Reducing Risk In The Cloud with Agentless Vulnerability Management

Last updated at Tue, 20 Aug 2024 20:54:50 GMT

In order to gain visibility into vulnerabilities in their cloud environments, many organizations still rely on agent or network-based scanning technology that was initially built for traditional infrastructure and endpoints.

These methods often struggle to keep up with the speed of change and scale of complex, and constantly changing cloud environments, forcing infrastructure teams to constantly play catch up and avoid significant blindspots caused by unprotected workloads.

Vulnerability management in the cloud starts with continuous discovery of the container images and deployed workloads that may contain them and the supporting resources that control how they are launched.  The assessment step produces  long lists of vulnerabilities that can lack the necessary context to help prioritize and accurately route the issue to the correct owners for remediation.

Learn more about Cloud Risk Management

Getting Better Visibility and Control

Rapid7’s InsightCloudSec now addresses all these challenges and provides agentless vulnerability assessment capabilities for cloud-based container workloads and hosts. Building on InsightCloudSec’s industry leading cloud resource discovery technology, we’ve unleashed the latest generation agentless methods for assessing vulnerabilities on containers and hosts in our customers cloud environments. Combined, this fully enables security teams to quickly identify where the vulnerabilities exist across their cloud infrastructure, what resources are responsible for managing the dynamic workloads that launch them, and the tools to manage response prioritization and remediation.

InsightCloudSec’s vulnerability management  capabilities are  purpose-built for cloud-native environments and leverage Rapid7’s proven vulnerability management expertise and intelligence.  Our agentless approach  reduces the unnecessary overhead of agent management on highly ephemeral cloud resources.

Vulnerability Management with Rapid7’s InsightCloudSec

Vulnerability management with InsightCloudSec focuses on container and host-based workloads found in production environments, where the risk of exploitation is the highest. The solution leverages event-driven detection capabilities, allowing teams to maintain an up-to-the-minute inventory of all resources in production. This in turn minimizes blind spots and allows for more trustworthy reporting.

The solution automatically analyzes new container images and host instances upon deployment and provides detailed intelligence and remediation guidance for known vulnerabilities. InsightCloudSec then periodically revalidates running hosts against the newest vulnerability data to detect and protect against drift.

Our comprehensive vulnerability detection spans operating systems, installed software packages and open-source software libraries and packages typically used as dependencies in these environments, providing customers with the broadest coverage available in the market.

Agentless Container and Host Workload Assessment

With agentless Vulnerability assessment, security teams gain robust, continuous visibility into what vulnerabilities exist in their cloud environment, without having to include an agent in their container and host golden images. We discover new container images and host instances in near-real-time and immediately gather the information necessary to perform the assessment without waiting for a scheduled scan window or impacting the performance of the live workloads.  

When new container images are detected in the deployed workloads, InsightCloudSec pulls the relevant data from the registries and performs a side-scan on them to index the inventory of operating system and installed software packages as well as any other dependent libraries that exist on which we can detect vulnerabilities.

In the same way, once a new running host (VM) instance is detected, InsightCloudSec fetches the workload's runtime storage layer using remote harvesting and automated snapshot triggering to gather the data required for vulnerability assessment.

By combining workloads metadata gathered from cloud provider APIs with container and host vulnerability data, we are able to provide contextualized vulnerability reports and deep visibility of where they exist in cloud environments, allowing security teams to respond to those impacting the most critical applications and cloud accounts.

Conclusion

Rapid7 and InsightCloudSec strive to help security and operation teams apply proper processes and procedures across the deployment pipeline, allowing them to quickly respond to vulnerabilities of any sort and severity.

With an accurate assessment of detected vulnerabilities and intelligent, automated routing for faster remediation, our solution empowers teams to have a robust and continuous visibility into vulnerabilities that exist in their cloud environments.