Secure containers software supply chain across the SDLC
In today’s digital landscape, containerization is essential for modern application development, but it also expands the attack surface with risks like vulnerabilities in base images, misconfigurations, and malicious code injections. Securing containers across their lifecycle is critical. Microsoft Defender for Cloud delivers end-to-end protection, evaluating threats at every stage—from development to runtime. Recent advancements further strengthen container security, making it a vital solution for safeguarding applications throughout the Software development lifecycle (SDLC). Container software development lifecycle The lifecycle of containers involves several stages, during which the container evolves through different software artifacts. Container software supply chain It all starts with a container or docker script file, created or edited by developer in development phase, submitted into the code repository. Script file converts into a container image during the build phase via the CI/CD pipeline, submitted into container registry as part of the ship phase When a container image is deployed into a Kubernetes cluster, it transforms into running, ephemeral container instances, marking the transition to the runtime phase. A container may encounter numerous challenges throughout its transition from development to runtime. Ensuring its security requires maintaining visibility, mitigating risks, and implementing remediation measures at each stage of its journey. Microsoft Defender for Cloud's latest advancements in container security assist in securing your container's journey and safeguarding your containerized environments Command line interface (CLI) tool for container image scanning at build phase, is now in public preview Integrating security into every phase of your software development is crucial. To effectively incorporate container security evaluation early in the container lifecycle, particularly during the development phase, and to seamlessly integrate it into diverse DevSecOps ecosystems, the use of a Command Line Interface (CLI) is essential. This new capability of Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides an alternative method for assessing container image for security findings. This capability, available through a CLI abstract layer, allows for seamless integration into any tool or process, independently of Microsoft Defender for Cloud portal. Key purpose of Microsoft Defender for Cloud CLI: Expanding container security to cover the development phase, code repository phase, and CI/CD phase: o Development phase: Developers can scan container images locally on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS using PowerShell or any scripting terminal. o Code repository phase: Integrate the CLI into code repositories with webhook integrations like GitHub actions to scan and potentially abort pull requests based on findings. o CI/CD phase: Scan container images in the CI/CD pipeline to detect and block vulnerabilities during the build stage. Invoke scanning on-demand for specific container images. Integrate easily into existing DevSecOps processes and tools. For more details watch the demo CLI demo How it works Microsoft Defender for Cloud CLI requires authentication through API tokens. These tokens are managed via the Integrations section in the Microsoft Defender for Cloud Portal, by Security Administrators. Figure 3: API push tokens management The CLI supports Microsoft proprietary and third-party engines like Trivy, enabling vulnerability assessment of container images and generating results in SARIF format. It integrates with Microsoft Defender for Cloud for further analysis and helps incorporate security guardrails early in development. Additionally, it provides visibility of container artifacts' security posture from code to runtime and context essential for security issues remediations such as artifact owner and repo of origin. For more details, setup guides, and use cases, please refer to official documentation. Vulnerabilities assessment of container images in third party registries, now in public preview Container registries are centralized repositories used to store container images for the ship phase, prior deployment to Kubernetes clusters. They play an essential role in the container's software supply chain and accessing container images for vulnerabilities at this phase might be the last chance to prevent vulnerable images from reaching your production runtime environments. Many organizations use a mix of cloud-native (ACR, ECR, GCR, GAR) and 3 rd party container registries. To enhance coverage, Microsoft Defender for Cloud now offers vulnerability assessments for third-party registries like Docker Hub and Jfrog Artifactory. These are popular 3 rd party container registries. You can now integrate them into your Microsoft Defender for Cloud tenant to scan container images for security vulnerabilities, improving your organization's coverage of the container software supply chain. This integration offers key benefits: Automated vulnerability scanning: Automatically scans container images for known vulnerabilities, helping identify and fix security issues early. Continuous monitoring: Ensures that new vulnerabilities are promptly detected and addressed. Compliance management: Assists organizations in maintaining compliance by providing detailed security posture reports on container images and resources. Actionable security recommendations: Provides recommendations based on best practices to improve container security. Figure 4: Docker Hub & Jfrog Artifactory environments Figure 5: Jfrog Artifactory container images in Security Explorer To learn more please refer to official documentation for Docker Hub and Jfrog Artifactory. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) security dashboard for cluster admin view, now in public preview, provides granular visibility into container security directly within the AKS portal Microsoft Defender for Cloud aims to provide security insights relevant to each audience in the context of their existing tools & process, helping various roles prioritize security and build secure software applications essential to ensure your containers security across SDLC. To learn more please explore AKS Security Dashboard Conclusion Microsoft Defender for Cloud introduces groundbreaking advancements in container security, providing a robust framework to protect containerized applications. With integrated vulnerability assessment, malware detection, and comprehensive security insights, organizations can strengthen their security posture across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). These enhancements simplify security management, ensure compliance, and offer risk prioritization and visibility tailored to different audiences and roles. Explore the latest innovations in Microsoft Defender for Cloud to safeguard your containerized environments- New Innovations in Container Security with Unified Visibility and Investigations.
