SEC541 Has Expanded!
We are excited to announce that the popular SEC541: Cloud Security Attacker Techniques, Monitoring, and Threat Detection class has just been expanded to 5 full sections. The class still has the daily walk through of real attacks against cloud environments, learning how to use AWS and Azure services to investigate suspicious activity in your cloud infrastructure. The class still teaches you how to capture log data and analyze the data in the context of your cloud environment and overall business objectives.
In the expanded 5-section class, an entire section is dedicated to the uniqueness of the Azure environment. Investigate data collected from Microsoft 365 Exchange, use the Azure CLI, learn about the Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Sentinel, learn about the Kusto Query Language. Students will also look at how to take those manual analytic approaches and build automated response actions that are being used to speed up investigations throughout the industry.
SEC541 starts each section 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.
"I enjoyed understanding the real life use cases for each of the topics and how it linked with a known attack (Capital One)." - Shakiya Linley, JP Morgan Chase
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.
"Using the labs was easy with well documented instructions. I like the fact that I could easily copy and paste the commands. This helps me to get through the lab fast but I also know that I can come back later after the course and take the time to review each command." - Ludek Suk, Accenture
The class culminates with a CloudWars challenge: a capture the flag style event where individuals or teams are faced with challenges from throughout the week.
The winning team will get to take home the brand new SEC541 challenge coin!
SYLLABUS SUMMARY:
- Section 1: Detecting adversarial activity in your cloud environment through management plane and network logging & analysis.
- Section 2: Dig deeper into your applications and compute systems running within the cloud environment.
- Section 3: Understanding your deployed cloud environment to easily identify deviation from organizational policy and potential malice.
- Section 4: Deep dive into Azure's ecosystem and the unique threats that can occur.
- Section 5: Learn to automate response actions in your cloud environment and put your new skills to the test in a Capture the Flag event.
SKILLS LEARNED:
- 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
KEY 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
