The Critical Evolution of Cloud Detection and Response

Cloud security has reached an inflection point. Organizations have accelerated their cloud adoption and must navigate a complex threat landscape where workloads spin up and down in seconds, applications deploy continuously and identities span multiple services and providers. 

This complexity creates significant challenges. The volume of logs and events has grown exponentially, making manual threat detection impossible, while changes in cloud infrastructure outpace the ability of traditional security tools. The interconnected nature of cloud services creates complex identity and access patterns that traditional security models struggle to govern. In this landscape, cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) have become the foundation for modern cloud security and cloud detection and response (CDR) has emerged as a critical capability to stop threats.

The Rise of Cross-Domain Attacks

Modern adversaries have evolved to exploit this complexity through cross-domain attacks. These attacks span multiple domains — endpoints, identity systems and cloud environments — making them challenging to detect and mitigate. Attackers use legitimate credentials obtained through dark web purchases, social engineering or phishing campaigns to slip into organizations. Once inside, they use legitimate tools and lateral movement to evade detection.

Consider this example of a cross-domain attack scenario: An adversary begins with valid RDP credentials from an access broker and uses these to compromise an endpoint. Once inside, they discover cloud credentials and move into the cloud control plane, where they escalate privileges and access additional sensitive data. This evolution has become mainstream: CrowdStrike has observed a significant rise in cross-domain attacks. 

These attacks are especially concerning when they involve the cloud control plane, which has a distinct architecture and dynamic nature that make it difficult for traditional endpoint (EDR) and identity (ITDR) security solutions to maintain visibility. Without specialized cloud security coverage, organizations lack visibility into cloud attack vectors, especially in environments where resources can appear and disappear within minutes. This visibility gap, combined with the interconnected nature of modern attacks, demonstrates why organizations need comprehensive security that spans the endpoint, identity and cloud domains.

When Conventional Security Meets Modern Cloud Threats

As organizations face these cross-domain attacks, the inability to connect cloud context with detection and alerting is reaching its breaking point. Most organizations begin their cloud security journey focused on visibility through CNAPP solutions. CNAPP identifies misconfigurations, excessive permissions and vulnerabilities before they can be exploited — essential capabilities for reducing risk and maintaining a strong security posture. However, the nature of modern cloud environments and sophisticated attack patterns creates challenges that require additional real-time detection and response capabilities.

Meanwhile, traditional threat detection tools, built for on-premises environments where infrastructure is largely static, predictable and centralized, struggle with cloud architecture. These tools cannot effectively track and protect distributed, ephemeral resources like containers and auto-scaling VMs that may exist for only minutes or seconds. 

For security teams, this creates a perfect storm. Differentiating between true positives, false positives and intentional activity is increasingly complex in today’s cloud environments; stopping attacks quickly is more difficult when resources are ephemeral; and implementing long-term preventive measures requires new approaches.

Defining Modern Cloud Detection and Response

These challenges demand a new approach to cloud security. Modern CNAPP solutions must evolve to include CDR capabilities. CDR enhances CNAPP's proactive security foundation by providing autonomous detection and response capabilities designed for cloud-native environments. It offers real-time threat detection through advanced behavioral analysis, focusing on runtime protection and adversary behavior alongside configuration and posture management. Together, CNAPP's proactive controls and CDR's runtime protection provide comprehensive coverage against sophisticated threats.

The relationship between CNAPP and CDR creates a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement: CDR enhances CNAPP's proactive security foundation while feeding valuable runtime insights back into preventive controls. When runtime protection is truly contextualized, it provides deeper visibility than posture management alone. This helps teams understand what's exploitable, detect deviations from the norm and continuously strengthen their security posture.

A modern CDR capability must deliver:

• Threat intelligence and proactive hunting: Beyond basic threat feeds, this means continuous analysis of cloud-specific attack patterns, techniques and behaviors. It enables security teams to identify and stop threats before they succeed, using sophisticated analytics to distinguish normal cloud operations and potential attacks.
• Cloud Indicators of Attack and Misconfiguration (IOAs and IOMs): This involves real-time correlation of workload behavior with cloud telemetry, understanding the complex relationships between different cloud services and identifying suspicious patterns that might indicate an attack in progress.
• Runtime workload protection: More than just monitoring, this capability provides automatic threat blocking and real-time workload protection, ensuring that even if an attacker gains initial access, they can't execute their intended malicious activities.
• Unified investigation timeline: Investigate attacks from code to cloud through a comprehensive graph, offering context-rich visualizations of active attack paths and their relationships across domains. This approach enables security teams to quickly understand the scope and progression of threats, facilitating a more efficient and informed response.
• Integrated response actions: Streamline security operations through native SOAR integration and DevSecOps-friendly workflows, enabling teams to automate remediation at scale while maintaining existing operational processes across cloud environments.

The Path Forward

As cloud environments continue to evolve and threats become more sophisticated, organizations need comprehensive CNAPP solutions with robust CDR capabilities to address the full spectrum of cloud security challenges. While proactive controls remain essential, the ability to detect and respond to threats in real-time has become critical for maintaining effective cloud security.

The future of cloud security lies in this unified approach, where proactive controls work in concert with detection and response capabilities. Detection tools need real-time cloud context to prioritize threats, while posture controls rely on detection insights to identify critical risks, creating a powerful feedback loop for comprehensive protection. 

This evolution reflects the increasing sophistication of cloud threats and the specialized capabilities needed to combat them. Organizations that embrace this comprehensive strategy will be better positioned to detect, prevent and respond to the next generation of cloud attacks. In an era where cloud security has become a key battleground for cyber threats, the ability to proactively secure and actively defend cloud environments isn't just an advantage — it's a necessity.

CrowdStrike Cloud Detection and Response

As part of CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security's comprehensive CNAPP, CrowdStrike delivers industry-leading CDR that detects and responds at the speed of today's adversaries. The solution provides complete visibility into end-to-end attack paths across endpoints, identity systems and cloud domains. Through correlation of runtime workload telemetry with agentless cloud logs and award-winning threat intelligence, organizations gain cloud-specific IOAs. With real-time workload protection to block malicious processes, an intuitive Incident Workbench for attack visualization and built-in workflow automation, teams can scale their response actions effectively. Organizations can further strengthen their defense with CrowdStrike Falcon® Adversary OverWatch™ 24/7 threat hunting and CrowdStrike's expert incident response services.

To dive deeper into why CDR is crucial for cloud security today, join our upcoming webinar, “Modernize Cloud Security with CDR: Unifying Cloud Posture and Protection”

Additional Resources

• Learn why it’s important to Unify Security Posture and Protection for Faster Cloud Detection and Response
• See how Rate Companies achieves real-time visibility and threat detection across its cloud infrastructure with CrowdStrike.
• Learn more about combating cross-domain of attacks — explore our Combating Cross-Domain Attacks Across Endpoint, Identity and Cloud eBook and watch the Stopping Cross-Domain Attacks video.
• Learn more about why cloud logging matters for CDR.
• Read about why CrowdStrike is a great fit for organizations looking for agent-first, behavior-based threat detection.