Cybersecurity continues to be a top priority in India due to the growing number of cyber-attacks targeting both businesses and government entities. Indian organisations are facing numerous security challenges but cloud security breaches are certainly on the rise. As a result, they need to prioritise modern, proactive cybersecurity solutions to protect against such activities.
According to the CrowdStrike Global Threat Report cloud intrusions surged an alarming 75% in 2023 compared to 2022. An overwhelming 84% of cloud intrusions trace back to eCrime actors, demonstrating their rapid adaptation in exploiting cloud infrastructure and workloads. These cybercriminal groups are operating with unprecedented stealth, leveraging cloud vulnerabilities, identity theft, and deploying social engineering tactics to obtain sensitive data and disrupt operations.
In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud security, it is vital for organizations to adopt a clear and forward-thinking approach. It is important to incorporate both agent and agentless approaches across all stages of the cloud journey, from pre-runtime to the control plane. When it comes to runtime and pre-runtime considerations, organizations should focus on safeguarding running states and seamlessly integrating security measures into development processes. This ensures that security remains a top priority throughout the entire development lifecycle.
Despite the growing importance of cloud security, many organizations still struggle due to the competing priorities of speed-to-market and risk mitigation. Therefore, organizations should adopt comprehensive security solutions that empower them to navigate these challenges effectively.
The dynamic nature of cloud systems and the shared responsibility model pose significant challenges to traditional security tools. To secure the cloud effectively, teams must adopt cloud-native security platforms. These platforms offer runtime workload protection, “shift left” security in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, centralised visibility and analytics, integration with infrastructure as code tools, as well as continuously assessing the cloud control plane for risks and misconfigurations.
However, in the face of such dynamic threats, organisations need protection across the critical areas of enterprise risk – endpoints and cloud workloads, identity and data. They can no longer rely on what we refer to as a ‘good enough’ approach to security. With the increasing sophistication of threats, ‘good enough’ simply does not work. Organizations need the best outcomes, which is stopping the breach and consolidating point solutions to drive down costs. Achieving these outcomes requires a true AI-native security platform, together with the human expertise that CrowdStrike brings, that can protect their assets.
To effectively confront advancing threats, organisations need to:
- Embrace cloud-native protection: With the surge in cloud adoption, businesses must prioritise safeguarding cloud native applications. As outlined above, cloud environments have become prime targets for cyberattacks, necessitating comprehensive visibility into applications and APIs to mitigate misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. Leveraging Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) provide unified visibility, context, and control across an organisation’s entire cloud environment. It can automatically discover cloud assets, monitor communications between services, detect misconfigurations and compliance risks, and identify runtime threats targeting cloud workloads. Integrating a CNAPP is essential to securing cloud migrations by continuously monitoring for risks and protecting workloads across build, deployment and runtime.
- Implement robust multi factor authentication (MFA): In 2023, identity-based and social engineering attacks experienced a sharp uptick due to their high success rates. The repercussions of stolen credentials are swift and severe, granting adversaries immediate access and control – a direct pathway to a breach. To effectively combat these evolving threats, organisations must prioritise implementing phishing-resistant multi factor authentication. Adopting MFA provides critical protection against stolen credentials, which remain a prevalent threat actor. MFA requires users to verify their identity with additional factors such as one-time passcodes, biometric scans, or security keys. Implement MFA across all critical access points including VPNs, email, cloud apps, and privileged accounts. Educate users on enabling MFA and best practices.
- Enhance enterprise visibility: Combatting adversaries who exploit valid credentials requires a holistic view across identity, cloud, endpoint, and data protection telemetry. The proliferation of disparate security tools – averaging 45+ per enterprise – creates data silos and hampers visibility. Consolidating into a unified security platform equipped with AI capabilities streamlines operations, providing comprehensive visibility and facilitating swift breach detection and response.
- Boost operational efficiency: Adversaries move swiftly within compromised environments, demanding agility from defenders. Legacy SIEM solutions fall short in speed, complexity, and cost effectiveness. Therefore, it is important to adopt security platforms that are faster, simpler, and more cost-effective, provide consolidated detection and response capabilities across first and third party domains, and consider 24/7 managed detection and response (MDR) services for enhanced efficiency and threat detection. This reduces dwell time from months to minutes.
- Foster a cybersecurity culture: While technology is pivotal, user awareness remains vital in breach prevention. Initiate user awareness training programs to combat phishing, social engineering, and other threats. Promote a culture of continuous improvement through tabletop exercises and red/blue teaming. Red team simulations reveal response gaps against real-world attacks. Use these results to improve detection and response capabilities. A culture focused on security strengthens readiness against attacks.
With threat actors constantly evolving their tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), organisations must stay agile and use intelligence to inform defenses. Leveraging solutions that enhance visibility, AI and automate processes will be key to cost-effectively fighting today’s advanced threats. But it also takes vigilance, training and collaboration across security teams to beat attackers at their own game.
