Detecting anomalies with Falco

Falco is a CNCF open source project that detects anomalous behavior or runtime threats in cloud-native environments, such as a Kubernetes cluster. It is a rule-based runtime detection engine with about 100 out-of-the-box detection rules. In this section, we will first take an overview of Falco, and then we will show you how to write Falco rules so that you can build your own Falco rules to protect your Kubernetes cluster.

An overview of Falco

Falco is widely used to detect anomalous behavior in cloud-native environments, especially in the Kubernetes cluster. So, what is anomaly detection? Basically, it uses behavioral signals to detect security abnormalities, such as leaked credentials or unusual activity, and the behavioral signals can be derived from your knowledge of the entities in terms of what the normal behavior is.

Challenges faced

To identify what normal behaviors are in the Kubernetes cluster is not easy. From a running application...