AWS has remained innovative, offering the ability to strategically scale its infrastructure and applications across enterprises. In addition to this, it also has exceptional security features with the relevant services. Although AWS takes absolute responsibility for securing its customers’ infrastructure, it is obvious that configuring its services with best practices is user-dependent. Businesses don’t have to worry because they have provided various offerings that make this feasible.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is very critical of the security issue and offers the administrators the required tools. One huge advantage of the Amazon Web Services Security stack is the simplicity of deployment. In some cases, all the business has to do is to subscribe to the service. In this blog article, we’ll take a look at some of the AWS tools that are available. They are as follows:
1. GuardDuty
This tool is regarded as the watcher on the wall. It is a controlled threat detection service that is easy to scale and deploy in your infrastructure. It has the capacity to evaluate log across your services and accounts to ensure that everything is well-protected. Amazon repeatedly boasts that its GuardDuty tool has the capacity to analyze tens of billions of events over Amazon Web Services. It also leverages the machine learning to make sure that you receive precise and actionable reports. There are not many companies that have this type of data set.
This tool also has the capability to detect activities that are associated with instance compromise, account compromise, and reconnaissance. This covers things, such as data exfiltration, port scanning, unusual API calls, malware, and different attempts to disable logging. It is important to note that you can’t write custom alerts for GuardDuty, because according to AWS, it is supposed to be a hand-off tool. However, it can computerize remediation of alerts through AWS Lambda and incorporate it into CloudWatch to ensure the administrators have one pane of glass.
2. Shield
The AWS Shield tool is an administered DDoS protection service. It has the capacity to protect load balancers, EC2, Global Accelerator, Route 53 resources, and CloudFront. Although DDoS protection may not seem such a big revolution, you may want to consider the fact that Amazon asserts that about 99% of infrastructure flood attacks that are detected by Shield get mitigated within one second on CloudFront. With this tool that offers you the opportunity to continue managing without having to engage your security team, you definitely have a remarkable competitive advantage. As a matter of fact, AWS Shield can also protect sites that are not hosted in AWS.
3. CloudWatch
This is a monitoring tool for almost everything. It ingests events, metrics, and logs across the AWS business infrastructure to make sure that the organization has visibility into all that is going on in its environment. If you have worked with SIEM, you will agree that a tool that has the capacity to aggregate numerous data and make it available to the engineers is highly crucial. Due to the fact that CloudWatch combines with GuardDuty and can offer huge quantity and quality of general information, and it also makes it pretty easy to troubleshoot your security incidents. Apart from security implication, the tool also helps aggregate resource utilization data and performance. You can use it for setting up auto scaling for different EC2 instances to routinely remove or add compute resources to ensure the companies get best value for the spend on the AWS platform.
4. Marcie
This tool is all about offering protection to your data. Marcie is a machine learning service tool designed to watch data access trends. It also helps discover any anomalies and spot unauthorized data access and data leaks. It can relay all alerts to CloudWatch in order to leverage the different custom and automation alerting. It is fully managed by AWS, and without a doubt, it provides additional alerts and visibility without any extra work.
5. AWS Inspector
This tool offers the security assessment service that carries out the best practice and vulnerability scanning for your AWS applications. It offers the administrators consistent improvements because the security team at AWS is always updating best practices. With the security standard and compliance incorporated into application and infrastructure deployment, an organization can have a great head start in remaining secure.
NOTE: Due to the fact that AWS is a safe haven for the DevOps engineers, some of the biggest security tools are from third-party sources. Prowler and Scoutsuite are two of the best configuration and compliance scanners designed for open source community. Let’s explore them in detail.
6. Prowler
Prowler positions itself as AWS Security best practices auditing, assessment, hardening. It covers configuration areas, including networking, identity management, and configurations related to HIPAA and GDPR.
7. Scoutsuite
It also functions as an auditing tool. The core difference between the two is that Scoutsuite is multiple-platform. It offers support for AWS, Azure, and Google. Although auditing tools may not be as thrilling as many other tools highlighted in the list above, their importance cannot be overemphasized. The truth is that the worst of data breaches ever experienced on AWS have been caused by simple misconfigurations. Giving allowance to public write/read access to AWS S3 buckets have remained the big causative factor for major breaches.
The Bottom Line
For instance, in 2017, Accenture (a corporate consulting firm) left about four S3 buckets to the public, and fortunately for the company, a security researcher found these buckets and reported the case to the organization. The buckets were not secured until the next day. According to report, they had about 137 gigabytes of data along with plaintext client passwords, decryption keys, AWS certificates, and some other Cloud platforms. Thankfully, not a single malicious attacker was able to access the data before recovery. If they had, they could have caused a serious damage to the firm and its clients. This example is just to show how important an auditing tool is in the framework of security.
