The Google Cloud Security Foundations webinar series showcases how IT and security leaders can use Google Cloud Security solutions and best practices to lay the groundwork for a resilient, adaptable, and scalable cloud security framework. Each piece will serve as a deep dive into a specific use case for Google Cloud Security solutions.

Cloud Security benefits from built-in security approach

Organizations are rapidly adopting cloud environments due to their agility and scalability. However, traditional security tools, designed for static network perimeters, struggle to adapt to the dynamic and distributed nature of the cloud. The cloud's fluidity, with its constantly changing services, resources, and identities, renders traditional perimeter security ineffective. The scale and complexity of cloud environments also pose a challenge, as traditional tools can't keep up with the vast array of cloud services and their unique security requirements.  Many traditional security solutions are not cloud-native, limiting their visibility into cloud configurations and hindering their ability to assess attack paths and risks. This necessitates a new approach to cloud security that embraces dynamism, scale, and a native understanding of the cloud ecosystem.

Limitations with Static Rules Used to Determine Cloud Risks

As organizations migrated to the cloud, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools emerged, aiming to address some of the limitations of traditional security solutions. However, CSPM and newer Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) tools typically rely on static rules for risk analysis. Let’s look at an analogy to understand the limitations of this approach. Imagine a city's security system based solely on static rules. This would be like having a list of known criminals and their descriptions, and police only responding when someone matching those descriptions is spotted. There would be fixed checkpoints at major intersections, and alarms triggered only when specific doors are forced open, but systems would overlook more complex scenarios where known checkpoints are bypassed. And when things get busy, systems can be easily overwhelmed with many minor alarms. Such a system is based only on predefined knowledge and known threats.

In the same vein, traditional security tool’s reliance on static rules to detect misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and potential threats often leads to "alert fatigue," where the sheer number of alerts makes it difficult for security teams to identify and prioritize truly critical risks.

When static rules for cloud security are used for identifying "toxic combinations," they often miss novel threats due to their reliance on predefined scenarios, requiring significant manual updates as threats evolve. Similarly, traditional attack path analysis based on static rules fails to account for dynamic cloud environments, more complex attack scenarios, and "unknown unknowns," leading to a false sense of security and leaving hidden attack vectors undetected.

What is Virtual Red Teaming?

Now, imagine a city security force where they simulate a multitude of potential attack scenarios. This would be like running regular, large-scale drills where security experts act as criminals, trying to breach security in various ways. They might try new tactics, exploit weaknesses in the system, or coordinate attacks. The city then analyzes these simulations to identify vulnerabilities and improve its defenses.

Advantages:

• The system uncovers "unknown unknowns" – weaknesses and attack vectors that weren't previously considered.


• It provides a dynamic and realistic assessment of security effectiveness.


• It allows the city to proactively improve its defenses before a real attack occurs.

To overcome the limitations of static rules and provide a more comprehensive and proactive approach to cloud security, we developed Virtual Red Teaming. Virtual Red Teaming can be compared to traditional human-led security red teams, which are composed of ethical hackers who covertly breach environments to identify weaknesses in an organization's security posture. 

Even though human-led red teaming has some advantages of being covert to purposely catch security teams off guard, much like a real attack, they still have limitations for being time-consuming and limited in scope due to the finite resources of the red team. They typically occur periodically, providing a snapshot of the security posture at a specific point in time, which can quickly become outdated in the rapidly changing cloud environment.

Virtual Red Teaming takes the best practices of human red team expertise – assuming the role of an external attacker and identifying potential compromise paths – and scales it massively by running millions of computer simulations against a dynamic model of the cloud environment. This allows for a much broader and more frequent assessment of potential risks, uncovering a wider range of vulnerabilities and attack paths than would be feasible with traditional methods.

Security Command Center - Virtual Red Teaming and More

Google Cloud's Security Command Center (SCC) provides end-to-end cloud security designed to help organizations find and fix security issues and detect and respond to threats. SCC goes beyond traditional CSPM capabilities by integrating advanced features, including Virtual Red Teaming, to provide a holistic and proactive approach to risk prioritization and remediation. SCC offers three key values: advanced protection for Google Cloud environments, advanced protection for AI, and advanced capabilities for risk management.