Enable Bring Your Own License (BYOL)
A customer uses Bring your own license (BYOL) capability, which is being deprecated, to deploy Qualys extension in their VMs. They are questioning about the deprecation, this deprecation implicates the deploy won't be more available, but what happen with the machines already has deployed the Qualys extension? Will the extension be removed from machines, since it was deployed via BYOL? Or after deprecated the extension continues working for the already deployed machines?Boost Security with API Security Posture Management
API security posture management is now natively integrated into Defender CSPM and available in public preview at no additional cost. This integration provides comprehensive visibility, proactive API risk analysis, and security best practice recommendations for Azure API Management APIs. Security teams can use these insights to identify unauthenticated, inactive, dormant, or externally exposed APIs, and receive risk-based security recommendations to prioritize and implement API security best practices.Bringing AppSec and CloudSec Together: Microsoft Defender for Cloud Integrates with Endor Labs
Modern enterprises operate at a breakneck pace, building applications that rely heavily on open-source dependencies while running workloads in complex, multi-cloud environments. Securing these applications requires a holistic perspective that covers both application security (AppSec) and cloud security (CloudSec). Historically, these two domains have operated in silos: AppSec teams focus on code scanning and secure development practices, while CloudSec teams concentrate on cloud infrastructure posture, runtime controls, and threat detection. Today, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Endor Labs are bridging this divide with a native integration that delivers true code-to-runtime reachability. By combining Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) capabilities, security teams can pinpoint exploitable vulnerabilities from the moment code is written to the time it’s deployed in the cloud. Why Bringing AppSec and CloudSec Together Matters A Unified Approach to Vulnerability Management Organizations often discover the same vulnerabilities at different stages in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). AppSec flags them in code repositories, and CloudSec flags them again once they’re running in production. By unifying AppSec and CloudSec in a single platform, customers can: Eliminate redundant alerts: Address the root cause of vulnerabilities when they’re first discovered in code, rather than letting them reach production. Streamline communication and collaboration: Ensure AppSec and CloudSec teams share the same data and priorities. Complete Visibility and Prioritized Remediation Security teams need to see not just which vulnerabilities exist, but also how they can be exploited in the cloud. Defender for Cloud and Endor Labs integrate code-level vulnerability scanning with runtime visibility, showing full attack paths from developer commits to actively running workloads. Reduced Risk Through Early Intervention Only a small percentage of vulnerabilities are exploitable, but it can be labor-intensive to distinguish real threats from theoretical ones. Endor Labs’ function-level reachability surfaces truly exploitable flaws, and Defender for Cloud correlates that data with running cloud workloads to help teams prioritize and fix high-impact issues quickly. How the Microsoft Defender for Cloud + Endor Labs Integration Helps Function-Level Reachability Analysis Endor Labs employs a precise method of SCA that identifies whether a vulnerable function in an open-source library is actually called by your application’s code. This drastically reduces false positives and helps developers focus on real risks. By surfacing these exploitable vulnerabilities natively within Defender for Cloud, AppSec teams can act on high-severity issues without needing multiple tools or extensive manual triage. Code-to-Runtime Exploitability Even if a vulnerability is reachable at the function level, it may or may not be running in production. Microsoft Defender for Cloud correlates the results from Endor Labs with container images, Kubernetes clusters, and other runtime contexts. This helps CloudSec teams: Visualize full attack paths: Understand exactly how a vulnerability could be exploited in a running application. Implement mitigating controls: Deploy firewall rules, network segmentation, or access restrictions while developers work on permanent fixes. Example: If you have an application with a reachable vulnerability in an open-source library, CloudSec teams see where the vulnerable container is running and whether it’s exposed to the internet. They can then take immediate action to reduce risk by limiting internet exposure while AppSec teams work to patch or upgrade the dependency. Streamlined Communication & Collaboration By displaying Endor Labs findings directly in Defender for Cloud, development and security teams work with a common set of data, facilitating faster, more transparent remediation on the most critical vulnerabilities. Using the Integration in Defender for Cloud After you connect Endor Labs to Defender for Cloud, you can explore the data in two main locations: Cloud Security Explorer and Attack Paths. Cloud Security Explorer Cloud Security Explorer provides an interactive query experience to search, filter, and correlate security information from your connected environments. Once Endor Labs findings are ingested, you can write queries to pinpoint exploitable vulnerabilities and prioritize remediation efforts. To get started, you can use these sample queries: Code repository with critical or high severity reachable vulnerabilities Code repository with critical severity reachable vulnerabilities creates a container image Code repository with critical severity vulnerabilities that are reachable at the function level function vulnerabilities Attack Paths One of the most powerful features of combining Endor Labs with Defender for Cloud is the ability to see Attack Paths—the end-to-end chain of how a vulnerability in code can be exploited when deployed in your cloud environment. Defender for Cloud automatically correlates the vulnerability details (from Endor Labs) with runtime data to show how it could be exploited in your environment. The attack path view provides a graphical representation from the vulnerable function in your source code to the specific runtime asset. The example below illustrates an attack path involving an internet-exposed running container with reachable vulnerabilities. Endor Labs identified these vulnerabilities within the code repository, and Defender for Cloud traced a container image containing the same vulnerabilities back to that repository. Together, these insights indicate that an attacker could exploit the vulnerabilities during runtime. Conclusion By unifying AppSec and CloudSec, organizations gain a complete view of their security posture—from code commits in GitHub or Azure DevOps to production workloads running in Azure, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud Platform. The Microsoft Defender for Cloud + Endor Labs integration delivers reachability-based SCA, reducing noise from false positives and helping teams prioritize and remediate real threats faster. Ready to Get Started? Request a Demo from Endor Labs. Connect your Endor Labs tenant to Defender for Cloud. Begin seeing rich, prioritized vulnerability findings directly from Defender for Cloud.AKS Security Dashboard
In today’s digital landscape, the speed of development and security must go hand in hand. Applications are being developed and deployed faster than ever before. Containerized application developers and platform teams enjoy the flexibility and scale that Kubernetes has brought to the software development world. Open-source code and tools have transformed the industry - but with speed comes increased risk and a growing attack surface. However, in vast parts of the software industry, developers and platform engineering teams find it challenging to prioritize security. They are required to deliver features quickly and security practices can sometimes be seen as obstacles that slow down the development process. Lack of knowledge or awareness of the latest security threats and best practices make it challenging to build secure applications. The new Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) security dashboard aims to alleviate these pains by providing comprehensive visibility and automated remediation capabilities for security issues, empowering platform engineering teams to secure their Kubernetes environment more effectively and easily. Consolidating security and operational data in one place directly within the AKS portal allows engineers to benefit from a unified view of their Kubernetes environment. Enabling more efficient detection, and remediation of security issues, with minimal disruption to their workflows. Eventually reducing the risk of oversight security issues and improving remediation cycles. To leverage the AKS security dashboard, navigate to the Microsoft Defender for Cloud section in the AKS Azure portal. If your cluster is already onboarded to Defender for Containers or Defender CSPM, security recommendations will appear on the dashboard. If not, it may take up to 24 hours after onboarding before Defender for Cloud scans your cluster and delivers insights. Security issues identified in the cluster, surfaced in the dashboard are prioritized to risk. Risk level is dynamically