Managed Canary

NCC Group’s Managed Canary is a deception-based managed detection service, designed to complement your existing threat detection capabilities with high-fidelity alerts and minimal false positives. By deploying Canaries, specialised decoy hosts, files, credentials, and services, throughout your network and cloud environments, we provide an early warning system for attackers who have bypassed perimeter defences or are performing internal reconnaissance.

As part of our MXDR ecosystem, the service is fully managed by NCC Group. We take care of deployment, health monitoring, alert triage, and continuous tuning. These alerts are correlated with other telemetry sources (e.g. CloudTrail logs, EDR, NDR) and enriched with context from AWS and on-premises systems to reduce false positives and increase actionable insights. Verified high-priority alerts are then escalated via your existing processes or sent to your AWS/SIEM dashboards as needed, providing you with immediate awareness of potential breaches inside your environment.

This service is designed to complement AWS’s native security services (like Amazon GuardDuty) by adding a critical layer of deception defense. While tools such as GuardDuty monitor for known threat patterns in AWS logs, Managed Canary introduces proactive traps that catch attackers who evade standard controls – for instance, alerting you if stolen AWS keys are being used or if someone is probing internal AWS resources. The service is especially valuable in regulated and high-risk industries (finance, critical infrastructure, government, etc.) where early detection of internal network movement or compromised accounts is paramount. By leveraging AWS’s global cloud infrastructure for hosting and deployment, Managed Canary can be delivered in a secure, scalable manner across multiple AWS regions and hybrid environments to meet the needs of global enterprises.

Core Service Features
· AWS Hosted Console: The Canary management console and backend run in the AWS Cloud (single-tenant Amazon EC2 instances)
· Turnkey deployment of Canary appliances and tokens across your environment – including decoy files, servers, credentials, and cloud keys. For example, we set up fake AWS API keys and other Canarytokens that instantly alert you if an attacker tries to use them NCC Group handles all configuration to tailor the deception environment to your AWS and on-prem assets
· Comprehensive coverage across AWS cloud, on-premises servers, user endpoints, and network devices. Canaries can be deployed in your AWS VPCs, data centers, and even OT networks to detect unauthorized activity in any segment of your infrastructure.24/7 monitoring and triage of all Canary alerts by NCC Group SOC
· Around-the-clock monitoring of all Canary alerts by NCC Group’s Security Operations Center. Our analysts investigate each alert to filter out any benign triggers, ensuring you only get notified for genuine threats (high signal, low noise)
· Each alert is enriched with additional context and correlated with other telemetry (such as EDR logs or AWS CloudTrail events) to build a complete picture of the incident
· Monthly reporting including alert trends and deception effectiveness
· Integration with MXDR and SIEM or SOAR tools
· Continuous tuning and health monitoring of deployed Canaries

Add-On Modules
· Integration with Splunk Cloud, Sentinel, or third-party SIEMs
· Alert forwarding to SOAR for automated playbook execution
· Alignment with purple team and threat simulation exercises
· Support for customer-owned Canaries (BYOL model)
· Multi-tenant deployment model for MSSPs or enterprise groups

Delivery Approach
· Deployment completed within 2–4 weeks
· Optional pre-assessment to design deception strategy
· Fully managed service under 12–36 month agreement
· Support for global, multi-region, and air-gapped environments
· Health monitoring and performance reviews included