Detecting Cloud-Specific Threats
Threats specific to how the cloud works
Cloud environments present attack patterns with no direct equivalent in traditional infrastructure, such as misuse of automated service credentials, abuse of serverless functions for cryptocurrency mining, or exploitation of federated identity configurations between different providers. Detecting these threats requires correlation rules specific to the normal behavior of each cloud platform, distinguishing between legitimate autoscaling activity and an anomalous pattern of mass resource creation that could indicate a compromised account being used for malicious activity at the organization's expense. This matters because security controls designed only for traditional networks usually have blind spots for these cloud-specific vectors. A real, frequent example is an attacker who compromises a credential with limited permissions and uses it exclusively to deploy compute instances for cryptocurrency mining, running up an unexpected bill before being detected.