calculated by an automatic attack path engine operating behind the scenes. This engine assesses the exploitability of security issues by considering multiple factors, such as cluster RBAC (Role Based Access Control), known exploitability in the wild, internet exposure, and more. Learn more about how Defender for Cloud calculates risk. Security issues surfaced in the dashboard are divided into different tabs: Runtime environment vulnerability assessment: The dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes environments means that vulnerabilities can arise from multiple sources, with different ownership for the fix. For vulnerabilities originating from the containerized application code, Defender for Cloud will point out every vulnerable container running in the cluster. For each vulnerable container Defender for cloud will surface remediation guidelines that include the list of vulnerable software packages and specify the version that contains the fix. The scanning of container images powered by Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management (MDVM) includes scanning of both OS packages and language specific packages see the full list of the supported OS and their versions. For vulnerabilities originating from the AKS infrastructure, Defender for cloud will include a list of all identified CVEs (common vulnerabilities and exposures) and recommend next steps for remediation. Remediation may include upgrading the Node pool image version or the AKS version itself. Since new vulnerabilities are discovered daily, even if a scanning tool is deployed as part of the CI/CD process, runtime scan can’t be overlooked. Defender for cloud makes sure Kubernetes workloads are scanned daily compared to an up-to-date vulnerability list. Security misconfigurations: Security misconfigurations are also highlighted in the AKS security dashboard, empowering developers and platform teams to execute fixes that can significantly minimize the attack surface. In some cases, changing a single line of code in a container's YAML file, without affecting application functionality, can eliminate a significant attack vector. Each security misconfiguration highlighted in the AKS security dashboard includes manual remediation steps, and where applicable, an automated fix button is also available. For containers misconfigurations, a quick link to a built-in Azure policy is included for easily preventing future faulty deployments of that kind. This approach empowers DevOps & platform engineering teams to use the “Secure by Default” method for application development. To conclude - automated remediation and prevention can be a game changer in keeping the cluster secure- a proactive approach that can help prevent security breaches before they can cause damage, ensuring that the cluster remains secure and compliant with industry standards. Ultimately, automated remediation empowers security teams to focus on more strategic tasks, knowing that their Kubernetes environment is continuously monitored and protected. Assigning owners to security issues Since cluster administration and containers security issues remediation is not always the responsibility of a single team or person, it is recommended to use the “assign owner” button in the security dashboard to notify the correct owner about the issue need to be handled. It is also possible to filter the view using the built-in filters and assign multiple issues to the same person quickly. Get Started Today To start leveraging these new features in Microsoft Defender for Cloud, ensure either Defender for Container or Defender CSPM is enabled in your cloud environments. For additional guidance or support, visit our deployment guide for a full subscription coverage, or enable on a single cluster using the dashboard settings section. Learn More If you haven’t already, check out our previous blog post that introduced this journey: New Innovations in Container Security with Unified Visibility and Investigations. This new release continues to build on the foundation outlined in that post. With “Elevate your container posture: from agentless discovery to risk prioritization”, we’ve delivered capabilities that allow you to further strengthen your container security practices, while reducing operational complexities.Important Update: Deprecation of “Bring Your Own License” in Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Introduction With the introduction of Microsoft Security Exposure Management data connectors, we are committed to enhancing your enterprise exposure management experience and data consumption through this unified view. As part of this effort, we are making changes to streamline and improve our vulnerability assessment (VA) solutions. One of these changes involves deprecating the “Bring Your Own License” (BYOL) feature in Microsoft Defender for Cloud and transitioning to Exposure Management data connectors for a more seamless and comprehensive solution. Why this change? Our goal is to provide a cohesive and comprehensive VA solution within the unified security operations platform. By consolidating these capabilities, we can deliver a more integrated and efficient experience for vulnerability and exposure management across cloud, hybrid and on-premises. Deprecation timeline The “Bring Your Own License” (BYOL) feature for vulnerability assessment will be deprecated in two phases: February 3, 2025: The feature will no longer be available for onboarding new machines and subscriptions. Any VMs between Feb and May will not have agents deployed May 1, 2025: The feature will be fully deprecated and no longer available. What this means for you? The new data connectors in Exposure Management will replace BYOL in Defender for Cloud and will offer: Multiple scanner options: Integration of different third-party VA solutions, providing more flexibility and coverage. More information about the connectors can be found here. Unified visibility: A single, combined view of all vulnerability assessments across multi-cloud and on-premises, simplifying prioritization, management, and reporting. Seamless integration: Once the data connector is configured, There is no agent installation required, because the connector retrieves data directly from the VA product via API. With the API permissions you provide, Microsoft Security Exposure Management can seamlessly consume your vulnerability data from the connector and the data collected in your environment. Exposure Management: Microsoft Security Exposure Management is a comprehensive security solution that offers a unified view of your security posture across all company assets and workloads. It enhances asset information with valuable security context, enabling you to proactively manage attack surfaces, protect critical assets, and identify and mitigate exposure risks effectively. Read more here. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is already a key component of Exposure Management, providing a unified security flow that ensures consistent application of security measures across all assets. We are continuously working to enhance this collaboration, further strengthening your overall security posture by delivering a cohesive and comprehensive security strategy. A key Initiative in this strategy is vulnerability management. We aim to enhance and centralize this aspect as much as possible, leveraging all available data points from MDC, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE), Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Managment, and various connectors. This centralized approach ensures that vulnerabilities are identified, prioritized and addressed promptly, minimizing potential risks and improving overall security resilience. This BYOL deprecation and transition to Security Exposure Management connectors is designed to enhance your overall experience and value. Below is a feature comparison to provide more clarity on the additional capabilities that will be available as part of this transition: Feature Defender for Cloud BYOL Microsoft Security Exposure Managment data connectors* Auto provisioning Automatic agent deployment for Azure machines** Customer deploys VA solution according to each vendors recommendation Multi-cloud Azure Only Multi-cloud and non-cloud Supported vendors Rapid7, Qualys Rapid7, Qualys, Tenable (and more planned) Aggregated results from multiple scanners Each device shows results from a single provider Devices show aggregated results from multiple providers Product experience Defender for Cloud portal Defender portal *Note: during the preview phase, use of data connectors is free. Once data connectors become generally available, there will be a consumption-based cost for each of the non-Microsoft data connectors. For more information, please see here. ** Removing BYOL auto-provisioning in Defender for Cloud means that while Microsoft will no longer automatically provision the agent, customers deploy the VA solution according to each vendors recommendation. Actions required If you are currently using BYOL solutions in Defender for Cloud, we encourage you to begin configuring your Microsoft Security Exposure Management data connectors for Qualys and Rapid7 before May 1, 2025. For more information on using the connectors, please visit the connectors onboarding documentation. Additional Note: BYOL is not the recommended migration path for all Defender for Servers customers currently utilizing Qualys Built-in for Vulnerability Assessment. Instead, these customers should migrate to the connector's solution suggested above for a seamless and optimized transition.
Elevate Your Container Posture: From Agentless Discovery to Risk Prioritization
As Kubernetes (K8s) continue to power modern containerized applications, the complexity of managing and securing these environments grows exponentially. The challenges in monitoring K8s environments stem not only from their dynamic nature but also from their unique structure—each K8s cluster operates as its own ecosystem, complete with its own control plane for authorization, networking, and resource management. This makes it fundamentally different from traditional cloud environments, where security practitioners often have established expertise and tools for managing the cloud control plane. The specialized nature of Kubernetes (K8s) environments limits the visibility and control available to many security teams, resulting in blind spots that increase the risk of misconfigurations, compliance gaps, and potential attack paths gaining comprehensive visibility into the posture state of K8s workloads is essential for addressing these gaps and ensuring a secure, resilient infrastructure. Key benefits By further expanding agentless container posture approach, Defender for Cloud delivers the following key benefits: Enhanced risk management: improved prioritization through additional security insights, networking information, K8s RBAC, and image evaluation status, ensuring more critical issues can addressed first. Proactive security posture: gain comprehensive insights and prevent lateral movement within Kubernetes clusters, helping to identify and mitigate threats before they cause harm. Comprehensive compliance and governance: achieve full transparency into software usage and Kubernetes RBAC configurations to meet compliance requirements and adhere to industry standards. Release features overview: Enhanced K8s workload modeling To ensure customers can better focus on security findings, and avoid reviewing stale information, Defender for Cloud now models K8s workloads in the security graph based on their configuration (K8s specification) rather than runtime assets. This improvement avoids refresh-rate discrepancies, providing a more accurate and streamlined view of your K8s workloads, with single security findings for all identical containers within the same workload. New Security Insights for Containers and Pods Security teams that use the security explorer to proactively identify security risks in their multicloud environments, now get even better visibility with additional security insights for containers and pods, including privileged containers, sensitive mounts, and more. For example, security practitioners can use the security explorer to find all containers vulnerable to remote code execution, which are also exposed to the internet and uses sensitive host mounts, to eliminate the misconfigurations and vulnerabilities before a potential attacker abuse them to attack the container remotely and break-out into the host through the sensitive host mount. Extended K8s Networking Information To enable customers to query the security graph based on additional characters of K8s networking and better understand exposure details for K8s workloads, Defender for Cloud now offers extended data collection for both K8s ingresses and services. This feature also includes new properties such as service port and service selectors. The following figure shows all new networking criteria that customers can now use to query for K8s networking configuration: The following figure show detailed exposure information on a K8s workload exposed to the internet: Enhanced image discovery Customers can now gain complete visibility to all images used in customer environments using the security explorer, including images from all supported registries, and any image running in K8s, regardless of whether the image is scanned for vulnerabilities, with extended information per image. Here are a few examples for important use cases that customers can detect and respond to action on through a single query in the security explorer: Detect usage of images from unmonitored registries: Figure 4: images deployed directly from an unscanned docker registry Check the presence of specific image in the environment Figure 5: search for an image with a specific digest Trace all images not evaluated for vulnerabilities Figure 6: all images not assessed for vulnerabilities K8s RBAC in the security graph The addition of K8s RBAC into the security graph serves two main purposes: Security practitioners gain easy visibility into K8s service accounts, their permissions, and their bindings with K8s workloads, without prior expertise, and hunt for service accounts that do not meet security best practices. In the following example, a service account that has full cluster permissions: Figure 7: example of service account cluster admin permissions on cluster level The security graph contextual analysis uses the K8s RBAC to identify lateral movement internally within K8s, from K8s to other cloud resources and from the cloud to K8s. The following example shows an attack path starting from a container exposed to the internet with a vulnerability that can be remotely exploited. It also has access to a managed identity allowing the attacker to move all the way to a critical storage account: Figure 8: attack path from a vulnerable exposed container to a critical storage account Comprehensive Software Inventory for Containers A detailed software inventory is now available for all container images and containers scanned for vulnerabilities, serving security practitioners and compliance teams in many ways: Full visibility to all software packages used in container images and containers: Figure 9: Full software list for images and containers Query specific software usage across all environments, making it easier to identify risks or ensure compliance. A common example of this use case includes a vulnerable software version with a zero-day vulnerability. For example, following the OpenSSL zero-day vulnerability publication, a security admin can use the following queries to find all instances of container images within the organization using OpenSSL version 3.0, even before a CVE was published: Figure 10: search for a specific vulnerable open ssl version Critical Asset Protection for K8s Critical asset protection has been enhanced to cover additional container use cases: Defender for cloud customers can now define rules to mark workloads as critical based on their namespace and K8s labels. The following figure shows how customers can define rules that would automatically tag critical workloads based on their K8s labels: Figure 11: customer defined rules for asset criticality based on K8s labels Predefined rules allow K8s clusters to be flagged as critical, ensuring prioritized focus during risk assessments. Example for one of the predefined rules that automatically tags K8s clusters as critical: Figure 12: Example for predefined K8s cluster criticality rules As with other asset protection features in Defender for Cloud, these updates seamlessly integrate into the risk prioritization, attack path analysis, and security explorer workflows. The following example shows a critical attack path where the attack target is critical K8s cluster: Figure 13: Critical attack path where the target is a critical K8s cluster K8s CIS benchmark Customers that would like to audit their K8s clusters for regulatory compliance using K8s CIS or enforce security controls that are part of the K8s CIS standard, now benefit from updated K8s CIS standards with broader