How is Contextual Security Assessment Critical for Cloud Attack Surface Management?
Attack surface management is crucial for identifying and addressing vulnerabilities before attackers strike. It helps teams understand their key risk areas within the cloud and enables IT, security, and leadership to minimize the organization’s attack vulnerability.
Zetafence, a global provider of Contextual Security Assessment and Behavioral Analysis Platforms, delivers a holistic perspective to cloud security by identifying attack path vulnerabilities, threats, and weaknesses by deploying behavioral contextualization through identity discoveries and access control, continuously monitoring activities and building relationships between computing and data resources, ensuring robust protection and uncovering hidden risks.
Are you interested in knowing more? Schedule a demo today with the experts at Zetafence.
Introduction to Context and Cloud Attack Surface Management
Context in cloud security refers to information about threats, vulnerabilities, and misconfiguration that could lead to a breach. It helps you understand what is happening in your cloud environment from an attacker’s perspective. This information enhances security and provides unified visibility to security teams for better operations.
Cloud Attack Surface Management (CASM) involves practices and technologies for identifying, analyzing, and addressing security risks in cloud environments.
Security teams use a four-step process to protect against digital attacks. It’s all about managing vulnerabilities and boosting cybersecurity.
Asset Discovery and Proper Classification
Asset discovery is critical to finding things several vulnerable elements within the cloud attack surfaces, including:
- Identify unused subscriptions to reclaim resources and eliminate potential vulnerabilities. Tools from Zetafence can assist with this process.
- The platform detects unsecured APIs, which are open invitations for attackers.
- CASM assesses the vulnerabilities within the organization’s attack surface, including all websites, endpoint devices, and hosted applications.
Execute Risk Assessment and Ongoing Vulnerability Management
Vulnerability assessments and penetration testing are essential for identifying system vulnerabilities, maintaining visibility of your environment, and informing stakeholders of potential risks.
Enable Automated Remediation Capabilities within Security Operations (SecOps)
Automated remediation is critical to helping reduce the risk of the organization’s cloud attack surface. CASM tools leverage continuous monitoring of all attack surfaces, and automated remediation works in tandem with constant vulnerability monitoring. As more hackers embrace adversarial AI tools, organizations will probably face increased attack velocity. With continuous monitoring and automated remediation, organizations will protect their cloud assets without human interaction.
Create and Nurture By Adopting a Continuous Improvement Workstream.
Organizations required to meet compliance mandates, including enabling continuous assessment, automation, and reporting, will benefit from Zetafence’s platform. This market-leading platform delivers exceptional dependency graphs and posture dashboard reporting to help organizations with accurate and updated security information and overall readiness.
What are Some Examples of Cloud Surface Management Security Breaches?
● “Capital One data breach (2019): A hacker gained access to the personal information of over 100 million customers by exploiting a misconfigured firewall rule in a cloud storage bucket.”
● “Alteryx data breach (2020): Over 120 million households in the US had their personal information exposed because of a misconfigured Amazon S3 bucket.”
● “Canva design leak (2021): because of a misconfigured firebase storage bucket, hackers leaked millions of Canva user designs, causing significant effort and cost to enumerate the damage.”
● “Toyota data exposure (2023): This incident involved the exposure of approximately 260,000 Toyota customers’ data caused by a misconfigured cloud environment.”
What are The Challenges Of Current Cloud Security Posture Analysis (CSPA)?
Legacy CSPA solutions became obsolete because of constant changes in cloud architectures and functionality. Another critical challenge was supporting agent-based and agentless CSPAs. Many CSPAs needed agents to deploy on cloud-based instances and applications to fully assess the vulnerability and overall risk posture.
Many early CSPAs lack integration into automated remediation workflows and continuous reporting systems.
How Do Hackers Execute an Attack Path?
Depending on their end-game, Hackers will execute a single-threaded attack path or combine several attack vectors into a chain or attack path.
Single-thread attacks could be as simple as a denial-of-service (DoS) attack or a brute-force attack against the identity management system. A chain chain or attack path could be a combination including:
Stage One: Sending out an email phishing message with a malicious malware file encouraging their victims to download and install this “patch.” However, this patch becomes a reconnaissance tool for hackers to discover additional vulnerable hosts.
