CrowdStrike and Google Cloud today debuted an expanded strategic partnership with a series of announcements that demonstrate our ability to stop cloud breaches with industry-leading AI-powered protection. These new features and integrations are built to protect Google Cloud and multi-cloud customers against adversaries that are increasingly targeting cloud environments.

At a time when cloud intrusions are up 75% year-over-year and adversaries continue to gain speed and stealth, organizations must adjust their security strategies to stay ahead. They need a unified security platform that removes complexity and empowers security and DevOps teams. As organizations navigate the evolving threat and technology landscapes, they turn to providers like CrowdStrike for best-in-class protection from code to cloud, delivered through a unified platform.

Today we are announcing that CrowdStrike is bringing industry-leading breach protection with integrated offerings like CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security, CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM, CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Protection and CrowdStrike Falcon endpoint protection bundles as preferred vendor products on Google Cloud Marketplace, accelerating time-to-value and our unified platform adoption for all Google Cloud customers. Now, more businesses than ever will have access to industry-leading security to protect their growing environments from the most advanced threats they face.

But that’s not all. CrowdStrike is innovating and leading to address the critical cloud security needs of today’s organizations by empowering them with unified visibility across their cloud environments, industry-leading threat detection and response, the ability to secure the application life cycle and prioritize remediation, and shift-left capabilities to prevent security issues early in development. Together with Google, we’re bringing these benefits to Google Cloud customers to stop breaches and protect their cloud environments from modern threats.

Below are some key announcements we’re excited to make at Google Cloud Next ’24.

Deeper Integrations

CrowdStrike Supports Google Cloud Run: CrowdStrike is providing support for organizations seeking to pair Google Cloud Run with Falcon Cloud Security. Today, we’re announcing deeper integrations and support for Google Cloud Run. Customers using Google Cloud Run to automatically scale containerized workloads and build container images will be able to secure those processes with Falcon Cloud Security, expanding their coverage and gaining world-class security at the speed of DevOps.

CrowdStrike Supports GKE Autopilot: Falcon Cloud Security now supports Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot, a critical automation tool for Kubernetes cluster deployments. Organizations operating with lean teams and resources can use GKE Autopilot and Falcon Cloud Security to identify critical risks, remediate them faster and run their business more efficiently.

Faster Breach Protection 

OS Configuration Support: Falcon Cloud Security will be able to support a single-click agent deployment to customers in Google Cloud with OS Config support. This support provides customers with a simple way to deploy the CrowdStrike Falcon® sensor across Google Cloud workloads for real-time visibility and breach protection in the cloud.

Enhanced Productivity

Falcon Cloud Security Kubernetes Admission Controller: Falcon Cloud Security is now the only cloud security tool on the market with a Kubernetes admission controller as part of a complete code-to-cloud, cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). Kubernetes admission controllers simplify the lives of DevSecOps teams by preventing non-compliant containers from deploying and allowing DevSecOps teams to easily stop frustrating crash loops — which cost developers and security teams valuable time — without writing complex Rego rules.

 

Google Workspace Bundles: CrowdStrike is now providing support to secure the millions of customers using the Google Workspace productivity suite with CrowdStrike’s leading endpoint security and next-generation antivirus protection.

CrowdStrike: Built to Protect Businesses in the Cloud

Our expanded strategic alliance with Google marks a significant milestone for cloud security. The powerful combination of AI-powered cloud services from Google Cloud and the unified protection and threat hunting capabilities of the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon platform provides the security that organizations need to stop breaches in multi-cloud and multi-vendor environments.

As cloud threats and technology continue to evolve, staying ahead of threats is paramount. Modern businesses need a powerful and leading ally to protect their cloud-based resources, applications and data as their reliance on cloud technology continues to grow. This industry-defining synergy between CrowdStrike and Google Cloud — both leaders in their own right — will shape the future of cloud technology and security, setting a new standard for protecting today’s cloud environments.

Additional Resources

• Read the press release to learn more.
• Learn how Falcon Cloud Security can protect your Google Cloud resources.
• See why Forrester named CrowdStrike a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Cloud Workload Security, Q1 2024. 
• Get a free Cloud Security Health Check and experience Falcon Cloud Security in action for yourself.  

Microsoft has released security updates for 150 vulnerabilities in its April 2024 Patch Tuesday rollout, a much larger amount than in recent months. There are three Critical remote code execution vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-21322, CVE-2024-21323 and CVE-2024-29053), all of which are related to Microsoft Defender for IoT, Microsoft’s security platform for IoT devices. 

April 2024 Risk Analysis

This month’s leading risk type is remote code execution (RCE), accounting for 44%, followed by elevation of privilege (21%) and security feature bypass (19%).

 

Windows products received the most patches this month with 91, followed by Extended Security Update (ESU) with 62 and SQL Server with 38. This represents a consistent uptick in vulnerabilities identified in Extended Support products. In order to ensure the security of endpoints, upgrade to a supported version or purchase Extended Support from the vendor.

Critical Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities Affect Microsoft Defender for IoT  

CVE-2024-21323 is a Critical RCE vulnerability affecting Microsoft Defender for IoT and has a CVSS score of 8.8. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability would allow an attacker to send malicious update files to the Defender for IoT sensor, allowing the attacker to overwrite any file on the managed asset. This vulnerability requires the attacker to be authenticated into the IoT sensor with just enough permissions to begin the update process. Any IoT device with the Defender sensor deployed should be updated as soon as possible.

CVE-2024-29053 is another Critical RCE vulnerability that affects the Microsoft Defender for IoT platform and has a CVSS score of 8.8. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow an unauthenticated attacker to upload malicious files to sensitive locations on the server appliance. Leveraging this vulnerability, the attacker could override any files including sensitive ones, thereby disrupting normal operation or inhibiting visibility into the IoT network.

CVE-2024-21322 is yet another Critical RCE vulnerability affecting Microsoft Defender for IoT and has a CVSS score of 7.2. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability would allow the attacker to send arbitrary commands to the managed device, possibly impeding normal functioning of the Defender for IoT monitoring software. This vulnerability requires the attacker to be an administrator of the management console of Defender for IoT on the web. Regular audits and validation of such accounts should be performed to limit risk. 

Severity	CVSS Score	CVE	Description
Critical	8.8	CVE-2024-21323	Microsoft Defender for IoT Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
Critical	8.8	CVE-2024-29053	Microsoft Defender for IoT Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
Critical	7.2	CVE-2024-21322	Microsoft Defender for IoT Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Table 1. Critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft Defender for IoT

Not All Relevant Vulnerabilities Have Patches: Consider Mitigation Strategies

As we have learned with other notable vulnerabilities, such as Log4j, not every highly exploitable vulnerability can be easily patched. As is the case for the ProxyNotShell vulnerabilities, it’s critically important to develop a response plan for how to defend your environments when no patching protocol exists. 

Regular review of your patching strategy should still be a part of your program, but you should also look more holistically at your organization’s methods for cybersecurity to improve your overall security posture. 

The CrowdStrike Falcon® platform regularly collects and analyzes trillions of endpoint events every day from millions of sensors deployed across 176 countries. Watch this demo to see the Falcon platform in action.

Learn More

Learn more about how CrowdStrike Falcon® Exposure Management can help you quickly and easily discover and prioritize vulnerabilities and other types of exposures here.

About CVSS Scores

The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is a free and open industry standard that CrowdStrike and many other cybersecurity organizations use to assess and communicate software vulnerabilities’ severity and characteristics. The CVSS Base Score ranges from 0.0 to 10.0, and the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) adds a severity rating for CVSS scores. Learn more about vulnerability scoring in this article. 

