Setting up alerts ensures that critical security events such as asset exposure, posture anomalies, missing patches, and compliance violations are detected early.
SanerCloud provides pre-built conditions for each alert that’s based on standard compliance specifications and overall security posture. Response configuration also helps users perform patch remediation tasks as needed.
Risks of Not Receiving Cloud Security Alerts
With cloud configurations and services always changing, failing to have an adequate alerting system leads to misconfigurations going unnoticed, unexpected modifications in crucial files or configurations, suspicious activity going unnoticed, and compliance violations turning into breaches.
By putting cloud security alerting into practice, anomalies, policy violations, and possible threats can be found before they become major incidents.
Trigger Points for Alerts
Alerts are typically triggered based on predetermined rules or conditions that monitor suspicious or risky behavior.
Following are some of the conditions that trigger alerts:
Misconfigured Resources
When a resource in the cloud environment is not securely configured, it triggers this alert.
Typical misconfiguration include:
Open Storage Buckets
A cloud storage service (like AWS S3 or Azure Blob Storage) is publicly accessible without authentication. It could be risky as sensitive data like backups, logs, or PII can be exposed to anyone on the internet.
Overly Permissive IAM Roles
Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles or policies allow broad access like `*:*` for all actions and on all resources. This poses a risk as a compromised user or service can perform unauthorized actions leading to privilege escalation, data leaks, or full environment compromise.
Unauthorized Access Attempts
This alert indicates someone is trying to access your cloud environment or specific resources without proper permissions. This is a key early warning sign of potential compromise or misconfiguration. This alert triggers when the system detects activities like failed login attempts, denied API calls, and access attempts from suspicious locations or devices.
Deviations from Compliance Standards (CIS, NIST, etc.)
Alerts are triggered when your cloud environment violates or drifts away from these standards. These alerts are activated when configurations, permissions, or activities do not align with recognized compliance benchmarks. Examples include, CIS Benchmark Violations, NIST Control Failures, Policy Drift or Configuration Changes.
Unexpected Changes to Critical Files or Configurations
This alert triggers when unauthorized or unexpected modifications are detected in sensitive configuration files or system settings within your cloud environment. These changes could indicate misconfiguration, insider error, or even a compromise in progress.
Types of Alerts and Purpose
Asset Exposure Alerts
Identifies and alerts when:
a) there is a violation in software license
b) assets are rarely used
c) there are outdated applications in the system
d) there are newly added devices
e) when there are newly added assets
Posture Anomaly Alerts
Identifies and alerts about an anomaly when discovering a new detection or when the responses for the detection align with the custom detection rules.
Identity Entitlement Management Alerts
Identifies and alerts about inactive and misconfigured entities and anomalous behavior.
Remediation Management Alerts
Identifies and alerts on discovering missing patches(critical and non-critical), important and critical, and when the responses for the detection align with the custom detection rules.
Subscriptions in Cloud Security Alerts
Subscriptions allow you to customize and control the alerts you receive, making sure you’re only notified about events that are most relevant to your security operations.
A subscription lets you define alert criteria based on specific tools or use cases within your cloud security platform (e.g., CIEM, CSPA, CSRM). This helps you focus on critical events such as:
- Specific role assignments (e.g., admin or cross-account roles)
- Privileged actions (e.g., changes to IAM policies, deletion of logs)
- Modifications to access permissions or entitlements
With subscriptions, you get alerts only for what matters to your team, avoid being overwhelmed by non-critical alerts, prioritize incidents based on context and relevance, and finally monitor specific events tied to policy or audit needs.
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