Sysdig Secure: Actually Works When Attackers Are Already Inside

What is Sysdig Secure

Sysdig Secure watches your cloud stuff while it's actually running and catches attacks that slip past everything else.

Most security tools check your setup when nothing's happening - they miss shit that matters when you're actually under attack. Sysdig watches your apps while they're running and catches the real problems.

It's built on Falco, which graduated from CNCF in February 2024 and is actually battle-tested. The runtime detection catches zero-days that signature-based tools completely whiff on.

Why Runtime Detection Actually Matters

Here's the thing: most security tools are looking in all the wrong places when the attack is already happening.

Sysdig uses eBPF to watch system calls in real-time, so it catches behavioral anomalies that signature-based tools never see. The performance impact is minimal - maybe 1-2% CPU overhead in most cases, though heavy workloads might see a bit more.

What it actually catches: Container escapes when something breaks out of its sandbox, crypto miners that hide behind legitimate binaries, lateral movement through weird network hops and privilege escalations, plus zero-day exploits that your signature-based tools never see coming.

Sysdig Sage AI Thing

They enhanced Sysdig Sage in 2025 with better platform integration - originally launched in 2023, but the 2025 updates actually made it useful. Basically ChatGPT for security investigations that doesn't completely suck now.

The AI correlation is actually pretty useful - instead of getting 10,000 individual alerts, it groups related events and shows you potential attack paths. The natural language search works well for non-security people who need to investigate incidents but don't know the syntax.

Real use case: Instead of learning complex query syntax, you can ask "show me all containers that made outbound connections to suspicious IPs in the last hour" and it figures out the rest. Though sometimes it gets confused by your custom labels and you end up writing the query manually anyway.

What It Actually Does

Sysdig tries to do everything in one tool. Configuration scanning finds your AWS buckets that are wide open and K8s pods running as root. Vulnerability management scans images and running workloads, but here's the useful bit - it prioritizes vulns in packages that are actually loaded and running, not just sitting on disk doing nothing.

Permission analysis spots overprivileged IAM roles and service accounts. Really helpful for cleaning up those "just give it admin for now" situations that never get fixed. Runtime protection is where Falco shines - catches weird behavior like processes spawning shells, unexpected network connections, privilege escalations.

The integration doesn't suck like most integrations - instead of juggling 5 different tools, you get one dashboard that correlates findings across all these areas. Less context switching, fewer false positives.

Real performance: Agent uses about 100-200MB memory depending on workload size. eBPF kernel integration means no dodgy kernel modules that can crash your nodes.

War story: Had this crypto miner that was a royal pain in the ass to find. AWS bill went crazy and took us way too long to figure out why. The thing was hiding behind normal processes but doing weird network shit to mining pools. Our expensive-as-hell security platform completely missed it - probably because it wasn't using some signature they knew about. Falco caught the weird behavior pretty fast once we got it running. Would've saved us a bunch of cash if we'd deployed it earlier instead of fucking around with other tools.

The bottom line? While other tools are busy scanning your infrastructure like it's a museum exhibit, Sysdig actually watches what's happening when attackers are already inside. That real-time visibility makes all the difference between catching an incident early versus explaining to your CEO why the entire AWS bill just tripled.

Here's how Sysdig actually pulls this off without killing your performance or drowning you in false positives.

Sysdig Secure is basically three main pieces: Falco for catching weird behavior, some AI stuff for correlation, and attack path mapping to show you how screwed you'd be if someone got in.

Falco - The Good Stuff

Falco is the engine that makes this whole thing work. It graduated from CNCF so it's not going anywhere, and it watches system calls in real-time through eBPF.

What Falco actually catches: Container escapes when something breaks out of its sandbox, weird process spawning like when your web server suddenly starts running bash, suspicious network connections to sketchy IPs, file access violations where processes touch files they shouldn't, and privilege escalation when something tries to become root unexpectedly.

The custom rule engine lets you write your own detection logic, which is actually pretty powerful if you know your environment.

Attack Path Mapping - Actually Useful

The Cloud Attack Graph thing actually helps prioritize what to fix first instead of just dumping 10,000 CVEs on you.

It maps out how an attacker could chain together different issues to move laterally through your environment. So instead of panicking about every medium-severity vuln, you can focus on the ones that actually matter in your specific setup.

Real example: It might show you that a public S3 bucket + overprivileged IAM role + container vuln = complete AWS account compromise. That's way more useful than just "you have 47 medium vulns."

Smart Vulnerability Prioritization

The vuln management is actually pretty smart - instead of just scanning everything and freaking out about CVSS scores, it figures out which vulnerabilities actually matter in your environment.

