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As cyber threats continue to evolve, enterprise security teams are under growing pressure to rapidly identify and mitigate cloud and SaaS-based attacks. Two concepts have emerged as cornerstones of a robust defense strategy: Cloud Detection and Cloud Hunting. However, a misunderstanding or underestimation of these concepts can leave organizations vulnerable to sophisticated attacks.

When it comes to today’s active, dynamic cloud threat landscape filled with targets from IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), to PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service), the conventional methods of managing incident response (IR) are increasingly falling short. Mitiga’s platform was born from this realization.

Cybersecurity has been with us for decades, yet it’s still a young and maturing industry—and not surprisingly. Every enterprise that cybersecurity supports is still moving along their own digital transformation journey. Some are in the early stages, lifting and shifting their on-prem workloads to the cloud. Others are well along the path, taking on new SaaS (Software as a Service) applications and developing their own cloud-native solutions to serve customers better, build efficiency into their operations, and transact with greater ease.

Incident response (IR) retainers have been a staple for security teams for years. You pay an upfront fee to an IR firm to be "on call" if an incident occurs. The basic idea is that IR experts are ready to parachute in when disaster strikes.

The new financing will help support rapid customer adoption of Mitiga’s IR2 platform, at the forefront of a new wave in cloud investigation and response capabilities.

There’s been a recent surge in cloud ransomware attacks. Examples of such attacks were observed by Sophos X-Ops, which detected the ransomware group BlackCat/ALPHV using a new Sphinx encryptor variant to encrypt Azure storage accounts by employing stolen Azure Storage account keys. The BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware group is the same entity that claimed responsibility for infiltrating MGM’s infrastructure and encrypting more than 100 ESXi hypervisors.

On September 12, 2023, the world woke up to the news ofanother significant cyber-attack, this time on MGM Resorts International, arenowned name in the hotel and casino industry. The incident affected theiroperations across various locations, including iconic Las Vegas.

Cloud environments offer tremendous advantages in agility, scalability, and cost efficiency. However, their dynamic nature also introduces new security challenges compared to traditional on-premises IT. To build true resilience for the inevitability of breaches in the cloud, organizations need to shift their mindset and priorities—starting with accepting the assumption that breaches will occur.

Mitiga's research discovered a significant new post-exploitation security concept: involving the use of Systems Manager (SSM) agent as a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) on Linux and Windows machines, controlling them using another AWS account. We shared our research with the AWS security team and included some of their feedback to this advisory.