security controls, with K8s CIS 1.5.0 for AKS, and EKS and K8s CIS 1.6.0 for GKE. To start using the new standards and controls, enable the desired K8s CIS standard through regulatory compliance dashboard, or via security policies: Figure 14: Enabling K8s CIS 1.6.0 for GKE Compliance status can then be monitored via the regulatory compliance dashboard for the relevant K8s CIS standard: Figure 15: Viewing K8s CIS 1.5.0 compliance status Get Started Today To start leveraging these new features in Microsoft Defender for Cloud, ensure either Defender for Container or Defender CSPM is enabled in your cloud environments. For additional guidance or support, visit our deployment guide. With these updates, we’re committed to helping you maintain a robust, secure, and scalable cloud-native environment. Learn More If you haven’t already, check out our previous blog post that introduced this journey: New Innovations in Container Security with Unified Visibility and Investigations. This new release continues to build on the foundation outlined in that post. With “Elevate your container posture: from agentless discovery to risk prioritization”, we’ve delivered capabilities that allow you to further strengthen your container security practices, while reducing operational complexities.Microsoft Defender for Cloud Customer Newsletter
What's new in Defender for Cloud? AI security posture management is now generally available! Reduce risk to cross cloud AI workloads by discovering generative AI Bill of Materials, strengthen generative AI application security posture and use the attack path analysis to identify risk. Learn more about it here. On-demand malware scanning now in public preview We’re excited to announce the public preview of on-demand malware scanning. Customers can now scan existing files in storage accounts on-demand, which helps customers to gain finer control and customization for critical storage assets. For more details, please refer to our documentation. Blog(s) of the month In November, following Ignite announcements, our team published the following blog posts we'd like to share: Cloud security innovations: strengthening defenses against modern cloud and AI threats New innovations in container security with unified visibility, investigations, and response actions Proactively harden your cloud security posture in the age of AI with CSPM innovations Prevent malware from spreading by scanning cloud storage accounts on-demand Deprecation of “Bring Your Own License” in MDC” GitHub community Learn how to onboard Azure DevOps to Defender for Cloud in our updated lab - Module 14 here. Visit our GitHub page here. Defender for Cloud in the field Refresh your knowledge on securing your AI applications: Secure your AI applications from code to runtime Visit our new YouTube page Customer journey Discover how other organizations successfully use Microsoft Defender for Cloud to protect their cloud workloads. This month we are featuring The NBA (National Basketball Association), a global sports and media powerhouse dedicated to growing and celebrating the game of basketball, partnered with Microsoft to address the complexities of scale, and security required for next-generation technologies. With its IT estate in Azure, the NBA leverages Defender for Cloud to provide a single pane of glass on its cloud security posture. Security community webinars Join our experts in the upcoming webinars to learn what we are doing to secure your workloads running in Azure and other clouds. This month, we have the following upcoming webinar: DEC 11 Microsoft Defender for Cloud | Exploring the Latest Container Security Updates from Microsoft Ignite DEC 12 Microsoft Defender for Cloud | Future-Proofing Cloud Security with Defender CSPM We offer several customer connection programs within our private communities. By signing up, you can help us shape our products through activities such as reviewing product roadmaps, participating in co-design, previewing features, and staying up-to-date with announcements. Sign up at aka.ms/JoinCCP. We greatly value your input on the types of content that enhance your understanding of our security products. Your insights are crucial in guiding the development of our future public content. We aim to deliver material that not only educates but also resonates with your daily security challenges. Whether it’s through in-depth live webinars, real-world case studies, comprehensive best practice guides through blogs, or the latest product updates, we want to ensure our content meets your needs. Please submit your feedback on which of these formats do you find most beneficial and are there any specific topics you’re interested in https://aka.ms/PublicContentFeedback. Note: If you want to stay current with Defender for Cloud and receive updates in your inbox, please consider subscribing to our monthly newsletter: https://aka.ms/MDCNewsSubscribe
Proactively harden your cloud security posture in the age of AI with CSPM innovations
Generative AI applications have rapidly transformed industries, from marketing and content creation to personalized customer experiences. These applications, powered by sophisticated models, bring unprecedented capabilities—but also unique security challenges. As developers build generative AI systems, they increasingly rely on containers and APIs to streamline deployment, scale effectively, and ensure consistent performance. However, the very tools that facilitate agile development also introduce new security risks. Containers, essential for packaging AI models and their dependencies, are susceptible to misconfigurations and can expose entire systems to attacks if not properly secured. APIs, which allow seamless integration of AI functionalities into various platforms, can be compromised if they lack robust access controls or encryption. As generative AI becomes more integrated into critical business processes, security admins are challenged with continuously hardening the security posture of the foundation for AI application. Ensuring core workloads, like containers and APIs, are protected is vital to safeguard sensitive data of any application. And when introducing generative AI, remediating vulnerabilities and misconfigurations efficiently, ensures a strong security posture to maintain the integrity of AI models and trust in their outputs. New cloud security posture innovations in Microsoft Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) help security teams modernize how they proactively protect their cloud-native applications in a unified experience from code to runtime. API security posture management is now natively available in Defender CSPM We're excited to announce that API security posture management is now natively integrated into Defender CSPM and available in public preview at no additional cost. This integration provides comprehensive visibility, proactive API risk analysis, and security best practice recommendations for Azure API Management APIs. Security teams can use these insights to identify unauthenticated, inactive, dormant, or externally exposed APIs, along and receive risk-based security recommendations to prioritize and implement API security best practices. Additionally, security teams can now assess their API exposure risks within the context of their overall application by mapping APIs to their backend compute hosts and visualizing the topology powered by cloud security explorer. This mapping now enables end-to-end API-led attack path analysis, helping security teams proactively identify and triage