For folks who are responsible for threat detection of any kind for their organizations, the cloud can often be a difficult area to approach. At the time of writing, Amazon Web Services contains over two hundred services, while the Azure cloud offers six hundred. Each of these services can generate unique telemetry and each surface can present defenders with a unique attack path to handle. Adding to this complexity is the diversity of cloud workload configurations, as well as varying architecture models.

For many years, hackers and cybercriminals have used social engineering techniques to gain unauthorized access to confidential information. It is easy to predict that these attacks will continue to advance in sophistication and frequency. Whether they are using AI to create better lures or cyber criminals are just getting more adept at exploiting human nature, the success of these attacks proves the tactics are winning.

Playbooks — and automated processes in general — used to be associated primarily with security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms, but that has changed recently. Many modern security information and event management (SIEM) solutions have started incorporating SOAR-like functionality, enabling you to automate security workflows and improve your mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR).