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24/7 Cloud Incident Response

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Cloud Incident Response

24/7 Emergency Hotline for cloud incident response: 1 (833) 562-5273

If compromise is active right now: revoke sessions, rotate keys, and contain access paths before an attacker can spread across accounts, subscriptions, projects, and SaaS integrations. Lockard Security can help contain, investigate, and recover while preserving the evidence your insurance, legal counsel, and leadership will need.

Cloud incident response is the structured process of detecting, containing, investigating, and eradicating threats in cloud environments like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, plus the SaaS systems connected to them. Cloud incidents often move fast because attacker actions can create new credentials, new resources, and new persistence paths in minutes. Your priorities should be: contain, investigate, eradicate, and recover in that order.

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What Cloud Incident Response Is

Cloud incident response investigation across AWS Azure and Google Cloud environments
Cloud incident response investigations often span AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, requiring rapid identity, log, and workload containment.

Cloud incident response focuses on identity, permissions, and audit trails. Most cloud compromises are not about a single vulnerable server. They are about stolen credentials, excessive permissions, and persistence through access keys, OAuth grants, service principals, workload identities, and cross-account trust relationships.

Practical reference: NIST guidance on incident handling is a solid baseline for process and reporting: NIST SP 800-61.

Common Cloud Incident Response Scenarios

Compromised IAM user or identity provider

Stolen credentials, MFA fatigue, token theft, or OAuth consent abuse leading to privileged access.

Leaked access keys and secrets

Keys exposed in repos, CI logs, endpoints, shared drives, or third-party tooling used for cloud automation.

Public exposure and misconfiguration

Public storage buckets, open security groups, exposed admin endpoints, and overly permissive firewall rules.

Workload compromise and lateral movement

Compromised VM, container, or Kubernetes workload used to obtain instance metadata credentials and pivot.

Data exfiltration from cloud storage and SaaS

Bulk downloads from S3, Azure Storage, GCS, M365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, or other connected platforms.

Cryptomining and resource abuse

New GPU instances, new clusters, or new billing spikes indicating attacker monetization.

Key point: in cloud incident response, attackers often create new access paths while you are investigating. Containment should focus on identities, tokens, keys, and trust relationships first.

Common Cloud Incident Timelines

Cloud incidents often compress the attacker timeline. A single compromised identity can be used to enumerate resources, create persistence, exfiltrate data, and deploy new infrastructure quickly.

Phase 1: Initial access

Stolen credentials, OAuth abuse, leaked keys, compromised endpoints, or exploited internet-facing services.

Phase 2: Enumeration and privilege escalation

Listing roles, policies, keys, storage, IAM relationships, and admin paths to expand permissions.

Phase 3: Persistence

New access keys, new service principals, new roles, new federation paths, and changes to audit controls.

Phase 4: Data access and operational impact

Exfiltration, destructive changes, ransomware staging, cryptomining, or disabling security services.

The best outcomes come from rapid containment plus clean evidence preservation. If you rotate everything without scoping first, you can lose attribution and miss a persistence path that survives the rotation.

High-Signal Indicators And IOCs For Cloud Incident Response

Cloud incident response works best with behavioral indicators and audit logs. These are high-signal patterns that repeatedly show up across AWS, Azure, and GCP investigations.

Identity and access indicators

  • New access keys, new service principals, or new workload identities created without a change ticket
  • MFA device changes, suspicious conditional access changes, or new trusted locations
  • Role assignments and policy changes that grant admin privileges unexpectedly
  • Unusual sign-ins, unfamiliar devices, impossible travel, or anomalous API usage patterns

Security control and logging indicators

  • Audit logging disabled or modified (CloudTrail, Azure Activity logs, GCP Audit Logs)
  • Security services disabled (GuardDuty, Security Hub, Defender for Cloud, SCC)
  • Alerting rules changed, webhook destinations modified, SIEM forwarding altered

Data access and exfiltration indicators

  • Large volumes of storage reads or downloads from S3, Azure Storage, or GCS
  • Bulk exports from SaaS or data platforms connected to cloud identity
  • New external sharing links, new public ACLs, or cross-account bucket access

Resource abuse indicators

  • New compute resources created rapidly across regions, especially GPU instances
  • Billing spikes, unusual reservations, or increased network egress charges
  • New container workloads or clusters created outside standard pipelines

Example hunt patterns that often matter in cloud compromise cases:

New admin role assignments or policy attachments
New access keys created for existing identities
Logging disabled or retention lowered
Storage made public or shared externally
Unusual egress or bulk download activity
Fastest confirmation path: preserve audit logs, identify the first suspicious identity event, then trace API actions forward in time. That usually reveals persistence and scope quickly.

Our Cloud Incident Response Process

Lockard Security uses a structured cloud incident response process aligned with NIST 800-61, tuned for cloud identity, audit trails, and rapid containment. We focus on scope, persistence removal, and safe recovery.

1) Rapid triage and containment

Stop active access, revoke sessions, isolate impacted workloads, and block known attacker paths.

2) Evidence preservation

Preserve audit logs, key events, and cloud resource state before destructive changes.

3) Investigation and scoping

Build a timeline of identity actions, API calls, resource changes, and data access patterns.

4) Eradication and persistence removal

Remove unauthorized roles, keys, federation paths, and backdoor resources across regions.

5) Recovery and validation

Validate clean workloads, restore guardrails, re-enable logging, and confirm no attacker access remains.

6) Reporting and prevention roadmap

Clear findings and a prioritized plan across IAM, logging, network controls, secrets, and monitoring.

Logs And Data Sources We Commonly Investigate

Cloud incident response is only as strong as your telemetry. We commonly scope incidents using these sources:

  • AWS: CloudTrail, GuardDuty, VPC Flow Logs, CloudWatch logs, IAM Access Analyzer, S3 access logs, Config
  • Azure: Azure Activity logs, Entra ID sign-in and audit logs, Defender for Cloud, NSG flow logs, Azure Monitor
  • GCP: Cloud Audit Logs, VPC Flow Logs, SCC findings, IAM changes, GCS access patterns
  • Kubernetes: audit logs, workload identity usage, container runtime telemetry, cluster control plane events
  • SaaS: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Okta, ticketing, and collaboration audit logs connected to cloud identity
  • Endpoints: EDR telemetry for developer workstations and admin jump hosts where keys and tokens often originate

If retention is short, we prioritize immediate capture to prevent losing the earliest events that define the root cause.

Safe Containment Actions To Prioritize

Cloud containment should be targeted, fast, and evidence-aware. These actions are commonly high-impact and low-risk when coordinated properly.

Revoke sessions and rotate keys

Invalidate tokens, rotate access keys, and rotate secrets tied to CI, infrastructure, and admin identities.

Lock down privileged access paths

Review admin roles, remove unknown role bindings, and reduce standing privileges to stop escalation.

Contain workloads and networks

Isolate compromised instances, restrict egress, and block unexpected outbound destinations.

Preserve audit trails

Export logs, snapshot critical resources where needed, and ensure logging is enabled across all regions.

Important: avoid deleting attacker-created resources until you have captured their configuration and related audit events. Those artifacts often reveal how access was obtained and where persistence still exists.

Cloud Hardening Checklist And Best Practices

Strong cloud security comes from guardrails and visibility. These controls consistently reduce blast radius and shorten detection time.

Identity and access

  • Enforce MFA and conditional access for all privileged users
  • Reduce standing privileges and implement least privilege for roles and service accounts
  • Alert on new keys, new roles, policy attachments, and admin consent events

Logging and detection

  • Enable audit logging across all regions and accounts, and centralize logs into a SIEM
  • Enable managed detections (GuardDuty, Defender for Cloud, SCC) and monitor for disablement
  • Set retention to prevent losing early events that define the root cause

Network and workload protections

  • Restrict egress and segment workloads by trust zone
  • Harden metadata access and protect workload identity usage
  • Implement secrets management and avoid long-lived keys wherever possible
Want a practical plan: we can convert this checklist into a prioritized roadmap aligned to your cloud architecture, tooling, and staffing.
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Cloud Incident Response FAQ

How do cloud attacks usually start?

Most start with identity compromise or leaked secrets. That includes stolen credentials, OAuth abuse, exposed keys, compromised endpoints, or overly permissive access paths that make privilege escalation easy.

Should we rotate everything immediately?

Rotation is usually required, but it should be coordinated with scoping. If you rotate blindly, you can lose evidence and miss a persistence path. We prioritize preserving the timeline first, then rotating with a plan that closes all access paths.

How fast can you help?

If compromise is active, call the hotline. We can guide containment immediately while starting evidence preservation and timeline building.

24/7 Cloud Incident Response Help

If your organization is facing an active cloud compromise, suspicious identity activity, or suspected data access in AWS, Azure, GCP, Microsoft 365, or Google Workspace, contact us immediately. The faster we contain, the less impact you typically absorb.

24/7 Emergency Hotline: 1 (833) 562-5273
Email: [email protected]
Request Cloud Incident Response

If you are still in the early warning stage, we can help validate whether activity indicates cloud compromise and prevent escalation into data loss, destructive changes, or ransomware staging.