lateral movement and data exfiltration risks. We’ve also enhanced API security posture capabilities by expanding sensitive data discovery beyond request and response payloads to now include API URLs, path, query parameters, and the sources of data exposure in APIs. This allows security teams to track and mitigate sensitive data exposure across cloud applications efficiently. In addition, the new support for API revisions enables automatic onboarding of all APIs, including tagged revisions, security insights assessments, and multi-regional gateway support for Azure API Management premium customers. Enhanced container security posture across the development lifecycle While containers offer flexibility and ease of deployment, they also introduce unique security challenges that need proactive management at every stage to prevent vulnerabilities from becoming exploited threats. That’s why we’re excited to share new container security and compliance posture capabilities in Defender CSPM, expanding current risk visibility across the development lifecycle: It's crucial to validate the security of container images during the build phase and block the build if vulnerabilities are found, helping security teams prevent issues at the source. To support this, we’re thrilled to share container image vulnerability scanning for any CI/CD pipeline is now in public preview. The expanded capability offers a command-line interface (CLI) tool that allows seamless CI/CD integration and enables users to perform container image vulnerability scanning during the build stage, providing visibility into vulnerabilities at build. After integrating their CI/CD pipelines, organizations can use the cloud security explorer to view container images pushed by their pipelines. Once the container image is built, scanned for vulnerabilities, it is pushed to a container registry until ready to be deployed to runtime environments. Organizations rely on cloud and third-party registries to pull container images, making these registries potential gateways for vulnerabilities to enter their environment. To minimize this, container image vulnerability scanning is now available for third-party private registries, starting with Docker Hub and JFrog Artifactory. The scan results are immediately available to both the security teams and developers to expedite patches or image updates before the container image is pushed to production. In addition to container security posture capabilities, security admins can also strengthen the compliance posture of Kubernetes across clouds. Now in public preview, security teams can leverage multicloud regulatory compliance assessments with support for CIS Kubernetes Benchmarks for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). AI security posture management (AI-SPM) is now generally available Discover vulnerability and misconfiguration of generative AI apps using Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Machine Learning, and Amazon Bedrock to reduce risks associated with AI-related artifacts, components, and connectors built into the apps and provide recommended actions to proactively improve security posture with Defender CSPM. New enhancements in GA include: Expanded support of Amazon Bedrock provides deeper discovery of AWS AI technologies, new recommendations, and attack paths. Additional support for AWS such as Amazon OpenSearch (service domains and service collections), Amazon Bedrock Agents, and Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases. New AI grounding data insights provides resource context to its use as a grounding source within an AI application. Grounding is the invisible line between organizational data and AI applications. Ensuring the right data is used – and correctly configured in the application – for grounding can reduce hallucinations, prevent sensitive data loss, and reduce the risk of grounding data poisoning and malicious outputs. Customers can use the cloud security explorer to query multicloud data used for AI grounding. New ‘used for AI grounding’ risk factor in recommendations and attack paths can also help security teams prioritize risks to datastores. Thousands of organizations are already reaping the benefits of AI-SPM in Defender CSPM, like Mia Labs, an innovative startup that is securely delivering customer service through their AI assistant with the help of Defender for Cloud. “Defender for Cloud shows us how to design our processes with optimal security and monitor where jailbreak attempts may have originated.” Marwan Kodeih, Chief Product Officer, Mia Labs, Inc. New innovations to find and fix issues in code with new DevOps security innovations Addressing risks at runtime is only part of the picture. Remediating risks in the Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline is equally critical, as vulnerabilities introduced in development can persist into production, where they become much harder—and costlier—to fix. Insecure DevOps practices, like using untrusted images or failing to scan for vulnerabilities, can inadvertently introduce risks before deployment even begins. New innovations include: Agentless code scanning, now in public preview, empowers security teams to quickly gain visibility into their Azure DevOps repositories and initiate an agentless scan of their code immediately after onboarding to Defender CSPM. The results are provided as recommendations for exposed Infrastructure-as-Code misconfigurations and code vulnerabilities. End-to-end secrets mapping, now in public preview, helps customers understand how a leaked credential in code impacts deployed resources in runtime. It provides deeper risk insights by tracing exposed secrets back to code repositories where it originated, with both secret validation and mapping to accessible resources. Defender CSPM now highlights which secrets could cause the most damage to systems and data if compromised. Additional CSPM enhancements [General Availability] Critical asset protection: Enables security admins to prioritize remediation efforts with the ability to identify their ‘crown jewels’ by defining critical asset rules in Microsoft Security Exposure Management and applying them to their cloud workloads in Defender for Cloud. As a result, the risk levels of recommendations and attack paths consider the resource criticality tags, streamlining prioritization above other un-tagged resources. In addition to the General Availability release, we are also extending support for tagging Kubernetes and non-human identity resources. [Public Preview] Simplified API security testing integration: Integrating API security testing results into Defender for Cloud is now easier than ever. Security teams can now seamlessly integrate results from supported API security testing providers into Defender for Cloud without needing a GitHub Advanced Security license. Explore additional resources to strengthen your cloud security posture With these innovations, Defender CSPM users are empowered to enhance their security posture from code to runtime and prepared to protect their AI applications. Below are additional resources that expand on our innovations and help you incorporate them in your operations: Learn more about container security innovations in Defender for Cloud. Enable the API security posture extension in Environment Settings. Get started with AI security posture management for your Azure OpenAI, Azure Machine Learning, and Amazon Bedrock deployments. RSVP to join us on December 3rd the Microsoft Tech Community AMA to get your questions answered.
