Lacework®, the data-driven cloud security firm, announced new capabilities that enable firms to uncover more critical threats to their infrastructure and empower teams to collaborate more efficiently in alert investigation and response. Lacework added automated time series modeling to the existing anomaly detection capabilities of the Polygraph® Data Platform.
How is Lacework improving efficiency amongst teams?
Using automated learning and behavioural analytics, the time series model builds a baseline of the volume and frequency of activity in a client’s environment and monitors for deviations from that unique baseline to detect threats like cryptominer attacks and compromised accounts with accuracy. Firms can proactively discover increased cloud usage due to misconfigurations — gaining a better understanding of their environment to control costs.
Lacework does this without the need for constant tuning of thresholds, reducing manual work and false positives. Lacework has also upgraded its alerting experience with features that empower teams to collaborate more efficiently in alert investigation and response.
The enormous amount of activity in the cloud and adoption of new technology makes it difficult to gain visibility into risks, investigate alerts efficiently, and take action, especially when company work teams are siloed into different workstreams and tools. Signature and rules-based approaches can’t keep pace with this dynamic environment and often overwhelm security teams with thousands of contextless alerts across a range of environments.
Polygraph, the Lacework cloud behavioral analytics engine, uses dozens of models to build a baseline of normal behaviors in the cloud. The time series model introduces a new dimension of analysis by tracking changes in activity frequency and volume over time in a cloud environment. It works with the existing models to uncover more anomalies with fewer alerts.
Lacework automatically adjusts the severity of alerts based on continuous learning and a fine-grained understanding of how much the observed behaviours deviate from the predicted baseline for improved accuracy. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, the number of unfilled cybersecurity jobs grew by 350% from 2013-21 with no sign of relief in the next five years.
By consolidating alerts into only those that matter and providing security teams with more context about what is happening across their environment, Lacework allows these overburdened teams to uncover more risks and deal with them more efficiently.
How does the product help firms stay on top of threats?
“It’s critical organisations get transparency as to what is happening across their multicloud environments, but the company’s security teams face a massive challenge keeping up with the dynamic nature of cloud environments while threats like cryptomining continue to proliferate,” commented Frank Dickson, IDC Group Vice President, Security and Trust.
“As an industry plagued by a seemingly insurmountable skills shortage, simply layering more alerts on the SOC does not help. Context matters; context quickly forwards SOC investigations from awareness to understanding by enabling correlations across datasets.”
“Alerts are thus replaced with context rich incidents that are quickly actionable and facilitate outcomes for customers. In the end, secure outcomes are the goal of every SOC.”
How does Lacework address the issue of alert fatigue?
Lacework has also revamped the alerting experience to help organisations better collaborate with teams to prioritise, investigate, and track the status of all alerts. This includes:
- Context-rich insights: Insights give the complete picture, associated events, timelines, and other details, helping firms understand where to focus and make better decisions.
- Configurable bi-directional sync: When teams update an alert on the Lacework user interface or the associated ticket in backend workflow tools like Jira, the alert status is automatically updated on both sides with bi-directional sync for accelerated resolution.
Firms can even give feedback on Lacework alert severity levels, which in turn helps the Polygraph Data Platform learn and optimise modeling to further improve alerting experience.
- Easy to manage alert lifecycle: Teams can easily organise alerts, view tags, filter to see a set of specific alerts, change the state of an alert to indicate whether it needs to be investigated or has been resolved, and add comments to better collaborate with teams.
What were the executive’s thoughts on the product?
“Lacework innovates to deliver features to help clients gain visibility and control needed to stay ahead of the threat landscape,” said Arash Nikkar, VP of Engineering, Lacework.
“The Polygraph Data Platform is the only cloud security solution to combine automated time series analysis with sophisticated cloud behavioural analytics to build baselines that are tailored to a firm’s unique environment. Combined with our enhanced alerting capabilities, we’re making it easier for teams to identify relevant risks and prioritise threats, even as their firm scales, the attack surface grows bigger, and security incidents increase exponentially.”
Time series modeling is available now for Lacework customers in Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments. And also, configurable bi-directional sync enhancements to the Lacework alerting experience are available to select customers in beta.