Virtual Red Teaming, built directly into SCC, plays a crucial role in delivering enhanced capabilities for risk prioritization and remediation. By continuously simulating attacks against a digital twin model of a customer's unique cloud environment, virtual red teaming identifies high-risk security issues that could lead to significant business impact. This includes uncovering toxic combinations that are unique to your environment vs. generic combinations that come from static rules. Furthermore, virtual red teaming generates detailed attack paths, visualizing the sequence of unique steps an attacker could take to reach and compromise valuable cloud resources in your specific environment. Compared to static analysis which repeatedly surfaces the same attack paths as everyone else over and over again.

The insights provided by Virtual Red Teaming, such as attack path details, risk scoring, and the identification of toxic combinations, are then used to prioritize remediation efforts, ensuring that security teams focus on the risks that truly matter. SCC also integrates automated case management and the ability to attach out-of-the-box and custom playbooks, enabling security teams to take direct action on identified cloud issues and streamline the remediation process. The integration of Google Threat Intelligence, including Mandiant's frontline threat intelligence, further enriches the risk scoring and prioritization, providing context based on real-world attack trends.

Benefits of Virtual Red Teaming

Let’s look at how Virtual Red Teaming compares to both traditional human-led red teaming and approaches relying solely on static rules.

Compared to human-led red teaming, Virtual Red Teaming offers several key advantages:

• Continuous and Scalable: Runs millions of attack simulations, providing a far more frequent and comprehensive assessment than periodic human-led exercises.


• Wider Coverage: By leveraging large scale computer simulations, virtual red teaming can explore millions of potential attack permutations, uncovering a wider range of vulnerabilities and attack paths than human testers alone.


• Discovery of "Unknown, Unknowns": Can identify novel and unforeseen attack vectors that may not be covered by predefined rules or the specific expertise of a human red team.


• Cost effective: While human-led red teaming can be expensive, virtual red teaming offers a more cost-effective solution for continuous and comprehensive security assessment.


• Immediately Actionable: Findings are directly integrated into SCC, providing actionable insights within the security team's existing workflow and enabling quicker remediation.

Compared to relying solely on static rules, Virtual Red Teaming provides a more dynamic and adaptive approach to cloud security:

• Proactive Risk Identification: Actively simulates attacks to discover potential vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, rather than passively relying on rules to detect known issues.


• Contextual Understanding of Risk: Analyzes the interconnectedness of cloud resources and identifies multi-stage attack paths and toxic combinations, providing a richer understanding of the true risk posed by individual security findings.


• Adaptable to Dynamic Environments: Continuously assesses the evolving cloud environment, ensuring that its simulations and risk assessments remain relevant as resources are added, removed, or reconfigured.


• Reduced Alert Fatigue: By prioritizing risks based on real attack simulations and potential impact, VRT helps security teams focus on the most critical issues, reducing the noise of irrelevant alerts.


• Improved Remediation Prioritization: The detailed attack paths and risk scoring enable security teams to understand the potential impact of vulnerabilities and prioritize remediation efforts accordingly.

Arm Your Security Team with Virtual Red Teaming

Traditional security approaches and static rules are inadequate for the dynamic cloud environment. They lead to alert fatigue and fail to identify new threats. Virtual Red Teaming , a part of Google Cloud's Security Command Center, offers a solution. By using large scale machine simulation to explore millions of potential attack paths, virtual red teaming proactively identifies and prioritizes risks. Unlike static rules, it can uncover unknown threats and provide a comprehensive understanding of an organization's security posture, enabling a proactive security approach.

Watch our webinar to learn more about proactive cloud security with Virtual Red Teaming.

The Google Cloud Security Foundations webinar series showcases how IT and security leaders can use Google Cloud Security solutions and some best practices to lay the groundwork for a resilient, adaptable, and scalable cloud security framework. Each piece serves as a deep dive into a specific use case for Google Cloud Security solutions. 

If you’d like to learn more about how these solutions secure a specific part of your cloud environment, check out the rest of our series here.