CrowdStrike Enhances Cloud Asset Visualization to Accelerate Risk Prioritization

The massive increase in cloud adoption has driven adversaries to focus their efforts on cloud environments — a shift that led to cloud intrusions increasing by 75% in 2023, emphasizing the need for stronger cloud security.

Larger scale leads to larger risk. As organizations increase their quantity of cloud assets, their attack surface grows. Each asset brings its own set of security concerns. Large cloud environments are prone to more cloud misconfigurations, which provide more opportunities for adversaries to breach the perimeter. Furthermore, when breaches do occur, tracing lateral movement to stop malicious activity is challenging in a complex cloud environment.

CrowdStrike, a proven cloud security leader, has enhanced its CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security capabilities to ensure security analysts can easily visualize their cloud assets’ connections so they can better understand and prioritize risks. Today we’re expanding our asset graph to help modern organizations secure everything they build in the cloud.

Stop Adversaries with Attack Path Analysis

We continue to expand our attack path analysis capabilities. Today, we’re announcing support for key AWS services including EC2, S3, IAM, RDS and container images.

With this enhanced support, CrowdStrike customers can quickly understand where their cloud weaknesses would allow adversaries to:

• Gain initial access to their AWS environment
• Move laterally to access vital compute resources
• Extract data from storage buckets

Investigating cyberattacks can be a grueling, stressful task. The CrowdStrike Falcon® platform stops breaches and empowers security analysts to find the root cause of each attack. As Falcon’s attack path analysis extends further into the cloud, customers can leverage CrowdStrike® Asset Graph to more quickly investigate attacks and proactively resolve cloud weaknesses.

In this example, we are investigating an EC2 instance with a vulnerable metadata version enabled. We see the EC2 instance is open to global traffic, so we select “Asset Graph” to investigate.

In Asset Graph, an adversary’s potential entry point is automatically flagged for us. The access control list is misconfigured and accepts traffic from every IP address. Upon inspection, we quickly visualize how the adversary would move laterally to access our EC2 instance. To resolve this issue, we first restrict the access control list to company-specific IP addresses. Then, we update the metadata service version used by the EC2 instance.

Both indicators of attack (IOAs) and indicators of misconfiguration (IOMs) are available for each managed cloud asset. With this knowledge, security teams can quickly identify each asset that allows for initial access to their cloud. Furthermore, sensitive compute and storage assets are automatically traced to upstream security groups and network access lists that allow for initial access. Using Falcon’s attack path analysis, security teams quickly see the remediation steps required to protect their cloud from adversaries.

Investigate Findings with Query Builder

Speed and agility are massive cloud benefits. However, the ability to quickly spin up cloud resources can result in asset sprawl — an unexpectedly large number of cloud assets in a live environment. For example, in some environments, a single S3 bucket can be accessible to many IAM roles. Each of those IAM roles may contain access to a large quantity of other storage buckets. Security teams need a way to sift through massive cloud estates to find the services requiring attention.

The Falcon query builder capabilities allow security teams to ask questions like:

• Which EC2 instances are internet-facing and contain critical security risks?
• Have any IOAs appeared on my AWS assets in the last seven days?

Figure 4. A query checking for internet-facing EC2 instances with critical security risks.

With Falcon’s query builder, pinpointing cloud weaknesses becomes an efficient process. Graphical views of cloud assets can be daunting. Building queries with Falcon enables teams to focus their attention on the assets that matter most: those that are prone to exploitation by adversaries.

Delivered from the Unified CrowdStrike Falcon Platform

The expansion of cloud asset visualization is another step toward providing a single console that addresses every cloud security concern. By integrating IOAs and IOMs with a connected asset map, CrowdStrike offers a robust, efficient solution for investigating today’s cloud security challenges.

Unlike other vendors that may offer disjointed security components, CrowdStrike’s approach integrates elements across the entire cloud infrastructure. From hybrid to multi-cloud environments, everything is managed through a single, intuitive console within the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon platform. This unified cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) ensures organizations achieve the highest standards of security, effectively shielding against breaches with an industry-leading cloud security solution. The cloud asset visualization, while pivotal, is just one component of this comprehensive CNAPP approach, underscoring CrowdStrike’s commitment to delivering unparalleled security solutions that meet and anticipate the adversaries’ attacks on cloud environments.

Get a free Cloud Security Health Check and see Falcon Cloud Security in action for yourself.

During the review, you will engage in a one-on-one session with a cloud security expert, evaluate your current cloud environment, and identify misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and potential cloud threats.

Additional Resources

• See why Forrester named CrowdStrike a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q1 2024.
• Learn more about CrowdStrike’s approach to continuous discovery and visibility of cloud-native assets with Cloud Security Posture Management.
• Learn about ​​common cloud misconfigurations and find out how to minimize the adversaries’ opportunities to exploit them in this eBook: Seven Easily Exploited Cloud Misconfigurations.
• Check out Falcon Cloud Security’s Attack Path Analysis capability in action via a Demo Drill Down.