3 Crucial Capabilities for Effective Cloud Detection and Response

Adversaries are increasingly attacking cloud environments, as evidenced by a 75% surge in cloud intrusions year-over-year in 2023. They are also getting faster: The fastest breakout time was clocked at just over 2 minutes, according to the CrowdStrike 2024 Global Threat Report.

Today’s adversaries are outpacing legacy security approaches. Disjointed point solutions can’t scale or provide visibility into a rapidly growing attack surface. As organizations adopt more cloud applications and services, they need a modern approach to detect, identify and block adversary activity in the cloud.

An effective cloud detection and response (CDR) solution provides incident management at every stage — from detection to remediation — quickly neutralizing threats with precision and efficiency:

1. 24/7 cloud services including managed detection and response and threat hunting to monitor, analyze and neutralize cloud threats, providing complete incident lifecycle management from detection to remediation.
2. Cloud adversary intelligence to understand adversary behavior and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to prioritize and triage incidents faster.
3. A unified cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) to detect and actively stop cloud breaches in real time.

Let’s explore the key components you should be looking for in your CDR.

24/7 Cloud Managed Detection, Response and Threat Hunting

The cloud security landscape is full of challenges that often exceed the capabilities of automated systems alone. The complex nature of modern threats, and the understanding required to address them, highlights a shortfall in many organizations: a lack of skilled professionals well-versed in cloud security practices.

Integrating cloud managed detection and response into a CDR solution fills this critical gap. Seasoned security professionals can interpret and act on information from automated tools. These experts analyze, validate and prioritize threats, driving continuous enhancement of security measures and technology implementation.

Figure 1. CrowdStrike Falcon® Complete dashboard — Executive Overview

Additionally, 24/7 cloud threat hunting services extend this proactive defense. Threat hunters work around the clock, ensuring constant vigilance over the entire cloud environment, including control plane activities and cloud runtime environments. Further, they need to monitor and prevent compromised users and credentials from being exploited in cloud attacks. And finally, cloud threat hunters must track lateral movement from cloud to endpoint, enabling rapid response and actionable insights for decisive remediation.

Adversary-based Threat Intelligence

As adversaries are becoming faster and more sophisticated, the importance of adversary-based threat intelligence helps security teams better understand their behavior and how to stop them. A CDR solution that uses adversary-based threat intelligence can significantly improve an organization’s detection and response capabilities.

Threat intelligence in the context of a CDR solution encompasses a wide array of information, ranging from indicators of attack (IOAs) to real-time data about emerging threats from adversaries around the world. Threat intelligence cannot be static — it is continuously updated based on new research and refined through machine learning algorithms and human analysis. A CDR solution using adversary-based intelligence can accelerate incident response by enabling security teams to more effectively anticipate, recognize and prioritize attacker behaviors.

Figure 2. CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations dashboard — Actors

Integrating adversary-based threat intelligence into a CDR solution can evolve its approach from a reactive defense to a confident and intelligence-driven defense, arming organizations with the knowledge and tools to combat sophisticated adversaries.

A Unified CNAPP

An organization can often find itself tangled up in the complexity of managing disparate tools to protect its cloud environments. This drives operational complexity and creates silos that impede the flow of crucial information, making it tough to build a full view of the organization’s cloud security posture. A unified cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) consolidates disparate tools into a single solution, bringing detection and response into the CDR framework.

A CDR should offer a CNAPP through a single agent and single platform. This removes the limitations of individual tools by offering end-to-end visibility across the cloud environment, enabling security teams to detect sophisticated attacks that might otherwise go unnoticed in a fragmented toolset. A unified CNAPP streamlines the workflow for incident response, allowing for faster mobilization against threats and more effective mitigation strategies.

Figure 3. CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security dashboard — Public Cloud Inventory

A CNAPP enhances the efficiency of security operations while improving the effectiveness of each function. This holistic approach ensures every aspect of cloud security is addressed, from initial threat detection to final resolution, making it a critical factor to consider when selecting a CDR solution.

CrowdStrike’s Cloud Detection and Response Solution

A CDR solution is an essential piece in the fight against the latest adversary threats targeting the cloud. By providing detailed visibility, real-time monitoring, rapid response capabilities and integrated human expertise, CDR empowers organizations to proactively manage their security defenses in the complex and dynamic cloud environment.

CrowdStrike delivers the world’s only unified approach to cloud detection and response that brings together world-class adversary intelligence and elite 24/7 services with the industry’s most complete CNAPP.

With CrowdStrike’s CDR solution, organizations can:

• Reduce cloud risks before they escalate
• Detect threats with complete context
• Stop breaches and rapidly investigate
• Swiftly respond and recover

You can try Falcon Cloud Security for free through a Cloud Security Health Check. It provides instant, complete visibility into your entire cloud estate and deploys in minutes with zero impact to your business.

Additional Resources

• Read The Complete Guide to CNAPPs, presented by CrowdStrike.
• Learn more about how you can stop cloud breaches with CrowdStrike unified cloud security for multi-cloud and hybrid environments — all in one lightweight platform.
• Read about how CrowdStrike has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Cloud Workload Security Q1, 2024.
• Take a free Cloud Security Health Check to visualize misconfigurations and other vulnerabilities in minutes.
• Learn how the powerful CrowdStrike Falcon platform provides comprehensive protection across your organization, workers and data, wherever they are located.