Additional Resources

• For more information on which products are in Microsoft’s Extended Security Updates program, refer to the vendor guidance here.
• Read the CrowdStrike 2024 Global Threat Report to learn how the threat landscape has shifted in the past year and understand the adversary behavior driving these shifts.
• See how Falcon Exposure Management can help you discover and manage vulnerabilities and other exposures in your environments. 
• Learn how CrowdStrike’s external attack surface module, CrowdStrike® Falcon Surface, can discover unknown, exposed and vulnerable internet-facing assets, enabling security teams to stop adversaries in their tracks.
• Learn how CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Protection products can stop workforce identity threats faster. 
• Make prioritization painless and efficient. Watch how CrowdStrike Falcon® Spotlight enables IT staff to improve visibility with custom filters and team dashboards. 
• Test CrowdStrike next-gen antivirus for yourself with a free trial of CrowdStrike® Falcon Prevent.

Two recent Microsoft breaches underscore the growing problem of cloud identity attacks and why it’s critical to stop them. 

While Microsoft Active Directory (AD) remains a prime target for attackers, cloud identity stores such as Microsoft Entra ID are also a target of opportunity. The reason is simple: Threat actors increasingly seek to mimic legitimate users in the target system. They can just as easily abuse identities from cloud identity providers as they can in on-premises AD environments.

Identity providers and Zero Trust network access solutions offer some capabilities to prevent cloud identity attacks — however, they often lack visibility across the identity landscape spanning on-premises and cloud identity providers, creating gaps that adversaries can exploit.

This blog shares how the failure to secure cloud identities can result in a breach and how recently released innovations in CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Protection can stop identity attacks in the cloud.

Get a free CrowdStrike Identity Security Risk Review to get instant visibility into your current Microsoft Entra ID, Active Directory and Okta environments.

CSRB Report Shows the Importance of Identity Security

The Summer 2023 Microsoft breach deconstructed by the U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) in a recent landmark report of the incident shows why identity threat detection and response is critical. 

Last May, a nation-state adversary compromised the Microsoft Exchange Online mailboxes of 22 organizations and over 500 individuals around the world. The threat actor accessed the accounts using authentication tokens signed by a key that Microsoft had created in 2016. “A single key’s reach can be enormous, and in this case the stolen key had extraordinary power,” said the CSRB. When combined with another flaw in Microsoft’s authentication system, the key allowed the adversary to gain full access to essentially any Exchange Online account anywhere in the world.

The CSRB found “this intrusion was preventable and should never have occurred” and offered several recommendations to ensure an intrusion of this magnitude doesn’t happen again. Two stood out:

1. Cloud service providers should implement modern control mechanisms and baseline practices, informed by a rigorous threat model, across their digital identity and credential systems to substantially reduce the risk of system-level compromise.
2. Cloud service providers should implement emerging digital identity standards to secure cloud services against prevailing threat vectors. Relevant standards bodies should refine, update, and incorporate these standards to address digital identity risks commonly exploited in the modern threat landscape.

While these CSRB recommendations are targeted toward cloud service providers (CSPs), given the Cloud Shared Responsibility Model, customers can’t rely solely on CSPs to stop breaches. Organizations need to lock down identities by layering in proactive identity protections across their hybrid identity environments. 

More recently, COZY BEAR, a Russia state-nexus adversary, conducted high-profile attacks on Microsoft’s corporate systems. This Microsoft breach involved common identity techniques like password spraying and credential scanning, and compromised corporate email accounts, including those of Microsoft’s senior leadership team.

What these two Microsoft identity breaches show is that adversaries are weaponizing identities. If you don’t have modern identity security, your organization may be at risk of a breach. 

New Identity Protections to Stop Breaches in the Cloud

CrowdStrike offers the industry’s only unified platform for identity threat protection and endpoint security, powered by rich threat intelligence and adversary tradecraft. Recent enhancements to CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Protection help customers better protect against modern identity attacks in the cloud.

While individual IAM and identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) systems provide user authentication, they lack the visibility into hybrid lateral movement and intelligence about adversary tradecraft to detect identity attacks across cloud and on-premises environments. Falcon Identity Protection not only has direct visibility into AD through the lightweight Falcon sensor, it also has pre-configured IDaaS connectors that give customers direct visibility into identity activity across cloud identity providers such as Entra ID and Okta. 

By correlating context from the authentication event, Falcon Identity Protection can detect if a user’s web-authenticated session is maliciously hijacked or other malicious web-based activity has occurred. The solution also provides workflows to take direct action, such as disabling an account, revoking a session and refreshing tokens, and updating the access policy in Entra ID to stop the attack. 

IAM and IDaaS systems are not only blind to cloud identity attacks, but due to their siloed nature they also lack the ability to deliver response actions to stop the adversary in a different cloud identity provider. As an IAM vendor-agnostic solution, Falcon Identity Protection spans multiple cloud identity providers to comprehensively stop adversaries.  

Customers can now defend against sophisticated identity-based threats with CrowdStrike Falcon® Adversary OverWatch’s new identity threat hunting capability. This 24/7 managed service, powered by AI and human expertise, utilizes telemetry from Falcon Identity Protection to disrupt adversaries across endpoint, identity and cloud. 

Take a Free Identity Security Risk Review 

Curious about your identity security posture? CrowdStrike’s complimentary Identity Security Risk Review provides a 1:1 session with a CrowdStrike identity threat expert to help you evaluate your hybrid identity security posture and uncover any potential risks. 

The risk review can be completed quickly and gives you:

• Instant visibility into the identity security posture across your hybrid identity environment
• Deep insights into possible attack paths that adversaries can exploit, and expert advice on how to address them
• An understanding of how to protect your organization from modern identity-based attacks like ransomware, account takeover, hybrid lateral movement and Pass-the-Hash. 

Additional Resources

• Register for a complimentary Identity Security Risk Review.
• Download the Identity Security Risk Review Infographic.
• Stream the “COZY BEAR on the Prowl” CrowdCast
• Visit the Falcon Identity Protection product page to learn more. 
• Watch CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz explain the recent Microsoft hack on “Mad Money.”

• CrowdStrike wins third consecutive Best Endpoint Detection and Response 2024 Award from SE Labs
• The award recognizes that the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform demonstrates consistent results in detecting real-world adversary tradecraft, both in SE Labs testing and in real-world scenarios
• CrowdStrike remains committed to participating in independent testing that provides transparency into the Falcon platform’s AI-native detection and automated prevention capabilities 

The CrowdStrike Falcon platform has received the Best Endpoint Detection and Response 2024 Award from SE Labs for the third consecutive year. This award honors CrowdStrike’s leadership in demonstrated detection, prevention and investigation capabilities. This repeat performance is made possible by CrowdStrike’s unified, AI-native platform, which delivers unsurpassed protection through a single lightweight agent and console, fueled by CrowdStrike’s petabytes of cross-domain intelligence and award-winning threat intelligence and advanced AI and machine learning capabilities. The recognition also highlights our continued commitment to transparency in public testing.

In describing the significance of this award, SE Labs notes:

“The best security involves having a good understanding of your enemy and the extent of the impact they could make (or have already made) on your IT infrastructure. Endpoint Detection and Response are the boots on the ground when it comes to seeing, stopping and investigating cyber threats on the network. A great solution makes it easier for security teams to be more effective.”

The SE Labs Best Endpoint Detection and Response 2024 Award reflects CrowdStrike’s consistent, year-long testing results in detecting real-world attacker behavior with the highest protection accuracy during SE Labs EDR tests. In the ransomware-specific testing, the Falcon platform detected and blocked all attacks to achieve a 100% ransomware protection score.

In addition, as part of this award, SE Labs incorporates results reported by customers. To earn this third straight win, the Falcon platform showed that it delivers best-in-class results during sophisticated lab-based testing and in real-world engagements. From ransomware to sophisticated attack chains, the Falcon platform defends against attacks at every stage, neutralizing adversaries.

