VMware Extends XDR to Containers and Kubernetes

VMware today announced it will expand the reach of its Carbon Black extended detection and response (XDR) cybersecurity platform to add support for containers and Kubernetes within the next six months.

Jason Rolleston, vice president and general manager for Carbon Black at VMware, said the goal is to make it simpler to centrally manage cybersecurity across a diverse range of platforms as Kubernetes clusters become more widely deployed across an enterprise.

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Cybersecurity teams should not need to become deep Kubernetes experts to secure those platforms alongside the legacy platforms that Carbon Black EDR already protects, noted Rolleston.

As the number of Kubernetes clusters deployed in those environments increases, they naturally become more tempting targets for cybercriminals.

Common attack vectors that can be exploited on Kubernetes platforms include distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), authentication bypass, direct transversal, remote code execution (RCE), overflow, informational, privilege escalation and SQL injection. Cybercriminals have also shown they can “jailbreak” from containers to take control of the hosts they run on.

Cybercriminals have especially focused on Kubernetes and containers to hijack IT infrastructure resources and mine cryptocurrencies, otherwise known as cryptojacking. While often considered a nuisance crime, organizations can incur tens of thousands of dollars in unexpected expenses when a monthly bill arrives from their cloud service provider.

More troubling still, if there has been a cryptojacking breach, it also means bad actors have gained access to credentials that can be used to inject more lethal types of malware.

VMware Carbon Black monitors the processes running in both container and Kubernetes environments and tracks historical data on any previous anomalies detected in a container that no longer exists.

The issue that many organizations encounter is that containers provide developers with a false sense of security. A container typically only runs for a few minutes before being replaced, so developers assume that there is not enough time for cybercriminals to exploit any potential vulnerabilities. However, organizations are now running thousands of containers simultaneously that have the same vulnerabilities so the attack surface that needs to be defended is much larger than many IT organizations might realize.

At the same time, cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated in terms of the types of cyberattacks they are launching against platforms such as Kubernetes; clusters that are running applications are frequently updated. The dynamic nature of these application environments makes it challenging for IT organizations to stay on top of cybersecurity, noted Rolleston.

It will be up to each organization to determine whether they will centrally manage Kubernetes and container security versus deploying cybersecurity platforms specifically for cloud-native application environments. That latter approach tends to increase the total cost of cybersecurity at a time when more organizations are sensitive to those costs.

Regardless of the approach, cloud-native security is becoming a more pressing issue as cybercriminals look to exploit well-known vulnerabilities that are encapsulated in a different type of software artifact.