Microsoft is busy with a project named ‘Project Freta’ that aims to weed out all loops holes in cloud security. This project that apparently might see light by the end of this year will assist cloud admins in identifying malware running on virtual machines in the cloud.
As cloud adoption is increasing at a massive rate, the traditional techniques of scanning the platform for security holes are proving slow.
What’s more is that such malicious software often have the ability to know whether it is being detected by the hypervisor security tools that are working outside the virtual machines and take necessary measures to remain concealed.
Project Freta is a cloud centric proof-of-concept software that helps identify in-memory malware by scanning memory snapshots from time to time in Linux and Windows Virtual Machines.
The project offers techniques, and tools that can scan for malware at a massive scale. Even the modern and sophisticated malicious software can be sensed with the tools and their signatures can immediately be added to the active scanning tools, locking them up from creating more trouble.
From the past few months the team working on the project Freta is seen sampling VMs running in Azure to analyze the compromised images. Aim is to strengthen the AI database of Microsoft to track down future threats on a massive note.
Note- Freta is a free cloud based offering from the tech giant that will have the potential to detect novel malicious software, kernel rootkits, process hiding, and other intrusions. Admins can use it simply by just capturing the image and then seek a report. And as there is no need to install any software, malware will never have time to evacuate or destroy data.