An Adversarial Approach to Testing Endpoint Detection and Response

SE Labs Endpoint Detection and Response testing involves using current threat intelligence on known and relevant adversaries to build similar attack chains in a practice known as adversary emulation. This involves replicating tradecraft from sophisticated adversaries such as Turla, Ke3chang, Threat Group-3390 and Kimsuky to make test cases as similar as possible to real-life engagements. The intent behind these attacks is to infiltrate systems and breach target networks, realistically mirroring the methods that adversaries use to compromise systems. 

Ransomware is a big part of SE Labs’ testing. It inflicts damages totaling billions of dollars and it’s increasingly used for extortion by big game hunting (BGH) adversaries — the number of data theft victims named on BGH dedicated leak sites spiked by 76% year-over-year in 2023, as detailed in the CrowdStrike 2024 Global Threat Report.

It is critical to test EDR vendors’ ability to detect the tactics of cybercriminal ransomware groups, as well as known and unknown ransomware. By creating attack chains that replicate tactics — such as the use of stolen identities or lateral movement — and using ransomware samples employing typical methods like phishing, these ransomware-specific EDR tests are meant to evaluate whether security vendors can detect and protect businesses against real-world scenarios.

Throughout 2023, SE Labs included realistic adversary tradecraft in its EDR attack chains, as well as real-world tactics used by ransomware operators, to evaluate detection and prevention capabilities. The ransomware-specific test involved 615 ransomware variants from 10 different ransomware families being employed in sophisticated attacks mimicking the tradecraft of real-world adversaries.

The SE Labs Best Endpoint Detection and Response 2024 Award stands as a unique accolade in the industry, recognizing practical success in seeing, stopping and investigating advanced threats by understanding adversary behaviors.

Additional Resources

• CrowdStrike was named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms — read more in this blog: Furthest Right in Vision. Highest in Ability to Execute. Only CrowdStrike.
• To learn what other industry analysts are saying about CrowdStrike, visit the Industry Recognition webpage.
• Test CrowdStrike next-gen AV for yourself with a free trial of CrowdStrike Falcon® Prevent.

UPDATE: It has been confirmed that disabling telemetry will not block this exploit. Applying a patch as soon as possible is the most effective remediation for this vulnerability. Patches for 8 of the 18 vulnerable versions have been released; patches for the remaining vulnerable versions are expected by April 19th.

CrowdStrike is constantly working to protect our customers from the newest and most advanced cybersecurity threats. We are actively monitoring activity related to CVE-2024-3400, a critical command injection vulnerability in the GlobalProtect feature of Palo Alto Networks’ PAN-OS software affecting “specific PAN-OS versions and distinct feature configurations,” the vendor says.

This vulnerability, which has been given a CVSSv4.0 score of 10 by the vendor, has been observed being exploited in the wild. If exploited, CVE-2024-3400 could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall. At the time of writing, there is no patch available. Palo Alto Networks says a patch will be ready by April 14, 2024. 

Here, we explain how customers of the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform can assess their risk exposure to this vulnerability. Customers should also monitor the vendor’s website for up-to-date information on vulnerable product versions, mitigations and available patches.

Assessing Risk Exposure to CVE-2024-3400

When a new and actively exploited vulnerability is reported, one of the first actions security teams must take is determining their exposure to the issue. Understanding which of their internet-exposed assets could potentially be affected by the vulnerability is the first step to understanding exposure — and clear visibility into internet-facing devices is essential.

After identifying potentially vulnerable assets, the next step is to understand if the exposed assets have the required conditions for the vulnerability to be present. 

According to the vendor information, some of the most recent PAN-OS versions (listed below) are affected. An asset will be affected if the GlobalProtect gateways and device telemetry are enabled. If these features are not enabled, this vulnerability cannot be exploited.

Version	Vulnerable Version	Fixed Version	Estimated Patch Release Date
PAN-OS 11.1.2	Less than 11.1.2-h3	11.1.2-h3	04/14/2024
PAN-OS 11.1.1	Less than 11.1.1-h1	11.1.1-h1	04/16/2024
PAN-OS 11.1.0	Less than 11.1.0-h3	11.1.0-h3	04/16/2024
PAN-OS 11.0.4	Less than 11.0.04-h1	11.0.04-h1	04/14/2024
PAN-OS 11.0.3	Less than 11.0.03-h10	11.0.03-h1	04/16/2024
PAN-OS 11.0.2	Less than 11.0.02-h4	11.0.02-h4	04/16/2024
PAN-OS 11.0.1	Less than 11.0.01-h4	11.0.01-h4	04/17/2024
PAN-OS 11.0.0	Less than 11.0.00-h3	11.0.00-h3	04/18/2024
PAN-OS 10.2.9	Less than 10.2.9-h1	10.2.9-h1	04/14/2024
PAN-OS 10.2.8	Less than 10.2.8-h3	10.2.8-h3	04/15/2024
PAN-OS 10.2.7	Less than 10.2.7-h8	10.2.7-h8	04/15/2024
PAN-OS 10.2.6	Less than 10.2.6-h3	10.2.6-h3	04/16/2024
PAN-OS 10.2.5	Less than 10.2.5-h6	10.2.5-h6	04/16/2024
PAN-OS 10.2.4	Less than 10.2.4-h16	10.2.4-h16	04/19/2024
PAN-OS 10.2.3	Less than 10.2.3-h13	10.2.3-h13	04/17/2024
PAN-OS 10.2.2	Less than 10.2.2-h5	10.2.2-h5	04/18/2024
PAN-OS 10.2.1	Less than 10.2.1-h2	10.2.1-h2	04/17/2024
PAN-OS 10.2.0	Less than 10.2.0-h3	10.2.0-h3	04/18/2024

Table 1. PAN-OS versions vulnerable to CVE-2024-3400

CrowdStrike Falcon Exposure Management customers can quickly identify exposed PAN-OS assets in their environments by filtering directly from the external attack surface management capability. This will help customers quickly identify all of the potential exposures, thereby proactively reducing the impact of a potential exploitation.

Filter	Value	Expected Result
Banner	GlobalProtect	All devices that return a GlobalProtect Banner
Platform	PAN-OS	All devices that are on a PAN-OS platform

Table 2. Falcon Exposure Management query filters to detect CVE-2024-3400

NOTE: The two filters listed above should be used independently as using them in tandem will likely net 0 results.

As pictured below, Falcon Exposure Management customers can broaden their search for all Palo Alto Networks devices by selecting the platform “PAN-OS,” enabling them to locate firewalls running the vulnerable version of GlobalProtect.

How Many Assets Could Be Affected?

Customers of CrowdStrike Falcon® Counter Adversary Operations who would like to identify the total number of potentially vulnerable internet-exposed assets can navigate to “External attack surface explore” located in the “External monitoring” section of the Counter Adversary Operations menu. There, they can use some of the following filters to view other PAN-OS assets visible on the broader internet:

Query	Expected Result
attributes_raw contains (Phrase) ‘Palo Alto Networks PA-200 series’ or banners_raw contains (Phrase) ‘GlobalProtect Portal’	Returns any device whose attributes contain the phrase “Palo Alto Networks PA-200 series” or returns the phrase “GlobalProtect Portal” in the HTML banner
platform.name contains (Phrase) ‘Pan-os’	Returns any device with “PAN-OS”‘ in its platform name
‘cpe:/a:paloaltonetworks:pan-os’	Returns any device that is noted as having PAN-OS installed

Table 3. Queries for detecting possible vulnerable assets in “External attack surface explore,” an external monitoring feature in Counter Adversary Operations

Conclusion and Recommendations

Critical vulnerabilities, especially those actively exploited, pose a high risk to organizations. In order to mitigate the risk of exploitation, those affected by CVE-2024-3400 are advised to update vulnerable appliances with the vendor-supplied patch. Patches for 8 of the 18 vulnerable versions have been released, and patches for the remaining vulnerable versions are expected by April 19th. In addition, it is advised to increase monitoring of vulnerable appliances as well as non-vulnerable assets potentially accessible by the appliance.

