. Incident Response (IR): The systematic approach to managing the aftermath of a security breach or cyberattack. Santiago provides a comprehensive definition:

"A collection of tools and procedures to respond to issues that pop up in companies that require urgent attention. The most popular cases of incident response can be things like leaked credentials or leaked customer information. And there's been like, for instance, many cases of ransomware as well."

Santiago G

  1. Cloud Incident Response: Adapting traditional IR processes to the unique challenges of cloud environments. This involves:

  • Leveraging cloud-native security services

  • Dealing with shared responsibility models

  • Handling multi-account and multi-region complexities

  • Addressing data residency and compliance issues

  1. IR Lifecycle: Typically includes these phases:

  • Preparation

  • Detection and Analysis

  • Containment

  • Eradication and Recovery

  • Post-Incident Activity

"The containment and the recovery phase of it all that takes the longest time because that phase, which is where in my talk, I'm talking about automating just that particular phase, because that phase of the incident response life cycle takes the longest."

Santiago G

  1. Forensics in the Cloud: The process of collecting, preserving, and analyzing digital evidence in cloud environments to identify the root cause of the incident and develop mitigation plans to prevent the security incident from occuring again.

"When you get into the cloud where it's a lot more fast and furious and things are happening at a different pace, we don't do a good job there either."

Nathan Case

💡 Practitioners Perspective: Building a Robust Cloud IR Strategy

1. Establish Strong Governance:

  • Develop clear policies and procedures for cloud resource management across all of your Cloud Service Providers

  • Define roles and responsibilities for IR Process and teams required if an incident was reported.

  • Establish communication protocols for incident reporting and escalation

"Sitting down and evaluating, well, how are we going to build this thing? What do you mean? How are we gonna build it? I mean, how are we going to put the switches together?"

Santiago G

2. Implement Comprehensive Logging and Monitoring:

  • Enable and configure Auditing and Logging services like AWS CloudTrail (AWS), Azure Monitor Logs (Azure), Cloud Audit Logs (GCP) across all cloud environments and across all active regions in your Cloud provider accounts.

  • Set up centralized logging capability using input from cloud native services like AWS CloudWatch Logs (AWS), Azure Monitor Logs (Azure), Cloud Monitoring (GCP)

  • Implement automated scanning tools in the CSPM, CNAPP etc category for continuous security posture assessment across all cloud providers.

3. Develop and Practice IR Playbooks:

  • Create detailed playbooks for common incident types in Cloud specifically. (e.g., data breach notification from external service, ransomware in cloud, cloud resource misconfiguration with no owner etc )

  • Conduct regular tabletop exercises to test and refine playbooks

  • Ensure playbooks address are updated for new cloud-specific scenarios (e.g., new service introduced by Cloud Provider that is being used by the organization e.g Amazon Bedrock etc)

"If you sat down and built those playbooks and those runbooks with your business owners and your technical owners and the product owners and you all agreed on it, then dude Monday morning is going to be a, just a breeze."

Nathan Case

4. Automate Containment Processes:

  • Develop serverless functions e.g AWS Lambda or cloud native services for automated playbook e.g Azure Sentinel Playbook etc for common containment actions (e.g., isolating virtual machine instances, revoking IAM permissions etc)

  • Implement workflow to orchestrate complex containment workflows e.g AWS Step Functions + AWS Lambda

  • Use automation rules in cloud native services e.g AWS Config etc to automatically remediate misconfigurations

"When it comes to containing an S3 bucket, I'm so glad that AWS decided to update their security specifications and policies for S3, because now public access is now disabled by default, which is great."

Damien Burks

5. Address Multi-Cloud, Multi-Account and Multi-Region Challenges:

  • Implement a centralized security location in each cloud provider for Security log collection, IR tools for the cloud provider etc

  • Use Cloud Native Governance tools like AWS Organizations and Service Control Policies (SCPs) in AWS to enforce security baselines

  • Develop procedures to cover for cross-account, cross-region, cross-cloud provider and even access for IR Team to impacted cloud provider accounts to reduce time required for IR team to get access to the impacted cloud resource or account.

6. Continuous Improvement and Adaptation:

  • Conduct post-incident reviews after every significant event

  • Stay informed about new security features and best practices from the Cloud Service Provider

  • Regularly update IR plans and playbooks based on lessons learned and evolving threats

"Security is a journey. It's not a destination. So there's no end to that scenario. That's a constant walk."

Nathan Case

  1. AWS-Specific Tools:

  2. Custom Automation Framework:

  3. Forensics Techniques:

    • EC2 Instance Memory Analysis: Using tools like LiME (Linux Memory Extractor)

    • S3 Bucket Forensics: Analyzing access logs and versioning history

    • VPC Flow Logs Analysis: For network traffic investigation

    AWS Forensics Documentation

  4. Open-Source Tools:

  5. Advanced Containment Strategies: For EC2 instances and S3 buckets

    • IAM role removal

    • Security group manipulation

    • Termination protection

    • Bucket policy modification

    AWS Security Best Practices

  6. Incident Response Automation:

    • AWS Systems Manager Automation

    • AWS Lambda for custom response actions

    AWS Incident Response Playbooks

  7. Threat Intelligence Integration:

    • Amazon GuardDuty with Custom Threat Lists

    • Third-party threat intelligence feeds

This week’s Cloud Security Quiz - All the Best!

Results from Last week

The correct answer was “Employer User Accounts

🤖 Are you interested in AI Cybersecurity?

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