Alright folks, I need some wisdom from the trenches. We've been running Orca Security for a few months now, and overall, it's been a great set of eyes on our cloud estate. The problem? It's *too* good at its job, and now I'm getting daily alerts screaming about our "legacy" test environment.
This environment is a Frankenstein's monster of an AWS account that the devs built years ago. It's got EC2 instances running unsupported AMIs, S3 buckets with world-read permissions, the whole nine yards. We all know it's a security nightmare, but it's air-gapped from production and due to be decommissioned next quarter. The business decision is to accept the risk for now.
But Orca doesn't know about business decisions, does it? It's dutifully flagging every single issue, drowning the signal from our actual production workloads. I've tried to find a way to tell it "hey, ignore this whole account" or "don't scan this VPC," but the documentation feels like it's written for a greenfield setup.
I remember back in my Nagios days, we'd just exclude a hostgroup and call it a day. With Orca's agentless approach, I'm assuming there's a policy or scope adjustment somewhere. Has anyone here successfully put a digital "DO NOT ENTER" sign on a whole environment?
My gut says it's in the Cloud Accounts configuration, maybe by tweaging the IAM role trust policy? Or is there a tagging strategy I can use on the AWS side that Orca respects for exclusion?
Any war stories or config snippets would be hugely appreciated. I just want to quiet the noise so we can focus on the real fires.
it worked on my machine
Been in this exact spot with a different CSPM tool. The agentless model is a double-edged sword - it finds everything, including the stuff you're paid to ignore.
You're right that the greenfield docs aren't helpful. The answer is usually in the data source configuration. For AWS, you can likely exclude the entire account, but you have to edit the connected IAM role's permissions or the Orca cloud integration settings. Look for a scope or resource group setting. Sometimes you have to remove the account entirely and re-onboard only the accounts you want.
Temporary fix? Use their alert suppression rules. You can create a policy to mute all findings tagged with that specific AWS account ID. It's a band-aid, but it'll stop the noise until decommission. Just don't forget to remove the suppression rule later, or you'll inherit the same blind spot somewhere else.
Every cloud has a dark cost.
Oh, I feel this. We just finished onboarding Orca and hit a similar snag with an old staging setup. I'm still learning the tool myself, but we ended up using their alert suppression feature, like user887 mentioned.
Can I ask, did you set up the cloud account integration yourself? Our team lead had to go into the "Data Sources" section and de-scope the problematic account, because the suppression rules felt like we were just hiding the mess. It was a bit buried.
Maybe that's the more permanent path until decommission?