Our product and internal security teams continue to actively monitor this dynamic and ongoing situation. CrowdStrike will continue to take additional steps, including mitigation and patching. As new information becomes available, we will publish updates as necessary. In tandem, we continue to develop and release new behavioral logic for the Falcon platform to detect and prevent malicious behavior related to CVE-2024-3400. 

Additional Resources

• See Falcon’s unrivaled protection in action in a short demo.
• Learn about our threat intelligence and hunting subscriptions.
• Experience how the industry-leading CrowdStrike Falcon® platform protects against modern threats. Start your 15-day free trial today.

• CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM enables companies to search, investigate and hunt down threats, including detection of advanced ransomware targeting VMware ESXi 
• Initial access to the ESXi infrastructure¹ is typically gained through lateral movement using valid credentials
• eCrime actors target and deploy ransomware in ESXi environments to increase the impact and scale of their attacks, which can be devastating for organizations

CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, the definitive AI-native platform for detecting, investigating and hunting down threats, enables advanced detection of ransomware targeting VMware ESXi environments. 

CrowdStrike has observed numerous eCrime actors exploiting ESXi infrastructure to encrypt virtual machine volumes from the hypervisor to deploy ransomware in organizations. Access to ESXi infrastructure typically takes place as part of lateral movement. For example, SCATTERED SPIDER often gains initial access to a Microsoft Entra ID identity via social engineering and then uses this identity to access internal information repositories such as SharePoint to search for ESXi related credentials. 

CrowdStrike refers to this tactic to deploy ransomware as “Hypervisor Jackpotting,”² as eCrime actors can  use ESXi hosts to rapidly expand the scope of affected systems.

Falcon Next-Gen SIEM can ingest ESXi logs to reveal evidence of attacker activity, detect suspicious behavior related to use of encryption commands and tooling in near-real time, audit configuration changes and events indicative of early signs of pre-ransomware activity, and detect logins from malicious IP addresses to create and raise incidents for investigation. 

Here, we provide an overview of how Falcon Next-Gen SIEM detects ransomware targeting ESXi environments.

Start With Log Forwarding and Configuration

Forwarding ESXi logs to Falcon Next-Gen SIEM can help detect ransomware targeting ESXi environments. By ingesting and alerting on authentication and shell logs that ship with ESXi, we can find evidence of attackers gaining interactive shell access to the ESXi servers, running basic enumeration commands, shutting down virtual machines and using built-in tools like openssl to encrypt the virtual machine volumes.

We recommend using a syslog aggregation point, like the CrowdStrike® Falcon LogScale Collector, to forward logs to Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. Detailed instructions for doing this can be found in the CrowdStrike Tech Center.³

Once your log collector is set up, you can configure the ESXi infrastructure to forward the logs to your log collector. The default configuration for syslog for VMware ESXi 7.x and VMware vCenter 7.x is sufficient to get the correct logs to the unified, AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon® platform. You can find the instructions on how to enable remote syslog forwarding in VMware’s knowledge base.⁴

Detect the Use of Built-In Encryption Tools

Most of the activity prior to the encryption of critical virtual machine guest files could potentially be normal behavior like listing and shutting down virtual machines. These are important events to capture in an incident, but they are not indicative of an attack on their own. 

To create a detection, we need to identify an event with a high enough confidence. The use of a tool like openssl with the encrypt option (enc) being run from the command line on critical guest virtual machine files is a high-confidence event that indicates something malicious is happening in our environment. 

Falcon Next-Gen SIEM will detect this activity in near real time and create an incident for you. It will also gather surrounding activity that has happened on that host and include it in the incident.

 

In this detection, we see the use of openssl to encrypt sensitive files, the SSH connection, some virtual machine enumeration and the virtual machines being shut down before encryption.

Gain Insights Into Early Ransomware Signs

Detecting an in-progress attack within your environment is critical, but it is always better to get insights into a pending attack before it starts. We can look for configuration changes to an environment, especially those that don’t comply with best practices or that degrade the security posture of the environment. 

One easily detectable signal would be if a user enables SSH on one of your servers running ESXi. In a best-case scenario, this is an auditable event that the security team can confirm is legitimate behavior. In a worst-case scenario, it is the first tip that someone has compromised your ESXi infrastructure. We can easily surface this activity by creating a scheduled search looking for the specific indicator. Running it on a short interval with an overlapping time period will ensure we get timely notifications without missing events. 

Reveal Unauthorized Logins from Malicious IP Addresses

Another indicator of a pending attack is the detection of logins to the ESXi management console that come from known malicious IP addresses where the console is purposely or accidentally exposed to the internet. Falcon Next-Gen SIEM leverages CrowdStrike’s integrated threat intelligence to identify any known indicators of compromise (IOCs) in critical data. By combining this with the ESXi login entries sent to the Falcon platform, we can detect the login attempts from known malicious sources.

CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM Exposes Ransomware Targeting ESXi 

By leveraging Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, you can provide your organization with multiple layers of detections, get unparalleled visbility into your ESXi infrastructure and get ahead of adversaries. Falcon Next-Gen SIEM leaves adversaries targeting ESXi environments with nowhere to hide, detecting suspicious behavior as early as possible, preventing attacks and stopping breaches.

Additional Resources

• Learn how to stop breaches with Falcon Next-Gen SIEM by visiting the webpage.
• Join our next biweekly next-gen SIEM showcase to view a live demo of Falcon Next-Gen SIEM.
• Download the CrowdStrike eBook, 8 Things Your Next SIEM Must Do, to understand the critical capabilities to look for when evaluating SIEM solutions.
• See Falcon LogScale in action by watching this fast-paced demo.

Sources

1. https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/carbon-spider-sprite-spider-target-esxi-servers-with-ransomware/
2. https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/hypervisor-jackpotting-ecrime-actors-increase-targeting-of-esxi-servers/
3. https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/tech-center/importing-logs-log-collector/
4. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2003322

Over the last year there has been a prevailing sentiment that while AI will not necessarily be replacing humans, humans who use AI will replace those that don’t. 

This sentiment also applies to the next era of cybersecurity, which has been rapidly unfolding over the last year. Recent breakthroughs in generative AI hold enormous promise for modern defenders. Amid the dual pressures of accelerating attacks — down to just over two minutes, in some instances — and persistent skills shortages, generative AI has the potential to be not just an accelerator, but a veritable force-multiplier for teams of all sizes and maturity levels. We’ve seen these impressive gains firsthand working with early adopters of Charlotte AI (made generally available last month), with users reporting speed gains of up to 75% across supported workflows. 

Making humans as effective and efficient as possible begins with giving them the best tools for the job. Today’s AI landscape presents organizations with a rapidly growing and often dizzying landscape of foundational models developed by the open-source community, startups and large enterprises. Each model is unique in its strengths and applications, varying in speed, accuracy, training data, computational intensiveness and in the underlying risks they pose to end-users. Invariably, selecting just one model, or one family of models, can force users to accept trade-offs across any one of these variables.

Security teams shouldn’t have to compromise on the tools they use to protect their organizations. In an ideal world, their tools should support the maximum levels of speed and accuracy required across the myriad workflows they oversee, without trade-offs on performance and risk — and without placing the burden on defenders to calculate computational complexity.

This is one of the foundational principles on which we’ve designed Charlotte AI. To optimize Charlotte AI’s performance and minimize the drawbacks of using individual models, we’ve architected Charlotte AI with a multi-AI system; one that partitions workflows into discrete sub-tasks and enables our data scientists to isolate, test and compare how effectively different models perform across tasks. This approach enables our experts to dynamically interchange the foundational models applied across workflows, ensuring end-users can interact with an ever-improving AI assistant fueled by the industry’s latest generative AI technologies. 

