Leveraging Elastic Security for comprehensive cloud protection

Elastic Security is a modern consolidated security operations platform that empowers security teams to maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their data across all environments — on-premise, hybrid, and cloud alike. Elastic Security’s core strength lies in its industry-leading and one-of-a-kind, search-powered security analytics layer that enables security teams to surface the security risks that matter, from all data, in real-time and at scale. 

The effectiveness of Elastic Security is bolstered by our Elastic Security Labs' threat research team. They provide hundreds of out-of-the-box (OOTB) detection content, complementing the customizable detection and monitoring workflows designed to cater to the unique requirements of each organization's security team. Furthermore, Elastic Security provides native endpoint and cloud security features, enhancing visibility and control over critical environments.

Specifically within cloud security, Elastic Security provides a comprehensive suite of capabilities that include Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Native Vulnerability Management (CNVM), and Cloud Workload Protection (CWP). Throughout this blog post, we will delve deeper into how Elastic Security can become the backbone of your cloud security strategy.

As you delve deeper into cloud security, you will realize that your ability to detect and respond to threats hinges on two critical factors: comprehensive visibility and dedicated protection. This is where the power of Elastic Security's Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) capabilities come to the fore, merging the broad reach of log ingestion with the specific vigilance of cloud workload protection.

In this section, we explore the expansive nature of Elastic Security's log ingestion capabilities, and then focus on the granularity of its Cloud Workload Protection. Together, these twin capabilities equip you to monitor and respond to security incidents more effectively, providing an unparalleled blend of wide-ranging visibility and focused security.

Logs serve as a critical resource, illuminating user activities, system anomalies, data transactions, and potential security incidents. Elastic Security stands out in its ability to ingest logs from an extensive range of sources, guaranteeing comprehensive visibility into your cloud environment. Specifically for cloud environments, Elastic supports a wide array of log sources from cloud providers, including but not limited to:

1. API Activity Logs: These logs record all activities related to the use of provider's APIs. This could include user activities, service activities, and so on. This is akin to AWS CloudTrail, GCP Cloud Audit Logs, and Azure Activity Logs.
2. Network Traffic Logs: These logs record all IP traffic going in and out of your network interfaces. They're useful for network monitoring, network forensics, and traffic analytics. They're similar to AWS VPC Flow Logs, GCP VPC Flow Logs, and Azure Virtual Network Flow Logs.
3. Access Logs: These logs keep track of all access and requests made to certain resources like storage buckets. They can provide detailed records for each request, such as the requester, bucket name, request time, request action, response status, etc. Similar to AWS S3 Access Logs and GCP Cloud Storage Access Logs.
4. Operational Logs: These logs provide insights into the operation of a resource, including detailed diagnostic traces. They might include things like performance counters, crash dumps, etc. Analogous to Azure's Diagnostic Logs.
5. System and Application Logs: These logs collect data from all of your systems, applications, and cloud services. This could include logs from virtual machines, containers, and any applications running on your services. Similar to AWS CloudWatch Logs, GCP Stackdriver Logging, and Azure Monitor Logs.
6. Function Execution Logs: These logs pertain to serverless compute services like AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions. They provide detailed information about invocations of your functions.

Beyond mere log collection, Elastic Security is delivered OOTB with over 200 detection rules, ranging from simple correlations to sophisticated machine-learning model rules specifically built for these cloud log sources. With these at your disposal, you can proactively detect malicious activities in near real-time.

Recognizing that a blanket detection strategy may not always be optimal, Elastic Security provides unfettered access to our powerful detection engine. This allows you to craft custom detection rules tailored to your unique security requirements. Coupled with our OOTB analytics capabilities, this grants you the freedom to explore and visualize your data in the way that best aligns with your needs — your possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

A crucial element of a robust cloud security strategy is dedicated protection at the workload level. This is where Elastic Security's advanced Cloud Workload Protection capabilities come into play, offering comprehensive monitoring of cloud workloads, both traditional Virtual Machines (VMs) and containerized workloads.

The rationale behind this level of visibility is simple — general cloud provider logs, while insightful, may not provide the level of granular visibility needed for the workloads that handle sensitive operational data. This is where Elastic Security’s cloud workload protection becomes essential.

Utilizing eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter), Elastic Security’s workload protection features monitor workloads at the kernel level, granting an unrivaled depth of insight into the workings at the edge. This granular visibility illuminates the minutiae of a workload's operation that might otherwise be overlooked.

These capabilities go beyond edge-based detection and prevention, including drift prevention, and also feed data back to Elastic for centralized detection and response. This layered approach provides an all-encompassing security net, intercepting potential threats at the edge while centralizing the data for further scrutiny and action.

While log collection provides crucial visibility into your cloud environment, logs alone don't suffice. As the old saying goes, "you can't protect what you don't know," emphasizing the need to go a step further and understand not just the assets that exist in your cloud environment, but their security posture as well. This is where Elastic Security's posture management capabilities shine.

Configuring cloud services often involves navigating through complex interfaces and settings, leading to a high possibility of misconfigurations. These misconfigurations, while seeming innocuous, can create potential gateways for cyber attacks. Elastic Security's robust Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) feature is a powerful tool that aids users in consistently monitoring and managing their cloud configurations. With CSPM, you can align your cloud configurations with recognized security best practices, thereby mitigating potential threats and reducing your attack surface.

One of the key strengths of Elastic Security lies in its ability to break down data silos. As a modern consolidated security operations platform, it provides a unified view of on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments. This means that users benefit from a “single pane of glass” when assessing the risks across their various environments, enhancing their ability to understand and respond to these risks effectively.

Whether you are utilizing Elastic Security’s native cloud and endpoint security capabilities or not, Elastic Security's native cloud and endpoint security capabilities, the platform's superior security analytics layer offers a unique advantage. With OOTB integrations, users can easily ingest data from third-party vendors, transforming Elastic Security into their modern, consolidated security operations platform or “security data lake.” This flexibility allows organizations to tailor Elastic Security to their specific needs and security goals, demonstrating its adaptability in the rapidly evolving landscape of cyber security.