sans.org/sec541 • Discover how to take this course: Online, In-Person SEC541: Cloud Security Attacker Techniques, Monitoring, and Threat Detection Attackers can run but not hide. Our radar sees all threats. SEC541 is a cloud security course that investigates how attackers are operating against Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure environments, the attacker’s characteristics, and how to detect and investigate suspicious activity in your cloud infrastructure. You will learn how to spot the malice and investigate suspicious activity in your cloud infrastructure. In order to protect against cloud environment attacks, an organization must know which types of attacks are most likely to happen in your environment, be able to capture the correct data in a timely manner, and be able to analyze that data within the context of their cloud environment and overall business objectives. SEC541 starts each day by walking through a real-world attack campaign against a cloud infrastructure. We will break down how it happened, what made it successful, and what could have been done to catch the attackers in the act. After dissecting the attacks, we learn how to leverage cloud native and cloud integrated capabilities to detect, threat hunt, or investigate similar attacks in a real environment, and building our arsenal of analytics, detections and best practices. The course dives into the AWS and Azure services, analyzing logs and behaviors and building analytics that the students can bring back to their own cloud infrastructure. Business Takeaways • Decrease the average time an attacker is in your environment • Demonstrate how to automate analytics, thus reducing time • Help your organization properly set up logging and configuration • Decreases risk of costly attacks by understanding and leveraging cloud specific security services • Lessen the impact of breaches that do happen • Learn how to fly the plane, not just the ability to read the manual Hands-on Training The labs in this course are hands-on explorations into AWS and Azure logging and monitoring services. About 75% of labs are AWS and 25% Azure. Each lab will start by researching a particular threat and the data needed to detect it. In most labs, the students will conduct the attack against their accounts, generating the logs and data needed to perform analysis. Students will use native AWS and Azure services and open-source products to extract, transform, and analyze the threat. The course lecture coupled with the labs will give students a full picture of how those services within AWS & Azure work, the data they produce, common ways to analyze the data, and walk away with the ability to discern and analyze similar attacks in their own cloud environment. • SECTION 1: SEC541 environment deployment, analyzing cloud API logs with CloudTrail, parsing JSON-formatted logs with JQ, network analysis • SECTION 2: Environment setup, application/OS log lab with OpenCanary, CloudWatch agent and customization, strange ECS behavior, finding data exfiltration • SECTION 3: Metadata services and GuardDuty, cloud inventory, discovering sensitive data in unapproved location with Macie, vulnerability assessment with Inspector, data centralization with Graylog • SECTION 4: Microsoft 365 Exchange investigation, introduction to Kusto Query Language, log analytics analysis using Azure CLI, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Sentinel, Azure network traffic analysis • SECTION 5: Setup the automate forensics workflow, analyze the results, participate in the CloudWars Challenge You Will Be Able To • Research attacks and threats to cloud infrastructure and how they could affect you • Break down a threat into detectable components • Effectively use AWS and Azure core logging services to detect suspicious behaviors • Make use of cloud native API logging as the newest defense mechanism in cloud services • Move beyond the cloud-provided Graphic User Interfaces to perform complex analysis • Perform network analysis with cloud- provided network logging • Understand how application logs can be collected and analyzed inside the cloud environment • Effectively put into practice the AWS and Azure security specific services • Integrate container, operating system, and deployed application logging into cloud logging services for more cohesive analysis • Centralize log data from across your enterprise for better analysis • Perform inventory of cloud resources and sensitive data using scripts and cloud native tooling • Analyzing Microsoft 365 activity to uncover threats • Ability to leverage cloud native architecture to automate response actions to attacks Authors’ Statement “Cloud service providers are giving us new tools faster than we can learn how to use them. As with any new and complex tool, we need to get past the surface-level 1how-to in order to radically reshape our infrastructure. This course is an overview of the elements of AWS and Azure that we may have used before but are ready to truly explore. By the end of the class, you ll be confident knowing that you have the skills to start looking for the threats and building a true threat detection program in AWS and Azure.” — Shaun McCullough and Ryan Nicholson 5 Day Program 30 CPEs Laptop Required GCTD Cloud Threat Detection giac.org/gctd