Charlotte AI’s multi-AI design is singular across the cybersecurity landscape, applying cutting-edge system design from the front lines of genAI research to CrowdStrike’s unsurpassed data moat of award-winning threat intelligence, cross-domain platform telemetry and over a decade of expert-labeled security telemetry. In this blog, we shed light on how it comes together.

Under the Hood: From Question to Answer with AI Agents

Charlotte AI enables users to unleash the transformative power of generative AI across security workflows. With a simple question, users can activate Charlotte AI to answer questions about their environments, generate scripts or analyze emerging threat intelligence; all grounded in the high-fidelity telemetry of the Falcon platform. Charlotte AI’s natural processing capabilities lower the level of skill and experience needed to make quick, accurate security decisions, while enabling even seasoned analysts to unlock incremental speed gains across every stage of their workflows — from surfacing time-sensitive detections, to investigating incidents to taking action with Real Time Response. 

Under the hood, Charlotte AI orchestrates over a dozen task-oriented “AI agents” to interpret a user’s question, plan the steps required to assemble a complete answer and structure the end result (Figure 1). Each AI agent is a subsystem consisting of a model and surrounding code that enables it to perform specific tasks and interact with other agents. One can think of each AI agent’s LLM (or other class of underlying model) as its “brain,” and each agent’s unique functionality (enabled by its surrounding code) as the skills that enable it to execute specific tasks. 

We can think of these AI agents much like the team of doctors working in concert in an operating theater, each overseeing specialized tasks; from administering anesthesia to operating on acute areas of focus. Similarly, each AI agent has a specific responsibility and area of expertise. Much like an operation that requires a team of specialists to collaborate, Charlotte AI’s dynamic task force of AI agents work together to support a growing number of workflows; from summarizing threat intelligence, to writing queries in CrowdStrike Query Language (CQL), to assisting incident investigations. 

At a high level, Charlotte AI activates AI agents to structure answers in the following sequence: 

• Step 1: Understand the Question: Charlotte AI first activates AI agents tasked with understanding the user’s conversation context and extracting entities referenced in the question — such as threat actors, vulnerabilities or host features.
• Step 2: Route Subtasks to AI Agents: Charlotte AI then activates a router agent, which determines which AI agent or agents to assign the user’s request. 
• Step 3a: Scan for Answers: If a user asks a question that requires data from one or more API calls, the request is passed to a dedicated agent within Charlotte AI that ensures the information is retrieved and available for further processing. 
• Step 3b: Plan Responses for Questions: If the user’s question doesn’t map to one or more API calls — for example, when asking Charlotte AI to generate a CQL query — Charlotte AI’s router agent can activate a number of other AI agents fine-tuned to accomplish specific tasks.
• Step 4: Validate the Plan and Retrieved Data: The runtime agent executes the API calls outlined by the prior AI agent. The output of this process is then reviewed by a validation agent, which determines whether the resulting information is complete or requires additional information. This AI agent may even issue a warning to the end user if the answer is incomplete.
• Step 5: Generate an Answer: A final AI agent structures the response to the user’s question, taking into account intuitive ways of presenting information to the end user and generating a summary of information presented. 

Guardrails against LLM Overexposure  

Systems that give users direct visibility to the output of LLMs (often referred to as “naked LLMs”) risk exposing users to inaccurate information when LLMs perform unexpectedly or hallucinate — a phenomenon where LLMs provide information that is not supported by, or even contradicts, source data. Inaccurate information can have devastating implications in security, ranging from impeded productivity, to a weakened security posture, to a major breach. 

Charlotte AI’s multi-AI architecture plays a critical role in enabling a safe user experience, providing buffers that insulate end-users from the direct output of LLMs. First, by having the flexibility to apply diverse models across workflows, Charlotte AI enables CrowdStrike’s data science team to limit the ripple effects of unexpected changes in performance stemming from any one model. Another way Charlotte AI buffers users against direct LLM exposure is by using an agent tasked with validating answers before they are presented to end-users, verifying that answers are both consistent with the type of result the user is expecting and grounded in Falcon platform data. 

Turbocharging Security Workflows: From Answer to Action 

As large language models reach new levels of maturity and commoditization, security teams face a growing landscape of conversational AI assistants. Charlotte AI’s multi-AI architecture enables users to tap into the power of today’s best-of-breed foundational models and cutting-edge innovations across their workflows while minimizing the trade-offs of limiting their selection to any one model or model family. This architectural adaptability enables Charlotte AI to continuously elevate every analyst to new heights of efficiency, equipping them with the insight they need to make faster, more accurate decisions and reclaim a speed advantage against modern adversaries. For a deeper look at Charlotte AI’s architecture, download the white paper: “The Best AI for the Job: Inside Charlotte AI’s Multi-AI Architecture.”

Next Steps: 

• Download the white paper: Learn more about Charlotte AI’s multi-AI architecture.
• Register for the Unstoppable Innovations Series: Hear how early adopters of Charlotte AI are turning hours of work into just minutes or even seconds. Register for the series. 
• Learn more: Visit the Charlotte AI product page. 

Organizations  are increasingly concerned about high-profile employees’ information being exposed on the deep and dark web. The CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations team is often asked to find fake social media accounts and personally identifiable information (PII) that might be exposed.

Impersonations and leaked PII can unravel lives and ruin the reputations of individuals and their organizations. Through surface, deep and dark web monitoring, CrowdStrike is able to provide timely alerts to our customers, helping them take quick action to mitigate the potential damage caused by these posts.

The CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations team has created thousands of monitoring rules that protect our customers, and nearly 20% of them focus solely on high-profile employees. In this blog, we break down the data source categories that generate the most actionable notifications — including the type of data being posted — and name the actors that are posting most frequently on those sites.

CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations Analysis

The analysis and graph below represent only the true positive notifications from the Counter Adversary Operations team. A true positive notification is one that has been determined to be malicious in nature and actionable for customers.

By analyzing true positive notifications, we can identify the top actionable sources and their effects on organizations.

Actionable Source Types

Chat Mediums 

The most common chat site with true positives seen in our monitoring is Telegram. 

Telegram included data that could be used to target high-profile employees and potentially their organizations. Telegram, unlike other sites, is not the most directly targeted source — high-profile employee data is found within the site, but this data is within combined lists of millions of other people’s data, so it is unlikely the author knows they have captured the sensitive data of high-profile employees. Otherwise, actors would individualize the credentials for purchase at a premium price. The majority of the sensitive data identified within Telegram includes email addresses and passwords for third-party applications. Although this does not directly tie into targeting high-profile employees to undermine their companies’ technical infrastructure, if these employees use the same password for their personal and corporate accounts, it can have catastrophic consequences.

There are numerous authors on Telegram posting what we would classify as true positive notifications for high-profile employees. These notifications typically include email and password combinations that are currently being used by the high-profile employees.

Criminal Marketplaces 

Like Telegram, criminal marketplaces include data that could have an immediate impact on high-profile employees. Specifically, the majority of the exposed data on criminal marketplaces comes from multiple large breaches of credit card information, and threat actors look to sell credit card data individually and indiscriminately. Threat actors parse the data individually by credit card owner name and list each one for sale, typically for less than $1 USD.

Threat actors do not appear to do research based on the accounts they are selling, which leads us to believe that bot farms are being used to perform automated collection. For instance, if a threat actor knew they had a working credit card — along with the purchasing information of a CEO or high-ranking official — they would likely either raise the price for that individual or attempt to further exploit the information.

“Carder Market” is a broker site that sells exposed credit card information, including the PII data needed to make online transactions. The site is nondiscriminatory and lists all accounts available after a purchase of $0.25 USD. This alludes to bot behavior, which is confirmed when attempting to identify the perpetrators — in this case, the perpetrator is one account identified as “Admin.” Though accounts are indiscriminately posted, high-profile employees could be targeted by searching for a specific name and suspected home of record within the data.

