Lacework Polygraph is a Host based IDS for cloud workloads. It provides a graphical view of who did what on which system, reducing the time for root cause analysis for anomalies in system behaviors. It can analyze workloads on AWS, Azure and GCP.

It installs a lightweight agent on each target system which aggregates information from processes running on the system into a centralized customer specific (MT) data warehouse (Snowflake on AWS)  and then analyzes the information using machine learning to generate behavioral profiles and then looks for anomalies from the baseline profile. The design allows automating analysis of common attack scenarios using ssh, privilege changes, unauthorized access to files.

The host based model gives detailed process information such as which process talked to which other and over what api. This info is not available to a network IDS. The behavior profiles reduce the false positive rates. The graphical view is useful to drill down into incidents.

OSQuery is a tool for gathering data from hosts, and this is a source of data aggregated for threat detection. https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2016/05/09/introduction-to-osquery-for-threat-detection-dfir/

Here’s an agent for libpcap https://github.com/lacework/pcap

It does not have an intrusion prevention (IPS) functionality. False positives on an IPS could block network/host access and negatively affect the system being protected, so it’s a harder problem.

Cloud based network isolation tools like Aviatrix might make IPS scenarios feasible by limiting the effect of an IPS.