What it checks: Is the vulnerable package actually running? No point fixing a vuln in a library that's just sitting on disk. Can attackers reach it? Internal-only services with vulns are less urgent than public-facing ones. What privileges does it have? A vuln in a root process is worse than one in a sandboxed container. Are there working exploits? Theoretical vulns are less scary than ones with public exploits in the wild.

This gets rid of most of the useless alerts. Instead of 10,000 CVEs to panic about, you get maybe 50 that actually matter.

Multi-Cloud Support (Works Everywhere)

We've deployed this across AWS, Azure, and GCP. The multi-cloud thing actually works, which is more than I can say for most tools.

AWS stuff that works:

• CloudTrail integration - pulls your API logs automatically, no custom scripting
• EKS works out of the box, Fargate takes some extra config
• IAM policy scanning catches those "just give it admin for now" situations that never get fixed
• Security Hub integration dumps findings where your compliance team expects them

Azure integration:

• AKS deployment is smooth, their Helm charts work fine
• Azure AD SSO setup took us about an hour, which is better than most tools
• Container Instances support is there but honestly most people use AKS anyway

GCP is solid too:

• GKE integration is clean, no weird permission issues
• Cloud Security Command Center integration works if you actually use that

The AI Stuff (Sage) - Actually Useful

The Sage AI thing got way better in 2025 - they originally launched it in 2023 but it was pretty much useless. Now it's actually not terrible. Instead of learning their query syntax, you can just ask it "show me containers that made weird network connections" and it figures it out.

The good parts:

• Natural language search actually works - you can ask questions like a human instead of memorizing query syntax
• Groups related alerts together instead of spamming you with 500 individual notifications
• Suggests what to look at next when investigating incidents - sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it catches stuff you'd miss

Real example: Instead of writing complex queries to correlate events, you can ask "what happened before this container started making outbound connections" and it builds the timeline for you. Half the time it's spot-on, the other half it includes every docker pull and log rotation from the past week.

The annoying parts:

• Sometimes gives you too much context when you just want a simple answer
• Occasionally suggests investigating things that are obviously normal (like your monitoring agent checking in)
• The marketing oversells it - it's helpful but not magic

Enterprise Setup (If You Must)

Setting up enterprise integrations took us longer than expected, but most stuff works once you get through it.

SSO integration:

• SAML setup with Okta took forever because their attribute mapping is picky as hell. SAML broke after some Okta update and everyone got locked out with some useless error about assertion validation that told us absolutely nothing. Took their support way too long to figure out that Okta's latest release broke the attribute mapping
• Once working, it's solid - users don't complain about separate logins anymore
• AD/LDAP works fine if you're still stuck in 2015

API integration:

• REST APIs are decent for custom workflows - we built a Slack bot that queries incidents
• Rate limiting is reasonable, documentation could be better
• GraphQL endpoint exists but the REST API covers most use cases

Compliance reports:

• SOC 2, PCI, HIPAA reports happen automatically, which is fucking brilliant
• CIS benchmarks are built in - compliance team loves not having to map findings manually
• Custom report templates work but expect to spend time tweaking them

Scale stuff:

• We're running about 1200 containers across 3 regions without issues
• Performance stays consistent as you add nodes, which isn't always true for security tools

Performance (Doesn't Suck Your Resources)

The agent uses eBPF which means no sketchy kernel modules that can crash your nodes.

Real numbers from our production: Memory usage is a few hundred megs per agent, more if you're running tons of containers. CPU usage is pretty low most of the time, spikes during incidents when it's doing more analysis. Network traffic isn't bad - not much unless your workload is super chatty. Logs locally when it can't reach the SaaS, cleanup usually works fine but we've had to manually clear disk space a couple times after long outages.

Why it doesn't kill performance:

• Samples system calls instead of capturing everything - smart enough to get the important stuff
• Does local filtering before sending data to the cloud
• Backs off resource usage when your nodes are under load (actually works unlike some agents)

War story: Had this agent that kept crashing with memory issues. Memory leak or something, getting killed every few hours which was annoying as hell. Spent a weekend trying to figure out why our alerts weren't working - turns out our custom rules were broken but it failed silently. Error just said something unhelpful about rule validation. Upgrading fixed the memory thing but then we had to waste more time fixing the rule syntax. Support was helpful once we got past the first level guys, but that took forever. At least the upgrade process doesn't suck.

The reality check: Sysdig Secure isn't magic, but it's the closest thing to runtime security that actually works in production without making your ops team quit. The combination of proven open source tech (Falco), decent AI assistance (Sage), and performance that won't crater your clusters makes it worth the complexity.