Falco has become a vital tool for security practitioners seeking to safeguard containerized and cloud-native environments. Leveraging the power of eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter), Falco monitors system calls and audit events, allowing it to detect malicious behavior in hosts and containers, no matter how large the infrastructure. Beyond its core detection capabilities, Falco offers critical integrations with industry-standard frameworks, such as MITRE ATT&CK and PCI DSS, to enforce regulatory compliance and security standards.
As the CNCF Graduate Project evolves to meet industry needs, one of the most pressing challenges practitioners face is ensuring that their instance of Falco stays ahead of evolving threats and regulatory requirements. With the complexity of managing and updating Falco rules, handling false positives, and keeping up with emerging threats, how can security teams efficiently manage their threat intelligence with Falco? In this blog post, we will explore various tools and approaches that help manage Falco’s rules and extend its capabilities to meet modern cybersecurity challenges.
Falcosidekick
Falcosidekick is a lightweight solution that extends Falco’s capabilities by forwarding Falco event data to various third-party services. As organizations adopt more complex environments, they often need to centralize threat detection and responses across multiple systems. This is where Falcosidekick excels: it acts as a bridge between Falco and the extensive third-party ecosystem, including logging services, chat platforms, alerting tools, and observability systems.
By connecting Falco to these services, Falcosidekick enables:
- Rich Contextual Alerts: Falco events, enriched with metadata, can be sent to systems such as Slack, Elasticsearch, Prometheus, or SIEM solutions, allowing teams to react quickly to suspicious behavior.
- Compliance and Digital Forensics: Event data can be logged and stored for audits, digital forensics, or compliance purposes, enabling deeper investigation when threats arise.
- Automation and Response: You can use Falcosidekick to automate workflows in response to specific detections, or run arbitrary FaaS scripts to mitigate risk.
For example, if Falco detects an unexpected process running in a container, the enriched alert can be sent to a chat platform like Slack, giving security teams the necessary context to assess the situation. This fan-out model ensures that you don’t miss critical alerts, and the ability to forward events to various platforms helps optimize your threat response strategy.
Falco Talon
An alternative approach would be to use Falco Talon within a zero-trust model by automating real-time responses to unexpected system behavior based on predefined Falco rules. Instead of relying solely on known attack signatures, this approach focuses on detecting deviations from expected behavior within the system.
In this approach, you can define Falco rules for the normal behavior of operating systems, containers, and processes. If anything outside of the expected behavior occurs, a Falco Talon action can be triggered to mitigate the threat immediately, such as:
- Gracefully terminating a Kubernetes workload.
- Isolating the pod networking with Network Policies
- Triggering additional monitoring or logging based on the specific threat.
This approach is ideal for enforcing regulatory compliance in environments requiring strict control, such as PCI DSS or SOC 2. The benefit of this approach is that it requires less frequent updates to Falco rules, as it doesn’t rely heavily on threat feeds or lists of known behaviors. However, implementing this method requires a deep understanding of your system’s normal behavior to avoid unintended disruptions caused by over-aggressive rules.
Falcoctl: Streamlining Rules Management and Threat Intelligence
Falcoctl is the command-line interface that simplifies the lifecycle management of Falco’s rules and plugins. Managing and updating Falco’s rules effectively is critical to staying ahead of evolving threats, and falcoctl allows practitioners to:
- Install, update, or downgrade Falco rules: Whether you need to update your rules in response to emerging threats or roll back to a previous version due to a false positive, falcoctl makes the process seamless.
- Manage Falco plugins: As the plugin ecosystem continues to grow, falcoctl helps install, upgrade, and manage plugins with minimal downtime, enabling Falco to integrate with more tools and data sources.
Falcoctl supports OCI-compliant registries for managing rules and plugins, allowing users to pull artifacts from custom or official sources. This is particularly useful for maintaining custom rules or curated threat feeds in larger organizations. For example, you can maintain a list of known malicious binaries within your Falco instance. If Falco Talon incorrectly blocks a legitimate process due to a false positive, falcoctl enables you to quickly revert to a previous version of the rule without disrupting your operations.
This flexibility makes falcoctl an essential tool for managing both threat intelligence and compliance requirements across dynamic, cloud-native environments.
The Growing Need for Managed Falco Feeds
Managing Falco’s rule lifecycle is essential for adapting to constantly changing security threats, compliance standards, and infrastructure needs. Yet, many practitioners face challenges in efficiently handling custom rules, updating threat feeds, and reducing noise in their production environments. To address these pain points, managed Falco Feeds can provide a solution.
Falco feeds allow users to maintain up-to-date rules for threat detection, compliance enforcement, and more. Instead of manually updating lists of IP addresses, complex macros, or regulatory compliance rules, managed Falco Feeds simplify this process by delivering continuous, curated rule updates. Managed feeds ensure that your Falco instance stays aligned with:
- Evolving threat landscapes: As new vulnerabilities, attack vectors, and threat operations are discovered, such as SCARLETEEL and CRYSTALRAY, managed feeds help update your detection mechanisms without requiring manual intervention.
- Compliance standards: For industries requiring compliance with frameworks like PCI DSS, SOC2, FedRAMP, NIS2, or GDPR, managed feeds can offer pre-built rulesets to enforce those standards automatically.
2024 Falco Survey: Understanding How You Manage Falco Rules
As Falco matures post-CNCF graduation, we are eager to understand how the community manages its Falco instances, especially as threat landscapes and compliance requirements evolve. We’ve launched the 2024 Falco Survey to gain insights into how Falco is being used in production environments, what tools (like Falcosidekick, Falco Talon, or falcoctl) are being adopted, and how custom rules are managed.
Now is the time to get involved—contribute to the Falco community, share your insights in the 2024 Falco survey, and help shape the future of this critical CNCF project.
Some of the questions we aim to answer:
- Are users heavily relying on Falcosidekick for automated responses, or is Falco Talon taking the lead in real-time threat mitigation?
- How do teams manage their custom rules updates?
- How does Falco contribute to solving organizational pain points, particularly in Kubernetes security and compliance?
Conclusion
Falco is a powerful tool for securing cloud-native environments, but managing its rules and threat intelligence is an ongoing challenge for many organizations. Whether you’re integrating with third-party services via Falcosidekick, automating real-time response with Falco Talon, or streamlining lifecycle management with falcoctl, there are solutions available to meet the evolving needs of security practitioners.
As we continue to build on the capabilities of Falco, fully managed Falco Feeds by Sysdig offers a way to stay ahead of emerging threats and complex compliance requirements without the friction of manual updates or configuration changes. Falco Feeds equips users to harness the power and flexibility of open source Falco and exper-written detection rules fueled by the Sysdig Threat Research Team for real-time threat detection at enterprise scale.