Full Report
Providing unconditional visibility into your environment
Analysis Summary
# Best Practices: Achieving Unconditional Cloud Visibility via Agentless Detection
## Overview
These practices focus on eliminating critical visibility blind spots in cloud environments, specifically targeting assets where traditional security agents cannot be deployed (e.g., virtual appliances, vendor-managed systems, or performance-sensitive workloads). The core strategy is leveraging agentless scanning capabilities, such as log collection and deep context correlation, to achieve 100% asset coverage for threat detection and investigation.
## Key Recommendations
### Immediate Actions (High Priority)
1. **Identify Unmonitored Assets:** Inventory all critical virtual appliances (firewalls, network gateways) and vendor-managed workloads within the cloud environment that currently lack security agent coverage.
2. **Assess Critical Vulnerability Exposure:** Immediately check existing vulnerability management systems against newly reported critical agentless vulnerabilities (e.g., PAN-OS) to determine the current level of exposure on unmonitored appliances.
3. **Enable Agentless Log Collection:** Activate agentless workload detection capabilities (where available) to begin automatically collecting local logs from difficult-to-monitor virtual appliances.
### Short-term Improvements (1-3 months)
1. **Integrate Local Logs into Central Telemetry:** Ensure that all collected local appliance/workload logs are promptly ingested into a centralized data lake (e.g., Wiz Signals).
2. **Establish Correlation Rules:** Configure or enable systems to correlate ingested local workload logs with existing cloud control plane events and runtime signals from agent-based sensors or cloud-native tools.
3. **Prioritize Security Team Training:** Train SecOps and Incident Response (IR) teams on how to query and analyze the newly available deep workload log data for investigations on traditionally "black box" assets.
### Long-term Strategy (3+ months)
1. **Achieve 100% Coverage Mandate:** Formulate a security architectural goal to use agentless methods to achieve comprehensive visibility across the entire environment, specifically targeting 100% coverage for non-agent-deployable assets.
2. **Holistic Kill-Chain Mapping:** Continuously refine threat detection capabilities to map the complete cloud kill-chain, leveraging correlated agentless signals (log data) with network data and cloud context to detect complex lateral movement.
3. **Integrate Agentless Data into Platform:** Standardize on a unified cloud detection and response (CDR) platform that natively integrates agentless workload data, ensuring all security insights reside in a single graph/contextual view, eliminating silos between monitored and unmonitored assets.
## Implementation Guidance
### For Small Organizations
- **Focus on Appliance Hardening:** Use agentless visibility primarily to identify critical, internet-facing virtual appliances and ensure they remain patched or migrated from known-vulnerable software versions immediately.
- **Leverage Cloud-Native Detection:** Where agent deployment is complex, rely heavily on cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) services supplemented by agentless log ingestion for immediate, high-signal security telemetry.
### For Medium Organizations
- **Pilot Contextual Correlation:** Select a critical layer of vendor-managed systems (e.g., load balancers or specific virtual firewalls) and pilot the correlation of their local logs against network traffic logs to build robust detection stories.
- **Define Frictionless Policy:** Establish clear organizational policies mandating that new infrastructure deployments must meet a minimum visibility threshold, utilizing agentless methods where traditional agent deployment is explicitly disallowed or impractical.
### For Large Enterprises
- **Standardized Data Ingestion Pipeline:** Implement enterprise-wide standards for the ingestion, normalization, and long-term retention of agentless local logs, treating this data source with the same rigor as traditional endpoint detection and response (EDR) data.
- **Dedicated IR Playbooks for Appliances:** Develop specific incident response playbooks dedicated to artifacts found in appliance logs, ensuring IR teams have clear procedures for evidence collection and forensic analysis when access is strictly controlled by vendors.
## Configuration Examples
*Note: Specific product configurations are proprietary, but the conceptual configuration goals are:*
1. **Virtual Appliance (e.g., Firewall/Gateway Instance):** Configure the appliance OS or management plane to stream required security and system logs (e.g., Syslog, audit logs) directly through the cloud provider's logging service (e.g., CloudWatch, Azure Monitor) or directly to the security platform's log ingestion endpoint.
2. **Agentless Platform Configuration:** Set the security platform scan policy to prioritize full snapshot collection and local file/log access for all identified workload types flagged as 'Virtual Appliance' or 'Vendor Managed'.
3. **Correlation Setting:** Configure detection rules to trigger an alert only when a specific sequence is observed: (1) Network ingress anomaly detected via cloud network flow logs, **AND** (2) Corresponding authentication failure or process execution trace found in the agentlessly collected local log from the targeted appliance.
## Compliance Alignment
- **NIST CSF:** Identify (ID.AM, ID.SC) – Achieving full coverage directly maps to understanding the assets (ID.AM) and understanding the security state (ID.SC). Detect (DE.AE) – Enhanced log ingestion improves the ability to detect anomalous activity.
- **ISO 27001/27002:** A.8.1, A.12.4 – Effective monitoring and logging necessitate capturing activity across **all** in-scope information systems, regardless of agent deployment feasibility.
- **CIS Workbench:** Control 1 (Inventory and Control of Enterprise Assets) – Agentless visibility ensures the security program maintains a complete and accurate inventory, which is fundamental for all other controls.
## Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- **Treating Agentless Data as Secondary:** Do not assume collected appliance logs are "less reliable" than agent logs; leverage them precisely where agents cannot go. Overlooking this data forfeits visibility into high-risk assets.
- **Ignoring Context Correlation:** Merely collecting logs without integrating them into the broader cloud context (Graph, Control Plane events) results in noise, not actionable threats. The value is in the correlation.
- **Performance Over-Correction:** Avoiding agent adoption due to perceived performance impact is valid, but failing to implement **any** mechanism for hidden assets leads to severe security coverage gaps (the 'unmonitorable' liability). Balance necessity with agentless alternatives.
## Resources
- **Agentless Security Frameworks:** Consult documentation from major cloud security vendors detailing their framework for agentless inventory and blind spot analysis.
- **Cloud Security Architecture Guides:** Review best practices from AWS, Azure, and GCP regarding their native logging mechanisms (e.g., exporting VPC Flow Logs, CloudTrail/Activity Logs) as prerequisites for successful agentless log ingestion.
- **Incident Response Playbook Templates:** Search for IR templates specifically addressing forensic collection on network appliances where direct host access is restricted.