Cloud Incident Response(IR) refers to the process of handling cybersecurity incidents within an organization’s environment. This involves identifying, investigating, containing, resolving, and recovering from potential cyber threats or security breaches.

As businesses increasingly utilize cloud computing and migrate their data and applications to cloud platforms, they must also be prepared to manage security incidents specific to cloud environments. Cloud incident response involves adapting traditional incident response practices to address the unique characteristics and challenges posed by cloud-based systems, which differ significantly from the on-premises, company-owned systems that many organizations traditionally manage.

Cloud Incident Response (CIR) plays a critical role in today’s cybersecurity landscape by swiftly identifying, assessing, and combatting cyberattacks or security breaches in cloud environments. Implementing an effective CIR strategy offers numerous advantages:

To effectively handle incidents involving cloud assets, security operations managers should adopt these four recommended practices for implementing incident response in cloud environments:

1. Engage GRC/legal teams early in the process

In cloud environments, involving GRC, legal, sourcing, procurement, and vendor management teams is crucial. They need to understand incident response (IR) requirements and processes, which are unique to cloud service models. Depending on your chosen CSP, you’ll enter a shared responsibility model, which varies based on the service model selected.

For context, some incidents have highlighted issues where CSP relationships negatively impacted cyber incident resilience. Two common scenarios include over-reliance on your organization’s detection and response capabilities without adequate visibility or control, and blindly relying on CSPs for incident response and notifications.

To ensure CSPs provide the necessary tools and controls for incident monitoring:

• Specify minimum security requirements in contracts, aligning with best practices or frameworks.
• Take precautions during mergers and acquisitions, ensuring acquired cloud assets meet your security standards to avoid unintended risks.
• Involve legal, GRC, and other relevant teams during CSP contract negotiations to ensure comprehensive coverage.
• Ensure that CSPs adhere to digital identity standards to enhance cloud security, particularly if your organization needs to meet compliance requirements or maintain robust forensic capabilities.
• Provide your organization with digital identity protection and monitoring solutions that minimize the risk of complete compromise.
• Establish efficient victim notification processes with clear details and preferred Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for communication, ensuring accuracy and completeness.
• Verify that CSPs comply with relevant security standards and compliance frameworks, regularly reviewing and updating requirements as new standards emerge.

Adopting these measures ensures that your incident response in the cloud is well-supported by contractual agreements, complementing technological solutions for effective management and resilience.

2. Enhance Incident Response Plans and Skills for Cloud Environments

Security and risk management leaders, including those on the Cloud Security Incidence Response team (CSIRT), should consider upgrading IR plans and readiness with the following actions:

• Develop a Cloud (Third-Party) Incident Playbook: Craft a playbook tailored for cloud environments to address unique challenges such as provider transparency issues during incidents. Include specialized tools, techniques, and legal/procurement strategies to detect, investigate, and mitigate cloud incidents effectively. For instance, stopping data flow into a cloud environment may be necessary in response to a suspected incident with a SaaS provider.
• Run Regular Cloud Incident Tabletop Exercises: Conduct tabletop exercises specifically focused on cloud incidents to enhance preparedness. These exercises simulate scenarios where critical information may be inaccessible, providing valuable practice in managing complexities involving external cloud providers.
• Consider Cloud Resilience Beyond Traditional Methods: Shift towards enhancing business resilience in IR planning. Embrace strategies aimed at minimizing business impacts during incidents, rather than solely focusing on containment and recovery. This approach may involve integrating digital supply chain redundancies and legal frameworks into IR and disaster recovery plans for cloud environments.

Security and risk management leaders should assess skill gaps within the CSIRT. They should consider adding the following skills to effectively manage incident response (IR) in cloud environments:

1. Discovering data across both on-premises and cloud environments.
2. Conducting digital forensics specifically tailored for cloud environments.
3. Understanding and utilizing cloud and third-party APIs.
4. Implementing cloud-native tools that can restrict or manage data flow in compromised cloud environments.
5. Developing a cloud profile capable of distinguishing critical telemetry amidst various noise signals.

3. Shift focus from assets to identities

• Cloud infrastructure poses visibility challenges because although machines operate within a unified ecosystem, they are categorized differently.
• This complexity renders traditional asset-centric methods ineffective for detecting incidents in most cloud scenarios.
• Effective cloud incident response requires a shift from viewing identity merely as context to adopting an identity-centric approach. This transformation leverages cloud-native visibility tools, user and entity behavior analytics, micro segmentation, and advanced log management techniques.
• These resources enable IR teams to track events comprehensively, allowing them to monitor and respond to potential attacker activities in the cloud. Thus, traditional asset-focused strategies are inadequate in cloud IR, highlighting the need for identity-centric visibility and management practices.

4. Integrate automation as a fundamental component

– Automation is crucial for accelerating incident response (IR) effectiveness. Leading cloud providers offer extensive API capabilities that enable automated configuration, data collection, logging, monitoring, inventory management, and identity control. This automation streamlines alert handling by integrating data from diverse sources and facilitating containment actions.

– In IR, automation allows for swift detection and identification of advanced persistent threats (APTs) and attackers’ tactics without the need to manually script each analysis. It ensures consistent and reliable analysis across different team members, simplifying training and collaboration.

– Automated workflows significantly reduce the complexity of IR tasks, enhancing efficiency in returning the organization to normal operations post-incident. They also expedite the investigative process by providing actionable alerts promptly, though challenges like varying attack timelines and data access delays remain.

Security and risk management leaders overseeing security operations in cloud environments should prioritize key strategies to enhance incident response (IR) capabilities. Before engaging a Cloud Service Provider (CSP), it’s crucial to involve GRC and legal teams to ensure the CSP can adequately support IR. Clearly defining responsibilities between your team and the CSP during incidents is essential for coordinated response efforts. Additionally, shifting from an asset-centered to an identity-first approach is critical, focusing on monitoring policies based on user identities, entitlements, and activities rather than physical assets. This shift improves visibility and enables tailored responses to cloud-specific challenges.