Public Repositories 

Unlike chat mediums and criminal marketplaces, public repositories include highly targeted information. On public repositories, Counter Adversary Operations observed data of three types of high-profile employees: government officials, influential figures and C-suite personnel. The exposed PII included residence addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, Social Security numbers, personal email addresses, detailed credit card information (including expiration date and security code) and vehicle plate numbers.

With the abundance of information included on these sites, bad actors have a higher potential to exploit high-profile employees either by harassing them or using their credit card/SSN information.

The public repositories we observed included Doxbin, Pastebin and GitHub. All three public repositories  allow users to post anonymously (and high-profile employee material was posted anonymously), allowing bad actors to easily obfuscate themselves and their intentions. 

Forums 

Malicious forum posts observed by our team are largely used to create and spread conspiracy theories or make derogatory statements related to individuals who have high name recognition. These posts are meant to degrade the reputation of an individual, but we rarely see posts containing sensitive data that could compromise the individual’s corporate credentials. 

For this category, the source that generated the most true positive notifications is 4chan. All true positive notifications on 4chan are posted under anonymous accounts. These posts are not limited to PII, as with other source categories. Many 4chan posts concerning high-profile employees are antisemitic in nature and usually end up being linked to an existing conspiracy theory. Something that is also unique to 4chan is the posts almost always target CEOs and additional executive employees.

Counter Adversary Operations has witnessed cyber threats turn into physical acts of targeting on 4chan. For example, our team observed a political discourse that devolved into the author posting their disagreement with an individual’s political views, resulting in a call to arms where the home of the individual was targeted by a picket line.

Social Media 

Social media sites also included targeted notifications where actors directly targeted high-profile individuals. However, this medium is less prone to data leaking than public repositories. Social media posts include direct harassment of individuals — in most cases, the harassment revolves around a political discourse that led to hate speech from individual actors. Unlike chat mediums, which can be listed privately, social media sites reach a higher swath of application users, and author discourse appears to be a popular topic to gain notice. 

The most common site on which Counter Adversary Operations observed this behavior was X (formerly Twitter). Counter Adversary Operations has aided customers in preparing documentation to take down X profiles that are attempting to impersonate high-profile employees’ accounts. These impersonating accounts used employees’ profile photos and names, making them more convincing.

The takedown process for social media accounts requires ample evidence of malicious behavior, not just the use of a name and photo. This can create a barrier for the affected user in getting the account taken down.

How CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations Can Help

CrowdStrike Falcon® Adversary Intelligence enables customers to monitor these sites and immediately alerts customers when activity against a high-profile employee is detected. And because CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations works with surface, deep and dark web data every day, the team knows which sites to focus on and which are less concerning. CrowdStrike offers an option to add an assigned Counter Adversary Operations analyst to help customers hunt for external threats to brands, employees and sensitive data, allowing their cyber professionals to devote their time to handling actionable data rather than hunting through a complex and ever-changing criminal ecosystem.

Additional Resources

• Watch this short demo to see how Falcon Adversary Intelligence enables organizations to proactively uncover fraud, data breaches and phishing campaigns to protect their brand from online threats that target their organization.
• To find out more about how to incorporate threat intelligence into your security strategy, visit the CrowdStrike Falcon Adversary Intelligence page.
• Read about the cybercriminals tracked by CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations in the CrowdStrike 2024 Global Threat Report.
• Request a free trial of the industry-leading CrowdStrike Falcon® platform.

• As Porter Airlines scaled its business, it needed a unified cybersecurity platform to eliminate the challenges of juggling multiple cloud, identity and endpoint security products.
• Porter consolidated its cybersecurity strategy with the single-agent, single-console architecture of the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon® XDR platform.
• With the Falcon platform, the airline has reduced cost and complexity while driving better security outcomes across its business and partner network. 

All passengers on Porter Airlines travel in style with complimentary beer and wine, free premium snacks, free WiFi, free inflight entertainment, no middle seats — the list goes on. 

With these perks, it’s no wonder Porter is growing fast. Headquartered in Toronto, Porter revolutionized short-haul flying in 2006. Since then, the airline has stretched its wings, amassing 58 aircraft, 3,200 employees and 33 destinations across North America. 

Early success has only fueled the company’s ambitions. Porter plans to double its workforce by 2026 and blanket all major U.S. cities and beyond. While this growth brings exciting business opportunities, it also creates new cybersecurity challenges, as the company piles on more data, devices and attack surfaces to protect. 

“When we started, we weren’t really a target for attackers, but we’re seeing more activity today,” said Jason Deluce, Director of Information Technology at Porter Airlines. 

To secure its growing business, Porter relies on the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon platform and CrowdStrike Falcon® Complete for 24/7 managed detection and response (MDR). This is the story of how CrowdStrike delivers the flexible and scalable cybersecurity that Porter needs to secure its business today and into the open skies ahead.  

New Security Requirements

The move to CrowdStrike was born out of necessity. Porter’s previous security stack centered on a noisy endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution. Alerts overwhelmed Deluce’s lean security team, and the vendor wasn’t much help. Then, after three years without contact, the sales rep dropped a high renewal bill. 

Porter used a separate cybersecurity platform for vulnerability management and log management. But according to Deluce, “it was all manual. It detects vulnerabilities, but it doesn’t do anything about them. That wasn’t enough for us.” 

Furthermore, none of the solutions were integrated, leaving Deluce and his team with multiple agents and multiple consoles to operate. “They kind of talk about the same thing, but there’s nothing to marry them together in one place. You have to go to separate places, try to make sense of the data and determine if it’s accurate or not.”

With the business taking off and cyber threats surging, Porter needed a modern cybersecurity platform to reduce the noise and stop breaches. With its single-agent, cloud-native architecture, the Falcon platform gave Porter exactly what it needed: one agent and one console for complete visibility and protection across the company’s expanding security estate.

And whereas the previous cybersecurity vendors left Deluce with more questions than answers, Falcon Complete MDR acts as a force multiplier for Porter’s security team, providing around-the-clock expert management, monitoring, proactive threat hunting and end-to-end remediation, delivered by CrowdStrike’s team of dedicated security experts. 

Stopping Breaches in the Cloud with the Falcon Platform

A few years back, Porter made the strategic move to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for hosting its business applications and corporate data. While this cloud strategy delivers the scalability and flexibility Porter needs to grow, it also introduces new security risks.

With the lightweight Falcon agent already deployed, Deluce was able to easily add CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security to its arsenal of protections. And because CrowdStrike and Amazon are strategic partners with many product integrations, deployment was a breeze. 

“The one-click deployment is pretty amazing,” said Deluce. “We were able to deploy Falcon Cloud Security to a bunch of servers very quickly.”

Falcon Cloud Security is the industry’s only unified agent and agentless platform for code-to-cloud protection, integrating pre-runtime and runtime protection, and agentless technology in a single platform. Being able to collect and see all of that information in a single console provided immediate value, according to Deluce. 

Porter soon looked to expand its cloud protections with CrowdStrike Falcon® Application Security Posture Management (ASPM). While evaluating the product, Deluce gained visibility into dependencies, vulnerabilities, data types and changes his team previously had no visibility into, ranging from low risk to high risk. The company moved fast to deploy Falcon ASPM. 

With ASPM delivered as part of Falcon Cloud Security, Porter gets comprehensive risk visibility and protection across its entire cloud estate, from its AWS cloud infrastructure to the applications and services running inside of it — delivered from the unified Falcon platform. 

Better Visibility and Protection

Porter has deployed numerous CrowdStrike protections to fortify the airline against cyber threats. Recently, that included CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Protection to improve visibility of identity threats, stop lateral movement and extend multifactor authentication (MFA). 

