You may also download a PDF version of this guide.

Product Overview

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed container orchestration service offered by Microsoft Azure, designed to simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications using Kubernetes. AKS offloads the operational overhead of managing the Kubernetes control plane to Azure, allowing developers to focus on building applications rather than managing complex infrastructure.  The service integrates natively with other Azure services for identity and access management, security, and monitoring. It provides features like automatic upgrades, node repair, and scaling to create a resilient and highly available environment for production workloads. AKS supports both Linux and Windows containers and can be used for various scenarios, from deploying microservices to running machine learning models at scale.

Detection Strategy for Cloud Integrations

Detection

Our cloud security detection strategy focuses on two common signal types at the control plane and resource levels: authentication events and API events. In limited cases, we also ingest certain data plane events such as network activity. We do this by integrating directly with cloud providers as well as cloud security service providers to gain a complete view of your cloud footprint.

We consume these events through a mix of raw log analysis and security alert processing, which are then run through our detection engine to look for signs of post-exploitation activity. When a threat is detected, our automated response bot, Ruxie, takes action by enriching evidence fields with first- and third-party threat intelligence. Additional Ruxie actions query a wide span of technologies in order to directly arm analysts with key pieces of investigative information and related events.

Response

In addition to verbose evidence collection for cloud alerts, cloud technologies are useful for triaging SaaS and identity alerts as well. User activities within the cloud providers, along with related alerts for anomalous indicators, help analysts gain a full picture of the activity that occurred within a session.

To learn more about our overall approach to detection strategy, see About Detection Strategy.

What We Support for Azure Kubernetes Service

To see a comprehensive list of the most up-to-date Expel detection rules, vendor detection rules, opt-in detections, and available DUETs (did you expect this) that we support for Azure Kubernetes Service, you can visit the Detections page in Workbench or ask your Sales or Support rep for the most recent download.

Additional Details and Common Questions

Console Access

A vendor alert does not typically include all of the contextual timeline activity surrounding the event of interest. Because this integration does not allow us to get all necessary data via the API, we will ask you for a certain level of console access during onboarding.

The level of access that we require is meant to support essential triage and research activities, and to help us determine the vector and extent of attacker activity for an identified threat. At minimum, we will ask for visibility into alert data, timeline events recorded, and live response/real time response shell (if applicable).

DUET

A DUET (did you expect this) rule flags certain events as needing an immediate verification or notification, and bypasses the normal internal event triage process. The events subject to DUET rules contain behaviors that are not typically indicative of true security incidents, as they are related to policy violations or potential risk.

There are a number of workflows that a DUET may follow. When enabled, the activity will be flagged for investigation and will be routed to you (rather than to us) to take a specified first action. To see the specific DUET rules currently supported for this integration, visit the Detections page.