New innovations in container security with unified visibility, investigations, and response actions
Container technology has become essential for modern application development and deployment. It's a critical component for over 90% of cloud-native organizations, facilitating swift, reliable, and flexible processes that drive digital transformation. This advancement has transformed software delivery and fostered innovation. The container market is growing rapidly, with containers-as-a-service adoption expected to reach 52% by 2024. However, as adoption accelerates and container capabilities evolve, organizations face rising container security challenges. The ephemeral and dynamic nature of containers makes it difficult to identify which ones are running at any given time and even harder to identify faulty or vulnerable containers. This makes it challenging for security teams to pinpoint the source of a security incident, putting the organization at risk of undetected threats. Consequently, tracking traffic flow and detecting runtime anomalies become more complex, thereby exposing critical systems to potential security breaches. In addition to that, the lack of expertise in containerized and cloud-native environments, combined with overwhelming vulnerability scan results, makes it difficult to detect, prioritize, and address critical security gaps, leaving the organization’s security weak and disjointed. To address these challenges, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, our Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), is enhancing its’ container security capabilities from development to runtime. These enhancements start with enhanced discovery, providing agentless visibility into Kubernetes environments, tracking containers, pods, and applications as they scale across the entire lifecycle. It strengthens security posture offering continuous and granular scanning from build to runtime, helping maintain compliance and secure configurations across all stages of the SDLC. Finally, Defender for Cloud’s native integration with Defender XDR delivers threat protection with real-time monitoring, prioritizing vulnerabilities based on risk and enabling SOC analysts to detect and respond to threats faster through rich contextual insights and cloud-native response tools. Today, we are excited to announce new and enhanced innovations in Defender for Cloud for securing containerized environments: Elevate your container posture: From agentless discovery to risk prioritization Enhanced container image discovery is now generally available, to ensure images are accurately identified and scanned for risks. Kubernetes Identity and Access information, now in public preview to enhance security by offering critical visibility into access permissions and potential attack paths within Kubernetes environments. Tagging and automatic classification of critical assets through pre-defined rules for prioritization is now generally available to improve response times and operational resilience. Breakthroughs in container security to strengthen the software supply chain across the SDLC Command line interface (CLI) tool for container image scanning at build phase, is now in public preview, integrating security into every phase of development. Vulnerability assessment of container images in third party registries, now in public preview to provide continuous vulnerability scanning across third party registries such as Docker Hub and JFrog Artifactory. Agentless vulnerability assessments for host VMs, now in public preview, enhances the security and compliance for servers in Managed Kubernetes services. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) security dashboard for cluster admin view, now in public preview, provides granular visibility into container security directly within the AKS portal. Container defense in action: Enhanced threat detection and response with Defender XDR integration Kubernetes process alert, powered by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) detection engine, is now generally available, expanding threat coverage for containerized environments. Binary drift detection, now generally available, provides real-time detection and response to unauthorized changes in container configurations, ensuring container security during runtime. Malware detection for Kubernetes host is now in public preview, ensuring comprehensive protection for both container workloads and underlying host infrastructure. Threat analytics report for containers incidents in Defender XDR, now generally available, providing SOC teams with detailed insights into potential attack methods, and incident investigation. Cloud process events and investigation queries in Defender XDR, now in public preview enhance investigation depth with process data and built-in queries Kubernetes response actions for container workloads is now in public preview to rapidly contain threats in near real-time. AI-powered guided threat remediation, now generally available, empowers SOC teams to efficiently manage container-specific incidents with step-by-step assistance, even with minimal expertise. In this blog, we will share more details on each of these announcements and how they address the typical challenges organizations face when securing containerized applications from build to runtime. Elevate your container posture: From agentless discovery to risk prioritization Effective container security starts with discovery. Without a clear understanding of what’s running in the environment, securing it becomes an impossible task. Containers are dynamic and ephemeral, making it challenging to track them, monitor vulnerabilities, and secure configurations. This is where enhanced container image discovery becomes essential—ensuring that container images are accurately identified and scanned for potential risks. To address this need, we’re excited to announce enhanced container image discovery, providing full visibility into container images, collecting comprehensive inventory data and offering insights into all images in the cloud environment, directly within the cloud security explorer. Once containers are discovered, the next step is managing access and understanding how vulnerabilities can be exploited. Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) are crucial for managing permissions and access within Kubernetes environments. Microsoft Defender for Cloud now provides critical findings to help teams secure access within clusters and across cloud environments. Introducing the new Kubernetes Identity and Access information in Defender for Cloud, security teams can now query identities, access data, and visualize how over-permissive authorization can lead to lateral movement. To further strengthen container security posture, Defender for Cloud maps all possible attack routes with a new attack path analysis engine. This capability helps detect and address complex threats from Kubernetes to cloud and vice versa across multicloud environments, before a breach occurs, proactively securing Kubernetes environments. Taking our commitment to enhanced container security and operational resilience a step further, Defender for Cloud helps improves response times, reduces downtime, and sets the stage for future automation with manual tagging of critical assets and automatic classification of critical assets in Kubernetes environment. Manual tagging empowers teams to explicitly identify their most critical Kubernetes assets, ensuring these receive top priority. Auto criticality, however, uses research-backed rules and cross-customer insights to automatically assign criticality levels to containers, identifying risks security teams might overlook. Enhanced data added to the Cloud Security Explorer including enhanced image discovery and Kubernetes RBAC data. Breakthroughs in container security to strengthen the software supply chain across the SDLC As cloud-native applications grow rapidly, integrating security into every development stage becomes critical. Microsoft Defender for Cloud simplifies this by scanning container images from their creation in the CI/CD pipeline to registries and host VMs, strengthening the security posture without slowing down development due to late-stage fixes. We are excited to offer a command-line interface (CLI) tool that allows seamless integration into any CI/CD pipeline. The CLI tool scans container images in the CI/CD pipeline, enabling developers to detect and block vulnerabilities during image building at any stage. Through this integration, Defender for Cloud provides visibility into onboarded pipelines and all container images pushed from those pipelines, allowing security teams to identify the source of the container image. After an image is built, scanned, and remediated, it’s pushed to a container registry until deployment. Continuous