Stage Two: Hackers will create waterhole attacks on vulnerable hosts they discovered during stage one. Watering hole attacks become very common. Hackers create fake web pages and redirect their victims to password-stealing sites.
Stage Three: Within additional email phishing messages, hackers will also weaponize these with malicious links, encouraging their victims to download extra files, including ransomware malware.
Stage Four: Credential theft is another attack vector that hackers will leverage. By obtaining credentials, hackers can log into their victims’ email accounts, applications, and cloud storage deposits.
Stage Five: After the hacker has installed various keylogger, malware, and ransomware programs, they have established several persistent attack tools that they can use until they are discovered.
How Critical Are Cloud Security Behavioral Assessments?
Cloud assessments are essential for any organization dependent on the cloud to deliver its digital transformation strategy. Cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure continuously add new features, fix broken functions, and increase their global visibility.
These actions by cloud providers often create more cyber threats, undetectable suspicious activity, and human error from misconfiguration.
Executing continuous assessments against the organization’s cloud assets helps protect cloud-based applications hosted by major cloud providers like Oracle, Salesforce.com, and Apple.com.
Assessments also give the organization’s SecOps teams much-needed visibility into potential breaches, insider threats, and phishing attacks. This visibility within the cloud platform helps SecOps teams determine what automated incident response plans they need to incorporate into their daily workflow.
Assessments also help organizations reduce their cloud security failures, meet their compliance monitoring requirements, and validate the current security posture of their digital assets to meet cyber insurance mandatory security measures.
What is the Formula for Success With Cloud Security Behavioral Assessment Products?
Organizations looking to invest in Cloud Security Behavior Assessment Platforms should measure their solution evaluation based on the following formula:
Security Behavior analysis = Context + Correlation. The power in proactivity detection of lateral movements is faster, with fewer false positives.
Context provides the background on what these tools need to look like. Correlation validates that the security telemetry data collected will deliver value in preventing current and future cyberattacks on the organization’s critical assets. Protecting cloud-based systems and various critical application programming interfaces (API) used by the organization within their most essential workloads of cloud and cloud computing services is the major goal of cloud assessment platforms, like Zetafence.
Without effective Cloud Security Behavioral Assessment platforms, organizations will face a wide range of cyberattacks, including real-world attacks, that will go undetected even with current intrusion detection systems and cannot meet compliance requirements.
Why Zetafence?
Zetafence, a global Cloud Contextual Assessment, assists in defensive risk evaluation by autonomously finding vulnerabilities, misconfiguration, lateral movements, attack path analysis, etc., by interacting with cloud services, logs, APIs, etc.
Discovery
Zetafence discover agents achieve this by periodically enabling security scanners to analyze access patterns, anomalous activities, and changes in graph dependencies that can trigger alerts.
Behavior
The Zetafence platform monitors security risks from the ground up by mapping attack landscapes and meticulously backtracking through users, identities, policies, and their activities, attempting to expose hidden connections that lead to breaches. The platform’s power results from encapsulating complex relationships using graphs, enriching graph elements, and constructing relationships that form the graphs.
A Clear Focus on Dependencies
Zetafence’s core innovation lies in constructing and analyzing intricate dependency graphs enriched with metadata. These graphs visualize complex relationships between system components, from users and applications to network devices and cloud resources. By mapping these connections, we identify potential vulnerabilities, hidden exposures, and attack paths that traditional security tools often miss. This holistic view enables us to detect threats early, prioritize risks accurately, and respond swiftly to incidents.
- The unique combination of security policies, users, roles, permissions, network control
- Establishing dependencies among these elements
- Registering time of the day of events, activities among those resources
Support for Kubernetes
- Service, Deployment, Pod, Service Account, Cluster Role, Cluster Role Binding, Role, Role Binding
- Establishing dependencies among them
- Enumerating annotation labels for each of those
- Registering time of the day of events, activities among those resources
Conclusion
New to Context Cloud Assessment? Zetafence offers multiple levels of support and licensing to meet every organization’s needs.
Ready to discuss the next steps?
Click here to schedule your first demo with the Zetafence engineering team today!