Deluce noted that previously, he had no easy way of knowing about stale accounts or service accounts. He’d have to do an Active Directory dump and go through each line to see what was happening. With Falcon Identity Protection, Deluce saw that Porter had over 200 privileged accounts, which didn’t add up, given his small number of domain admins. 

“I saw that a large group had been given print operator roles, which would have allowed them to move laterally to domain admins,” noted Deluce. “With Falcon Identity Protection, I was able to change those permissions quickly to reduce our risk. I also started enforcing MFA from the solution, which is something I couldn’t do before with the products we had.”

Gaining better visibility has been an important theme for Porter. The company also uses CrowdStrike Falcon® Exposure Management to gain comprehensive visibility to assets, attack surfaces and vulnerabilities with AI-powered vulnerability management.  

“We’re taking on new vendors faster than we’re taking on airplanes, so we need to limit our exposures,” said Deluce. “With Falcon Exposure Management, I can scan our digital estate to see which assets we have exposed to the internet, as well as any exposures belonging to our subsidiaries and partners, so we can reduce those risks.” 

The solution provided quick value when Deluce noticed one of his APIs was exposed to the internet, which shouldn’t have been the case. He also found that many of the assets connected to the company’s network belonged to third parties, which is a major risk, given that any attack against those devices could affect Porter. 

“Falcon Exposure Management shows us our vulnerabilities and exposures, and how we can reduce them,” said Deluce. “This is key as we continue to build out the company and expand our partner network.”

Securing the Future with CrowdStrike

Safety is paramount to airlines — and that includes keeping customer data safe. With its investment in CrowdStrike, Porter is demonstrating its commitment to safety and security. 

But for cybersecurity leaders like Deluce, the work is never done. Adversaries continue to get bolder, faster and stealthier. To stay ahead of evolving threats, Porter continues to lean into CrowdStrike, recently testing Charlotte AI and CrowdStrike Falcon® Adversary Intelligence, among other capabilities designed to help teams work faster and smarter.

Deluce reflected on how far the company has come in its cybersecurity journey and the role that security plays in enabling future growth. 

“We’ve gone from multiple tools, high complexity and spending a lot for poor visibility to a single pane of glass where we can do a bunch of new things with one platform,” concluded Deluce. “Cybersecurity is key to scaling the company and we know CrowdStrike is there for us.”

Additional Resources

• CrowdStrike was named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms — read more in this blog: Furthest Right in Vision. Highest in Ability to Execute. Only CrowdStrike.
• To learn what other industry analysts are saying about CrowdStrike, visit the Industry Recognition webpage.
• Test CrowdStrike next-gen AV for yourself with a free trial of CrowdStrike Falcon® Prevent.

Organizations are increasingly turning to cloud computing for IT agility, resilience and scalability. Amazon Web Services (AWS) stands at the forefront of this digital transformation, offering a robust, flexible and cost-effective platform that helps businesses drive growth and innovation. 

However, as organizations migrate to the cloud, they face a complex and growing threat landscape of sophisticated and cloud-conscious threat actors. Organizations with ambitious digital transformation strategies must be prepared to address these security challenges from Day One. The potential threat of compromise underscores the critical need to understand and implement security best practices tailored to the unique challenges of cloud environments. 

Central to understanding and navigating these challenges is the AWS shared responsibility model. AWS is responsible for delivering security of the cloud, including the security of underlying infrastructure and services. Customers are responsible for protecting their data, applications and resources running in the cloud. This model highlights the importance of proactive security measures at every phase of cloud migration and operation and helps ensure businesses maintain a strong security posture.

In this blog, we cover five best practices for securing AWS resources to help you gain a better understanding of how to protect your cloud environments as you build in the cloud. 

Best Practice #1: Know All of Your Assets

Cloud assets are not limited to compute instances (aka virtual machines) — they extend to all application workloads spanning compute, storage, networking and an extensive portfolio of managed services. 

Understanding and maintaining an accurate inventory of your AWS assets is foundational to securing your cloud environment. Given the dynamic nature of cloud computing, it’s not uncommon for organizations to inadvertently lose track of assets running in their AWS accounts, which can lead to risk exposure and attacks on unprotected resources. In some cases, accounts created early in an organization’s cloud journey may not have the standard security controls that were implemented later on. In another common scenario, teams may forget about and unintentionally remove mitigations put in place to address application-specific exceptions, exposing those resources to potential attack.

To maintain adequate insight and awareness of all AWS assets in production, organizations should consider implementing the following:

• Conduct asset inventories: Use tools and processes that provide continuous visibility into all cloud assets. This can help maintain an inventory of public and private cloud resources and ensure all assets are accounted for and monitored. AWS Resource Explorer and Cost Explorer can help discover new resources as they’re provisioned.
• Implement asset tagging and management policies: Establish and enforce policies for tagging cloud resources. This practice aids in organizing assets based on criticality, sensitivity and ownership, making it easier to manage and prioritize security efforts across the cloud environment. In combination with the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service, tagging can also be used to dynamically grant access to resources via attribute-based access control (ABAC). 
• Integrate security tools for holistic visibility: Combine the capabilities of cloud security posture management (CSPM) with other security tools like endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions. Integration of these tools can provide a more comprehensive view of the security landscape, enabling quicker identification of misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and threats across all AWS assets. AWS services including Trusted Advisor, Security Hub, GuardDuty, Config and Inspector provide actionable insights to help security and operations teams improve their security posture.

CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security makes it easy to implement these practices by offering a consolidated platform that integrates with AWS features to maintain coverage across a customer’s entire multi-account environment. Falcon Cloud Security offers CSPM, which leverages AWS EventBridge, IAM cross-account roles and CloudTrail API audit telemetry to provide continuous asset discovery, scan for misconfigurations and suspicious behavior, improve least-privilege controls and deploy runtime protection on EC2 and EKS clusters as they’re provisioned. It guides customers on how to secure their cloud environments to accelerate the learning of cloud security skills and the time-to-value for cloud initiatives. Cloud Operations teams can deploy AWS Security Hub with the CrowdStrike Falcon® Integration Gateway to view Falcon platform detections and trigger custom remediations inside AWS. AWS GuardDuty leverages CrowdStrike Falcon® Adversary Intelligence indicators of compromise and can provide an additional layer of visibility and protection for cloud teams.

Best Practice #2: Enforce Multifactor Authentication (MFA) and Use Role-based Access Control in AWS

Stolen credentials pose a severe threat — whether they are user names and passwords or API key IDs and secrets — allowing adversaries to impersonate legitimate users and bypass identity-based access controls. This risk is exacerbated by scenarios where administrator credentials and hard-coded passwords are inadvertently stored in public-facing locations or within code repositories accessible online. Such exposures give attackers the opportunity to intercept live access keys, which they can use to authenticate to cloud services, posing as trusted users. 

In cloud environments, as well as on-premises, organizations should adopt identity security best practices such as avoiding use of shared credentials, assigning least-privilege access policies and using a single source of truth through identity provider federation and single sign-on (SSO). AWS services such as IAM, Identity Center and Organizations can facilitate secure access to AWS services by supporting the creation of granular access policies, enabling temporary session tokens, and reporting on cross-account trusts and excessively permissive policies, thus minimizing the likelihood and impact of access key exposure. By implementing MFA in conjunction with SSO, role-based access and temporary sessions, organizations make it much harder for attackers to steal credentials and, more importantly, to effectively use them.

Falcon Cloud Security includes cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), which evaluates whether IAM roles are overly permissive and provides the visibility to make changes with awareness of which resources will be impacted. Additionally, Falcon Cloud Security conducts pre-runtime scanning of container images and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates to uncover improperly elevated Kubernetes pod privileges and hard-coded credentials to prevent credential theft and lateral movement. Adding the CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Protection module delivers strong protection for Active Directory environments, dynamically identifying administrator and service accounts and anomalous or malicious use of credentials, and allowing integration with workload detection and response actions. 

