Introduction
Security threats originating in the cloud continue to rise, and adversaries show no signs of letting up. As revealed in the CrowdStrike 2023 Global Threat Report, cloud exploitation increased 95% in 2022, with a 288% uptick in cases involving threat actors targeting cloud environments.
At the same time, adversaries continue to grow smarter and faster as they innovate to exploit gaps in cloud security. It takes an average of just 79 minutes for adversaries to break out and begin moving laterally through an enterprise environment, according to the CrowdStrike 2023 Threat Hunting Report — with the fastest observed breakout time a mere 7 minutes.
Defenders Need to Stay Ahead of Adversaries
The effectiveness of cloud security hinges on defenders’ ability to collect, correlate and analyze data across on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Simply put, modern defenders need to find exploitable weaknesses before adversaries do. But, conventional approaches to security can’t deliver the granular visibility and control needed to manage cloud risk, particularly risk associated with containers.
Hybrid deployments with components distributed between multiple cloud environments and on-premises systems also create complexity that leads to delayed response and excess operational overhead. Stitching together many siloed monitoring and remediation solutions paves the way for coverage gaps and visibility blind spots that make it hard to detect, prioritize and remediate risk
To combat the sheer volume and evolving sophistication of modern cloud attacks, organizations need to take a smarter, faster approach to cloud security. This new approach must equip defenders with continuous visibility coverage and accurate intelligence to understand adversary tactics for initial access, lateral movement, privilege escalation, defense evasion and data collection. And, it must allow defenders to outpace and outsmart attackers.