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View Alerts

When there is a behavioral anomaly, a potential threat or intrusion to your cloud entities, then you should see an alert on the Alerts page.

From the alert list, click the alert to view more information about the event.

Status

  • Open - The alert needs to be investigated.
  • In progress - The alert is under active investigation.
  • Closed - The alert has been resolved.

To change an alert status to Closed:

  1. Click the status dropdown menu and select Closed.
  2. Select your reason for closing the alert from the following:
    • Other
    • False positive
    • Not enough information
    • Malicious and have resolution in place
    • Expected because of routine testing
    • Expected behavior
  3. Provide an optional comment.
  4. Click Close alert.

You can also click Close as false positive to change the status.

For Jira bidirectional integration, you can change an alert status to Closed by changing the associated Jira ticket to the corresponding status based on your status mapping. For more information, refer to Jira alert channel.

False Positives

Lacework gathers the combined alert closure data across our customers to better understand alerts and improve the alerting experience. Closing an alert as a false positive will not impact future alerts, meaning an alert you closed as a false positive will continue to trigger if its conditions are detected.

Add Exception

Policy exceptions are a mechanism used to maintain the policies, but let you circumvent one or more restrictions.

Click Add exception to create an exception for the policy associated with this alert. For details, see Policies Overviews.

Details

Click Details to see the following sections:

WHY - Describes why the potential threat occurred.

WHEN - Describes when the event was first seen and the event time range.

WHO - Describes the username and hostname associated with the event.

WHAT - Describes the vulnerable cloud activity.

WHERE - Describes the location associated with the event, such as IP address.

note

To enhance the batch-processing time, Lacework has successfully implemented a new architecture method. Consequently, the following data will now be excluded from the Lacework Console:

List of excluded data

Context Panels

Context panels are available for host and IP address resources. Click the hostname or IP address to see additional context about the resource.

Click Open resource details to go to its Resource Explorer entry.

Exposure

For details, see Exposure Polygraph.

Investigation

Click Investigation to start investigating the event.

Polygraphs

The polygraph technology dynamically develops a behavioral model of your services and infrastructure. The model understands natural hierarchies including processes, containers, pods, and machines. It then develops behavioral models that polygraph monitors in search of activities that fall outside the model’s parameters.

Lacework provides polygraphs for Application Communication, Pod Communication, and API behavior (for anomaly events).

Use the search feature to narrow the polygraphs to any element that contains your keyword.

Investigation Questions

Lacework uses a set of investigation questions to help uncover unexpected behaviors that can be relevant to the event. Pay attention to the questions that have a Yes answer to keep your investigation in the correct direction.

Process Details

This section displays submitted rule status and logs.

List of Active Containers

This section displays all running containers.

Container Image Information

View the container image information associated with the event, such as the packaged application, dependencies, and what processes it runs when launched.

Events

Click Events to view and verify the technically relevant observations of individual events. The data presented in the Events tab may vary depending on the available data.

Actions for the list include the following:

  • Refresh data.
  • Download the event list as a CSV.
  • Search for specific events.
  • Select which columns to display in the list.

For threat intel and composite alerts, Lacework also displays the Event window, which indicates the timeframe related to the compromise. This period extends up to seven days from the initial detection.

info
  • For composite alerts, the Events tab presents concrete evidence of the observed compromise that Lacework detected. Each evidence contains the following metadata:
    • Event Activity: Timestamp indicating when this event was observed.
    • Event ID: The unique identifier for this event.
    • Event Name: The descriptive name or label assigned to each event.
    • Event Description: Provides a brief explanation or summary of the details and significance of each event.
  • Lacework leverages several detections to swiftly identify security incidents within your environment. For the list of detections, see Detections Reference.

Click Related Alerts to view correlated alerts with similar patterns and thresholds defined in your alert rules and policies.

The alerts list displays up to 10 related alerts at a time. You can perform the following actions on related alerts:

  • Refresh data.
  • Download the alert list as a CSV.
  • Select which columns to display in the list.

Integrations

Click Integrations to view all active and inactive integrations associated with the alert.

For a full list of supported channels, see Configure Alert Channels.

note

The Inactive integrations card contains all your disabled and deleted alert channels.

Timeline

Click Timeline to view all alert updates, integration updates, user comments, and make updates and comments when needed.

You can perform the following actions on the updates and comments:

  • Refresh data.
  • Filter by alert updates, user comments, user actions, and integration updates.
  • Add comments to an open alert. Note that commenting on closed alerts is not allowed.
Use Markdown to write comments

You can use Markdown to quickly add formatting elements to your comments.

Italicize, bold, and strikethrough text with Markdown
  • To format text as italic, enclose it in a single asterisk or underscore.
  • To format text as bold, enclose it in two asterisks.
  • To format text as bold and italic, enclose it in three asterisks.
  • To format text in strikethrough, enclose it in two tildes.

Create headings with Markdown
You can also use Markdown to create up to five different headings. To create a heading, add number signs (#) before your heading text. The number of number signs you use corresponds to the heading level.
For example, to create a heading 2, use two number signs (e.g., ## My Header).


Create ordered and bullet lists with Markdown
  • To create an ordered list, add line items with numbers followed by periods. Indent one or more items to create a nested list.
  • To create an unordered list, add dashes (-), asterisks (*), or plus signs (+) in front of line items. Indent one or more items to create a nested list.

Create code blocks and blockquotes with Markdown
  • To denote a word or phrase as code, enclose it in backticks (`).
  • To create a blockquote, add a > in front of a paragraph.

Create tables and horizontal rules with Markdown
  • To add a table, use three or more hyphens (---) to create each column’s header, and use pipes (|) to separate each column. For compatibility, you should also add a pipe on either end of the row.

    | Syntax      | Description |
    | ----------- | ----------- |
    | Header | Title |
    | Paragraph | Text |
    The rendered output looks like this:

  • To create a horizontal rule, use three or more asterisks (***), dashes (---), or underscores (___) on a line by themselves.
    *** --- _________________
    The rendered output of all three looks identical:
    __________________________________________________________

Create links with Markdown
To create a link, enclose the link text in brackets (e.g., [Lacework]) and then follow it immediately with the URL in parentheses (e.g., (https://www.lacework.com)).

Evolving Alerts

Evolving alerts are the ones that are still receiving new data to update the alert details accordingly. For example, the latest data allows Lacework to upgrade the alert severity from High to Critical or reopen an alert you have closed.

When viewing an "Evolving" alert from the Lacework Console, you'll see the alert time range and corresponding observations. Lacework will post updates to the Timeline tab, showing the number of newly observed events from the previous update. A similar update will also be sent to your chosen alert channel.

Lacework continues to update the alerts for up to one hour for threat intel alerts and up to 48 hours for composite alerts. Any new data that occurs beyond that period creates a new alert.

You can configure evolving alerts when creating alert rules. See Alert Rules.

note

Evolving Alerts feature is only available for threat intel and composite alerts.

Alert Name Updates

We have updated certain alert names to enhance communication, understanding, and the actionability of alerts within your system. The table below provides a list of all the updated alert names: