Cloud Security’s Dirty Secret: The “Set It and Forget It” Myth Just Blew Up in Our Faces

Look, I’ve been in this game long enough to smell a tech industry fairy tale when I see one. Remember when cloud migration was sold as the ultimate security panacea? “Just move to the cloud and let AWS/Azure/Google handle all that pesky security stuff.” Yeah, about that…

The reality is brutal: dynamic infrastructure, overlapping APIs, container sprawl, and multi-cloud architectures have created a perfect storm of blind spots that would make even the most seasoned security pro break into a cold sweat.

The Network Visibility Wake-Up Call

Here’s what nobody tells you about cloud security: when attackers start bypassing your fancy EDR tools (and trust me, they are), you’re going to find yourself desperately wishing you had better network visibility.

Vince Stoffer, Field CTO at Corelight, nails it: “Our cloud research team understands how the sheer volume of API calls and the constant addition of new services across cloud providers make log standardization and analysis a real challenge.”

Translation? Every cloud provider speaks a different language, and your security team is stuck playing UN interpreter during a crisis.

Why Network Telemetry Is Your Secret Weapon

The beauty of network telemetry is that it’s the universal translator of the cloud world. While AWS might call it one thing and Azure another, network traffic patterns remain consistent across the board.

Most cybersecurity analysts already speak “network data” fluently. When cloud telemetry speaks the same language, they can spot suspicious patterns faster than you can say “data breach.”

This is where Network Detection and Response (NDR) becomes your new best friend. It delivers consistent, real-time visibility across multi- and hybrid-clouds, normalizing telemetry between environments like a boss.

The Adversary Patterns You Need to Know

As cloud deployments get more complex, the threats evolve but the fundamentals stay the same. Even those fancy short-lived workloads still follow predictable patterns. Here’s what to watch for:

External communications for data exfiltration – Attackers love to maintain command-and-control over unusual ports and protocols

Deviations in production containers – Those immutable, consistent workloads suddenly acting weird? Red flag

Disabled host-based sensors – When adversaries with admin access start turning off your monitoring tools, you’ve got problems

Enumeration and discovery activity – Attackers mapping your resources like they’re planning a heist

The Threats Hiding in Your Cloud Traffic

Using traffic mirroring and virtual taps, network-level telemetry collection is largely tamper-resistant and offers visibility independent of host integrity. Combine this with endpoint data and container runtime data, and you’ve got a comprehensive security picture.

The threats you’ll see include:

Supply chain compromises – Malicious container images and packages dropping cryptominers that beacon to pools

Infostealer-led intrusions – Stolen credentials or session tokens enabling console/API access

Interactive admin tooling in containers – SSH, RDP, or VNC in immutable production environments? Suspicious AF

Misuse of managed services and data egress – Connections to new regions, unfamiliar APIs, or sudden outbound volume spikes

Coinminers communicating with mining pools – Attackers abusing your cloud resources to mine cryptocurrency

What to Monitor (and How to Do It Right)

If you’re convinced that network monitoring is key to cloud security (and you should be), here’s your monitoring checklist:

East-west and north-south traffic – Intra-cloud communications and internet ingress/egress

Container traffic (Kubernetes) – Identifying deviations after application deployment

TLS metadata – SNI, certificate subjects to reveal managed service endpoints

DNS Data – Identifying communications with malicious domains and network tunneling

Flow logs and traffic mirroring/pcap – For breadth and depth

Building Your Cloud Security Workflow

Here’s your step-by-step guide to cloud security that actually works:

Start with flow logs and traffic mirroring – Understand their latency and fidelity so you know what each source can and can’t tell you.

Pull cloud network telemetry into a single platform – Standardize it and enrich it with cloud inventory and tags so context travels with the data.

Establish and tune baselines – By role, service, port, and known external peers. Alert on new destinations, ports, or protocols.

Monitor egress tightly – Instrument VPC/VNet egress and add node-level viewpoints to look for newly observed domains or IPs.

Profile managed-service access via TLS metadata – Alert on first-seen APIs, endpoints, or regions per workload.

Hunt for miner footprints – Connections to known pools and characteristic protocols.

Flag interactive protocols in containers – SSH/RDP/VNC and lateral movement patterns within clusters.

Correlate endpoint compromises – If a user device is breached, pivot to cloud egress for matching infrastructure and behaviors.

Continuous validation – Emulate adversaries to confirm you can detect infostealers, cryptomining, C2, and suspicious admin behavior.

The Bottom Line

Multi-cloud security isn’t just achievable—it’s essential. As attackers lean on AI and slip past trusted controls, network visibility isn’t optional. It’s the foundation for understanding your environment and catching threats before anomalies become incidents, on the ground or in the cloud.

This article was inspired by a conversation between Richard Bejtlich, Corelight’s strategist and author in residence, and David Burkett, Corelight’s cloud security researcher, on Corelight’s DefeNDR podcast series.

To learn how Corelight’s Open NDR Platform unifies cloud and network evidence for fast, effective detection and response, explore more at Corelight.com/elitedefense

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