scanning, including daily registry rescans, helps identify zero-day vulnerabilities and ensures all images, even those bypassing the monitored pipeline, are fully scanned. In addition to its native support for scanning container images in cloud registries, Defender for Cloud is excited to also support vulnerability assessment of container images in third party registries, including Docker Hub Container Registry and JFrog Artifactory. Defender for Cloud scans CI/CD pipelines and integrates with container registries, meeting developers and DevOps teams where they manage images. This seamless scanning for vulnerabilities simplifies management and offers centralized visibility into images across environments. The container registry scan results are available to both the development and security teams, so they can quickly patch, update or block images before they’re pushed to production. The goal of a secure software supply chain is not only to prevent the use of vulnerable container images but also to ensure that the container infrastructure is secure throughout its lifecycle. Kubernetes host is the foundation of a containerized environment. If the host is compromised, it can lead to the entire cluster being at risk. Attackers could gain access to sensitive data, disrupt services, or even take control of the entire infrastructure. To enhance container security and compliance, Defender for Cloud now includes agentless vulnerability assessments for host VMs in Managed Kubernetes services (AKS only). While securing container images at the build and registry stages is critical for preventing vulnerabilities early in the development process, it’s equally important to maintain strong security once those containers are deployed and running. To facilitate this, the new AKS Security Dashboard empowers resource owners or cluster administrators with a simplified, streamlined experience, offering granular visibility into container posture assessments directly within the AKS portal. This includes vulnerability assessments for hosts and container images including CVE remediation, compliance checks, and security best practices, enabling more efficient security management. Development teams and cluster operators can now access these insights without switching tools, enhancing communication between development and security disciplines, offering actionable recommendations at the cluster level. Container defense in action: Enhanced threat detection and response with Defender XDR integration Ensuring runtime security is vital to maintain the integrity of applications in shared environments. Continuous monitoring, enforcing isolation, and detecting anomalies help prevent and respond to threats in real-time, keeping containers secure throughout their lifecycle. Building on these essential security measures, we are excited to announce that our unique eBPF sensor now provides Kubernetes alerts, powered by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) detection engine in the backend. We've optimized Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to effectively detect threats in containerized environments. By validating detections, enriching them with container-specific context, and fine-tuning alerts based on the Microsoft Kubernetes threat matrix, developed and maintained up to date by Microsoft security researchers, we've ensured a balance of comprehensive threat coverage and accurate detection. Runtime security demands vigilance against unauthorized changes, or binary drift, in container images—a key indicator of potential attacks. With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, you can now detect and respond to these changes in real-time, ensuring containers stay secure and unaltered throughout their lifecycle. While monitoring and securing container workloads is critical, ensuring the host infrastructure is protected from malware is equally vital for maintaining the security of your containerized environment. To address this, Defender for Cloud is extending the Malware detection for Kubernetes host VMs. Real-time threat detection helps identify potential issues and deviations within your containers; the next critical step is to fully understand the scope and impact of these threats. Think of threat detection as spotting smoke from a fire—it's the first sign something's wrong. But to fully understand the situation and prevent further damage, you need to find the source of the fire and assess its spread. To provide such detailed threat investigation, Defender for Cloud offers a threat analytics report for containers incidents in Defender XDR that helps SOC teams and analysts with extensive information around the potential attack methods that attackers could leverage to infiltrate the containers. It also contains suggestions on how to remediate these threats, and for hunting queries. To facilitate deeper investigation, Cloud process events and investigation queries in Defender XDR, now enable security teams to leverage enriched insights from integrated cloud audit and process event logs. These capabilities help SOC teams trace suspicious activity, analyze control plane and runtime processes, and conduct thorough forensic analysis. Building on this foundation, Defender for Cloud introduces the go hunt action, equipping SOC teams with pre-built, advanced hunting queries tailored to specific clusters. These queries retrieve incident-time data, streamlining investigation so teams can focus on analyzing results and responding to threats efficiently. Together, these capabilities enhance investigation depth, reduce response time, and strengthen overall security resilience. When a containerized environment faces a threat, swift containment is key to protecting critical assets and minimizing downtime. With Defender for Cloud’s new one-click containment Kubernetes response action, security teams can now manually isolate or terminate compromised pods instantly, cutting off unauthorized access and stopping lateral movement within the cluster. This rapid response feature reduces Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), allowing teams to neutralize threats in real time, safeguard operations, and focus on investigating the root cause—all without complex configurations. Additionally, security teams can leverage AI-driven guided threat remediation with step-by-step assistance, empowering SOC teams to manage container-specific incidents efficiently, even with minimal expertise. New innovations for container threat protection with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Additional container security announcements [General Availability] Containers software inventory: Defender for Cloud now provides a list of software installed in their containers and container images through the Cloud Security Explorer. This list can also be used to quickly gain other insights into the customer environment, such as finding all containers and container images with software impacted by a zero-day vulnerability, even before a CVE is published. [Public Preview] CIS Kubernetes Benchmark: Security teams can leverage multicloud regulatory compliance assessments with support for CIS Kubernetes Benchmarks for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). [General Availability] Enhanced Kubernetes (K8s) alert documentation and simulation tool: Defender for Cloud’s simulation tool proactively tests Kubernetes (K8s) environment by simulating real-world attack scenarios, causing alerts to be generated. The simulation tool deploys two pods in a target cluster: attacker and victim. During the simulation, the attacker "attacks" the victim using real-world techniques. Stay ahead of container vulnerabilities and attacks with end-to-end protection As containers become central to cloud-native applications, Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides end-to-end security across the entire container lifecycle—enhancing security posture, detecting and responding to threats, and ensuring compliance from development to runtime. As a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), Defender for Cloud empowers everyone from individual developers to SOC analysts and CISOs, providing the precision and depth needed to effectively protect containerized environments from sophisticated threats — setting our approach apart from traditional security methods. To learn more about Defender for Cloud and our new security innovations, you can: Read about the latest posture management security innovations in Defender for Cloud. Check out our cloud security solution page. Learn about our latest releases here. Join us at Ignite. Learn how you can unlock business value with Defender for Cloud. See it in action with a cloud detection and response use-case. Start a 30-day free trial. Source: 1.CNCF Annual Survey 2023 2. Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud Report