Best Practice #3: Automatically Scan AWS Resources for Excessive Public Exposure

The inadvertent public exposure and misconfiguration of cloud resources such as EC2 instances, Relational Database Service (RDS) and containers on ECS and EKS through overly permissive network access policies pose a risk to the security of cloud workloads. Such lapses can accidentally open the door to unauthorized access to vulnerable services, providing attackers with opportunities to exploit weaknesses for data theft, launching further attacks and moving laterally within the cloud environment.

To mitigate these risks and enhance cloud security posture, organizations should:

• Implement automated security audits: Utilize tools like AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Config and AWS IAM Access Analyzer to continuously audit the configurations of AWS resources and identify and remediate excessive public exposure or misconfigurations.
• Secure AWS resources with proper security groups: Configure security groups for logical groups of AWS resources to restrict inbound and outbound traffic to only necessary and known IPs and ports. Whenever possible, use network access control lists (NACLs) to restrict inbound and outbound access across entire VPC subnets to prevent data exfiltration and block communication with potentially malicious external entities. Services like AWS Firewall Manager provide a single pane of glass for configuring network access for all resources in an AWS account using VPC Security Groups, Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Network Firewall.
• Collaborate across teams: Security teams should work closely with IT and DevOps to understand the necessary external services and configure permissions accordingly, balancing operational needs with security requirements.

Falcon Cloud Security continuously monitors AWS service configurations for best practices, both in live environments and in pre-runtime IaC templates as part of a CI/CD or GitOps pipeline. Overly permissive network security policies are dynamically discovered and recorded as indicators of misconfiguration (IOMs), which are automatically correlated with all other security telemetry in the environment, along with insight into how the misconfiguration can be mitigated by the customer or maliciously used by the adversary.

Best Practice #4: Prioritize Alerts Based on Risk

Adversaries are becoming more skilled in attacking cloud environments, as evidenced by a 75% increase in cloud intrusions year-over-year in 2023. They are also growing faster: The average breakout time for eCrime operators to move laterally from one breached host to another host was just 62 minutes in 2023. The rise of new technologies, such as generative AI, has the potential to lower the barrier to entry for less-skilled adversaries, making it easier to launch sophisticated attacks. Amid these evolving trends, effective alert management is paramount.  

Cloud services are built to deliver a constant stream of API audit and service access logs, but sifting through all of this data can overwhelm security analysts and detract from their ability to focus on genuine threats. While some logs may indicate high-severity attacks that demand immediate response, most tend to be informational and often lack direct security implications. Generating alerts based on this data can be imprecise, potentially resulting in many false positives, each of which require SecOps investigation. Alert investigations can consume precious time and scarce resources, leading to a situation where noisy security alerts prevent timely detection and effective response.

To navigate this complex landscape and enhance the effectiveness of cloud security operations, several best practices can be adopted to manage and prioritize alerts efficiently:

• Prioritize alerts strategically: Develop a systematic approach to capture and prioritize high-fidelity alerts. Implementing a triage process based on the severity of events helps focus resources on the most critical investigations.
• Create context around alerts: Enhance alert quality by enriching them with correlated data and context. This additional information increases confidence in the criticality of alerts, enabling more informed decision-making regarding their investigation.
• Integrate and correlate telemetry sources: Improve confidence in prioritizing or deprioritizing alerts by incorporating details from other relevant data sources or security tools. This combination allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the security landscape, aiding in the accurate identification of genuine threats.
• Outsource to a competent third party: For organizations overwhelmed by the volume of alerts, partnering with a managed detection and response (MDR) provider can be a viable solution. These partners can absorb the event burden, alleviating the bottleneck and allowing in-house teams to focus on strategic security initiatives.

AWS Services like AWS GuardDuty, which is powered in part by CrowdStrike Falcon Adversary Intelligence indicators of compromise (IOCs), help surface and alert on suspicious and malicious activity within AWS accounts, prioritizing indicators of attack (IOAs) and IOCs based on risk severity. 

Falcon Cloud Security is a complete cloud security platform that unifies world-class threat intelligence and elite threat hunters. Falcon Cloud Security correlates telemetry and detections across IOMs, package vulnerabilities, suspicious behavior, adversary intelligence and third-party telemetry ingested through a library of data connectors to deliver a context-based risk assessment, which reduces false positives and automatically responds to stop breaches. 

Best Practice #5: Enable Comprehensive Logging

Adversaries that gain access to a compromised account can operate virtually undetected, limited only by the permissions granted to the account they used to break in. This stealthiness is compounded by the potential for log tampering and manipulation, where malicious actors may alter or delete log files to erase evidence of their activities. Such actions make it challenging to trace the adversary’s movements, evaluate the extent of data tampering or theft, and understand the full scope of the security incident. The lack of a comprehensive audit trail due to disabled or misconfigured logging mechanisms hinders the ability to maintain visibility over cloud operations, making it more difficult to detect and respond to threats.

In response, organizations can:

• Enable comprehensive logging across the environment: Ensure AWS CloudTrail logs, S3 server access logs, Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) access logs, CloudFront logs and VPC flow logs are activated to maintain a detailed record of all activities and transactions.
• Ingest and alert on logs in your SIEM: Integrate and analyze logs within your security information and event management (SIEM) system to enable real-time alerts on suspicious activities. Retain logs even if immediate analysis capabilities are lacking, as they may provide valuable insights in future investigations. 
• Ensure accuracy of logged data: For services behind proxies, like ELBs, ensure the logging captures original IP addresses from the X-Forwarded-For field to preserve crucial information for analysis.
• Detect and prevent log tampering: Monitor for API calls that attempt to disable logging and for unexpected changes in cloud services or account settings that could undermine logging integrity, in line with recommendations from the MITRE ATT&CK® framework. In addition, features such as MFA-Delete provide additional protection by requiring two-factor authentication to allow deletion of S3 buckets and critical data.

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security for AWS

Falcon Cloud Security integrates with over 50 AWS services to deliver effective protection at every stage of the cloud journey, combining multi-account deployment automation, sensor-based runtime protection, agentless API attack and misconfiguration detection, and pre-runtime scanning of containers, Lambda functions and IaC templates. 

CrowdStrike leverages real-time IOAs, threat intelligence, evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across vectors such as endpoint, cloud, identity and more. This not only enhances threat detection, it also facilitates automated protection, remediation and elite threat hunting, aligned closely with understanding AWS assets, enforcing strict access control and authentication measures, and ensuring meticulous monitoring and management of cloud resources.

You can try Falcon Cloud Security through a Cloud Security Health Check, during which you’ll 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.

Protecting AWS Resources with Falcon Next-Gen SIEM

CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM unifies data, AI, automation and intelligence in one AI-native platform to stop breaches. Falcon Next-Gen SIEM extends CrowdStrike’s industry-leading detection and response and expert services to all data, including AWS logs, for complete visibility and protection. Your team can detect and respond to cloud-based threats in record time with real-time alerts, live dashboards and blazing-fast search. Native workflow automation lets you streamline analysis of cloud incidents and say goodbye to tedious tasks. 

For the first time ever, your analysts can investigate cloud-based threats from the same console they use to manage cloud workload security and CSPM. CrowdStrike consolidates multiple security tools, including next-gen SIEM and cloud security, on one platform to cut complexity and costs. Watch a 3-minute demo of Falcon Next-Gen SIEM to see it in action.

Additional Resources 

• Read about common cloud misconfigurations in this CrowdStrike white paper: Seven Easily Exploited Cloud Misconfigurations
• Download the CrowdStrike eBook, 8 Things Your Next SIEM Must Do, to understand the critical capabilities to look for when evaluating SIEM solutions.
• See why Forrester named CrowdStrike a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Cloud Workload Security, Q1 2024. 
• See for yourself how the industry-leading CrowdStrike Falcon platform protects against modern threats. Start your 15-day free trial today.