cybersecurity

Cloud incidents are increasing and require specific investigation methods focused on cloud assets, identities, and configurations rather than traditional endpoints. Unit 42’s recommended response process includes the following steps:

Scope and Mindset for Cloud Investigations

• 29% of incidents in 2024 involved cloud or SaaS environments.
• Cloud investigations prioritize identities, misconfigurations, and service interactions.

Step 1: Triage and Scoping

• Establish event timeline and detect abnormal activity.
• Identify affected assets (VMs, IAM, storage, containers).
• Address logging gaps—enable and retain logs for at least 90 days.

Step 2: Evidence Collection

• Collect audit/resource logs, VM/container snapshots.
• Capture volatile artifacts quickly as cloud environments are ephemeral.

Step 3: Identity and Role Forensics

• Investigate IAM settings, login patterns, escalation attempts.
• Watch for identity hopping and privilege misuse.

Step 4: Lateral Movement and Persistence

• Detect movement across regions/services using existing credentials.
• Use behavioral baselining to spot anomalies, not just failed logins.

Step 5: Containment, Eradication, Recovery

• Contain compromised assets quickly without alerting attackers.
• Remove persistence, rotate credentials, and validate remediation.
• Restore operations, patch vulnerabilities, and monitor for follow-up attacks.

Recommendations

• Centralize logs, develop IR playbooks, and prepare forensic sandboxes.
• Institutionalize lessons learned to improve future incident response.
• Adopt zero trust principles and use specialized security assessments and retainers for support.

https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/responding-to-cloud-incidents/