AWS has announced Amazon GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection, a feature that uses AI/ML capabilities to improve threat detection for your applications, workloads, and data. GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection employs sophisticated AI/ML to identify both known and previously unknown attack sequences, offering a more comprehensive and proactive approach to cloud security. This enhancement addresses the growing complexity of modern cloud environments and the evolving landscape of security threats, simplifying threat detection and response.
Many organizations face challenges in efficiently analyzing and responding to the high volume of security events generated across their cloud environments. With the increasing frequency and sophistication of security threats, it has become more challenging to effectively detect and respond to attacks that occur as sequences of events over time. Security teams often struggle to piece together related activities that might be part of a larger attack, potentially missing critical threats or responding too late to prevent significant impact.
To address these challenges, AWS expanded GuardDuty's threat detection capabilities to include new AI/ML capabilities that correlate security signals to identify active attack sequences in your AWS environment. These sequences can include multiple steps taken by an adversary, such as privilege discovery, API manipulation, persistence activities, and data exfiltration. These detections are represented as attack sequence findings, a new type of GuardDuty finding with critical severity. Previously, GuardDuty had never used critical severity, reserving this level for findings with the utmost confidence and urgency. These new findings introduce critical severity and include a natural language summary of the threat’s nature and significance, observed activities mapped to tactics and techniques from the MITRE ATT&CK® framework, and prescriptive remediation recommendations based on AWS best practices.
GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection introduces new attack sequence findings and improves actionability for existing detections in areas such as credential exfiltration, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration. This enhancement enables GuardDuty to offer composite detections that span multiple data sources, time periods, and resources within an account, providing you with a more comprehensive understanding of sophisticated cloud attacks.
