Introducing simplified end-to-end TDIR for Chronicle

As cloud adoption continues to grow, so too does the number of cloud-born security threats. However, cloud environments can present significant opportunities to improve security with the right tools and processes in place.

When it comes to effective threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) in the cloud, modern solutions must ensure that the entire security operations workflow — from data analysis through detection to response — are working in tandem to deliver the insights, context, and processes needed for cyber defenders to respond to threats with speed and precision. 

At Google Cloud, we believe that modern security operations should rely less on customer engineering and more on packaged outcomes delivered by solution providers. With this in mind, we are excited to announce today at our annual Security Summit that Chronicle Security Operations now provides turnkey TDIR for Google Cloud. By integrating with our cloud-focused Security Command Center Premium (SCC) and Google Cloud telemetry, Chronicle can collect and analyze data from Google Cloud, detect and investigate threats, and automate responses to mitigate risks.

In our recent State of Cloud Threat Detection and Response Survey, 71% of respondents said that “entire classes of threats are eliminated by migrating to the cloud,” and 82% stated that “the cloud affords the ability to process more data, including on-prem data, which can improve detection across the board.” 

To take advantage of all that the cloud can do for security, organizations should to do more than “lift and shift” their existing security tools and processes to the cloud. The cloud presents a different attack surface, often across several cloud services and data repositories, and each can have different attack tactics, potential misconfigurations, and context.  

This update to Chronicle helps enable teams to:

• Detect with confidence. Out-of-the-box detection rule sets developed by Google threat researchers surface cloud attack vectors and provide high fidelity, contextualized alerts that quickly give insight into potential threats in your Google Cloud environment. 

• Investigate with full context. Visualize threat storylines, complete with cloud-specific context that is correlated with additional data and context from across your environment for fast and efficient investigations.

• Respond with speed and precision. Streamline workflows and automate response actions with prebuilt playbooks and best practices designed specifically for Google Cloud. Chronicle SOAR’s case management and team collaboration help ensure fast and timely response.

• Simplify data ingestion. Chronicle automatically ingests, normalizes and contextualizes cloud telemetry from a variety of Google Cloud services (such as Cloud Asset Inventory, Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Compute Engine, cloud audit logs, and Cloud DLP), reducing the need for complex and time-consuming engineering.

Putting Google Cloud TDIR to work 

Let’s take a closer look at how our end-to-end cloud TDIR workflow manages a potential Google Cloud attack. 

Setting up cloud TDIR in Chronicle only takes a few clicks. Security Command Center’s built-in threat detection identifies attacks against Google Cloud resources. These findings, as well as audit, NAT, DNS, and firewall logs, are ingested into Chronicle to provide additional insight and context into Google Cloud threats.

Chronicle now provides detection rules for Google Cloud threats. These rules correlate SCC findings with Chronicle’s advanced detection engine to reveal the broad scope of malicious activity, giving you visibility and more contextual information into what’s going on in your environment. In our example, Chronicle alerts on suspicious activity that can indicate an attempt to exfiltrate data from BigQuery.

The new Chronicle Alert Graph surfaces key details of primary alerts you’re investigating in seconds. Combining cloud alerts and telemetry and correlating that with vital context from other sources (such as user data, endpoint data, and threat intelligence,) you can explore the visual representation of an alert’s relationship to other alerts and entities, dig into the potential attack paths, get quick summaries of implicated security artifacts, and pivot into your Google Cloud Console to do a deeper dive into potentially-impacted resources.  

In our example, we can see a BigQuery exfiltration event associated with a customer and that it’s associated with a particular service account tied to a Google Cloud org. Alert context below tells us more about what’s been impacted. It shows us that cloud credentials in the form of encryption keys and email addresses were associated with the event.

Chronicle case management automatically groups any related alerts into threat-centric cases, uniting the information that matters and making it simple for you to see and understand the scope of the event. 

In our example, Chronicle groups these alerts together based on common source address and username, and the case wall provides the summary of the alerts and actions that are taking place across the entire case.

Chronicle playbooks, designed specifically for Google Cloud, automate your desired response processes. In our example, when an alert was generated a playbook automatically ran through predefined steps that gathered data, enrichment, and took automated remediation steps to prevent this service account and instance from continuing.

Ready to detect with confidence, investigate with broad context, respond with speed and precision, and simplify data ingestion? Chronicle Security Operations is your go-to for turnkey, end-to-end threat detection, investigation, and response on Google Cloud.    

Tune in to our Security Summit session to learn more and see a demo of the new Google Cloud TDIR capabilities.