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3 stories in the last 7d

Unmasking Cloud Identities: From Behavioral Clustering to Automated Detection

Unit 42 clusters behavior of 40,000+ AWS identities from 125 cloud environments to map functional roles and enable lightweight SQL-based detection.

Palo Alto Unit 42 built an unsupervised behavioral clustering model using UMAP and HDBSCAN on AWS CloudTrail logs to map cloud identities to functional roles such as administrators, backup services, security tooling and DevOps. The study analyzed over 40,000 identities across 125 cloud environments over two months. The researchers show that heuristics extracted from the clustering map can be implemented in standard SQL, enabling role classification at scale without running a continuous ML pipeline. The methodology extends to audit logs from other cloud providers, SaaS and Kubernetes.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 3d agoResearch

Most Firms Unable to Recover Quickly from Ransomware

Fenix24's first State of Recoverability report finds only 0.5% of 800+ ransomware clients neared 24-48 hour recovery targets, with identity failures central.

Drawing on 500+ ransomware recoveries, Fenix24 found only four of 800+ clients (0.5%) came close to their own 24-48 hour recovery targets, and none reached full operations for weeks. 99.2% lacked a documented identity recovery plan, Active Directory typically fell first, and 94% tied backup systems to the compromised directory. In 38% of engagements backups survived but could not carry recovery; storage ran short in 82% of cases and 95% lacked meaningful MFA on critical infrastructure consoles.

Infosecurity Magazine · 1d agoResearch

Turn it off and on again, but for critical infrastructure

KTH researchers trained a reinforcement-learning intrusion response agent on an emulated segmented OT network that autonomously resets hosts and processes to disrupt intruders.

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology built a containerized replica of a segmented industrial network, attacked it across 14 days, and captured 40,000 30-second traffic intervals to train a defense agent under partial observability. The agent observes six packet-count numbers per interval, maintains 500 running state hypotheses, and can reset supervisory hosts, water tank processes, or entire subnets, with resets rebooting the target, renewing credentials, and changing its IP. The best agent approached a full-visibility baseline but depends on an assumed attacker behavior model; the testbed comprised three supervisory hosts, two PLCs, two tanks, weak credentials, and CVE-2017-7494 exposure. The team released its implementation and plans validation on a real industrial testbed with a partner.

Help Net Security · 3d agoResearchCVE-2017-74942· 1 read