Attackers are using AI to find and chain vulnerabilities; detection and response alone cannot always keep up. According to Unit 42’s Incident Response Report, they can now exfiltrate data in under 72 minutes, 4x faster than the year before.
To stop the next chained zero-day attack, security teams need active runtime protection inside their workloads that can block exploits and kill malicious processes. DevOps teams need those same workloads to stay fast and reliable. Traditional agents can consume too much CPU and memory, slowing applications and driving up costs, so DevOps often removes them and relies on agentless scanning. Scanning can surface risk, but it can’t stop an attack in progress, leaving critical production workloads exposed at runtime.
Today, Cortex Cloud is releasing the Cortex Cloud Sensor, which provides best-in-class active protection for the most critical cloud workloads and applications. Optimized for the cloud, it is a lightweight version of the Cortex XDR sensor, purpose-built for Kubernetes, containers, and Linux cloud workloads. It secures the applications that run your business.
Agentless Scanning Surfaces Risk. Active Runtime Protection Stops Attacks
Agentless scanning is the foundation of cloud risk reduction. It finds vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposed data across your environment so you can fix the biggest problems first. Some vulnerabilities can’t be patched right away, new ones appear daily, and attackers only need one way in. Once they’re inside, agentless scanning can’t stop active attacks.
Cloud runtime protection closes that gap. It runs alongside your applications and watches what they’re doing as they run. When an attacker takes over a workload, launches malicious code, or hides in a container that exists for only a few minutes, runtime protection blocks it on the spot. With attacks now running start to finish in minutes, that protection has to be in place before the attack begins.
The Cortex Cloud Sensor can stop active attacks in real time while keeping your environments stable. Here’s how it is delivered.
Shut Down Attacks as They Happen
Every workload with the Cortex Cloud Sensor gets the best-in-class protection that Cortex has to offer:
- Anti-malware: Blocks known and unknown malware before it can execute on the workload.
- Exploit protection: Stops the techniques attackers use to exploit vulnerabilities in running applications, including ones that haven't been patched yet.
- Real-time response: Kills malicious processes and quarantines malicious files the moment an attack is detected, before it can spread.
Detect Cloud Attacks in Real Time
The Cortex Cloud Sensor gives your security team continuous visibility into what’s running on every cloud workload:
- Threat detection: Checks runtime behavior against detection rules from our threat research to catch attacker activity as it happens.
- Cloud and endpoint analytics: Records process, file, and network activity so analysts can investigate incidents and hunt for threats.
- File integrity monitoring (FIM): Watches critical files and directories and alerts on unauthorized changes.
Investigate with Full Context and Respond with AI
The Sensor gives analysts all the context they need to understand an attack and act on it quickly:
- Full alert context: Shows exactly which workload, cluster, and cloud account is involved, so analysts don’t have to hunt for where an alert came from.
- Code-to-runtime correlation: Connects runtime alerts to cloud activity, identities, configuration, and source code, so teams can trace an attack back to the root misconfiguration, vulnerability or code.
- AI-driven response: AI agents powered by Cortex AgentiX help investigate incidents and recommend remediation steps such as patching vulnerable code or fixing the misconfiguration.
None of this protection matters if the sensor gets removed, which is why we built it to run in the most demanding cloud environments.
Purpose Built for Cloud Native Environments
Cloud applications run differently from the servers most security agents were built for. Development teams ship many times a day, containers start and stop constantly, and clusters scale up and down based on demand. A few percent of CPU overhead across thousands of containers shows up in latency dashboards and the cloud bill.
The Cortex Cloud Sensor was designed thoughtfully for cloud native environments:
- Low resource consumption: The Sensor is lightweight because it focuses on runtime monitoring and active protection; vulnerability and configuration scanning is handled by agentless scanning.
- Built for ephemeral workloads: New containers and workloads are protected the moment they spin up, so any addition of ephemeral workloads doesn’t leave gaps in coverage.
- Workload stability: The sensor uses eBPF to monitor process, file, and network activity, so it doesn’t risk node stability or turn every kernel upgrade into a compatibility test.
- Easy to deploy: Roll out the sensor with a Helm chart, DaemonSet, or the standard Linux installer for VMs. It uses the same policies and content updates as the rest of the Cortex platform, so it is easy to manage.
As a result, the Cortex Cloud Sensor uses up to 75% fewer resources than the standard Cortex Sensor.
Protection that stays on
In the age of AI, attacks unfold in minutes, and security can only protect the workloads it runs on. When the sensor stays within your performance limits, both engineering and security teams can rest knowing that their most critical applications and workloads stay protected.
That's the standard we set for the Cortex Cloud Sensor: the best security for your cloud applications, with minimal impact on performance or uptime.
Want to get hands-on? Request a demo to see it in action.