Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Competing for cloud security talent—win without the fight (PRT043)

Summary

The speaker, with over five years of experience at AWS in cybersecurity, discusses the challenges of hiring cloud security talent.
AWS's complexity is increasing, making it difficult to find experts who can normalize data from CloudTrail, VPC flow logs, and Config to extract insights and identify threats.
The speaker introduces Optics' solution, which focuses on cloud detection and response (CDR), to alleviate the need for specialized security resources.
CDR aims to understand data, identify threat behaviors, and provide context for API connections between services.
The speaker emphasizes the difficulty for even senior security engineers to understand and respond to sophisticated threats like privilege escalation and data exfiltration.
Optics' approach involves thinking like a threat actor and providing customers with contextual and actionable outcomes, including remediation steps.
The solution maps out patterns of API calls that could indicate threats, such as privilege escalation or data exfiltration, and presents them in an understandable format.
The goal is to allow companies to focus on their core business rather than becoming security experts, by outsourcing the complexity of cloud security threat detection to Optics.

The increasing complexity of AWS services and the vast amount of data generated make it challenging for companies to find and retain cloud security experts who can effectively manage and secure their cloud environments.
There is a growing need for tools and services that can simplify the process of threat detection and response in the cloud, as evidenced by the introduction of cloud detection and response (CDR) solutions like the one offered by Optics.
The speaker's approach suggests a shift in the industry towards managed security services, where third-party providers handle the intricacies of cloud security, allowing businesses to allocate their resources to other areas.
The use of automated systems to detect patterns and anomalies in API calls and logs can significantly reduce the time and expertise required to identify and respond to security incidents.
The presentation highlights the importance of contextualizing security alerts and providing actionable intelligence, which can help organizations respond more effectively to potential threats.
The analogy of mapping out roads, as Google Maps did, to the process of identifying and responding to cloud security threats suggests that the industry is still in the early stages of understanding and navigating the complex landscape of cloud security.