Continually reviewing your organization’s incident response capabilities can be challenging without a mechanism to create security findings with actual Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources within your AWS estate. As prescribed within the AWS Security Incident Response whitepaper, it’s important to periodically review your incident response capabilities to make sure your security team is continually maturing internal processes and assessing capabilities within AWS. Generating sample security findings is useful to understand the finding format so you can enrich the finding with additional metadat ..read more

You can use Amazon Security Lake to simplify log data collection and retention for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and non-AWS data sources. To make sure that you get the most out of your implementation requires proper planning. In this post, we will show you how to plan and implement a proof of concept (POC) for Security Lake to help you determine the functionality and value of Security Lake in your environment, so that your team can confidently design and implement in production. We will walk you through the following steps: Understand the functionality and value of Security Lake Determine succes ..read more

Welcome to another blog post from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT)! For this post, we’re looking at two events that the team was involved in from the viewpoint of a regularly discussed but sometimes misunderstood subject, least privilege. Specifically, we consider the idea that the benefit of reducing permissions in real-life use cases does not always require using the absolute minimum set of privileges. Instead, you need to weigh the cost and effort of creating and maintaining privileges against the risk reduction that is achieved, to make sure that your permissions are appropri ..read more

In this blog post, we focus on two recently released features of AWS Security Hub: the consolidated controls view and consolidated control findings. You can use these features to manage controls across standards and to consolidate findings, which can help you significantly reduce finding noise and administrative overhead. Security Hub is a cloud security posture management service that you can use to apply security best practice controls, such as “EC2 instances should not have a public IP address.” With Security Hub, you can check that your environment is properly configured and that your exis ..read more

AWS re:Inforce took place in Anaheim, California, on June 13–14, 2023. AWS customers, partners, and industry peers participated in hundreds of technical and non-technical security-focused sessions across six tracks, an Expo featuring AWS experts and AWS Security Competency Partners, and keynote and leadership sessions. The threat detection and incident response track showcased how AWS customers can get the visibility they need to help improve their security posture, identify issues before they impact business, and investigate and respond quickly to security incidents across their environment ..read more

RSA Conference 2023 brought thousands of cybersecurity professionals to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California from April 24 through 27. The keynote lineup was eclectic, with more than 30 presentations across two stages featuring speakers ranging from renowned theoretical physicist and futurist Dr. Michio Kaku to Grammy-winning musician Chris Stapleton. Topics aligned with this year’s conference theme, “Stronger Together,” and focused on actions that can be taken by everyone, from the C-suite to those of us on the front lines of security, to strengthen collaboration, establish new be ..read more

A full conference pass is $1,099. Register today with the code secure150off to receive a limited time $150 discount, while supplies last. AWS re:Inforce is back, and we can’t wait to welcome security builders to Anaheim, CA, on June 13 and 14. AWS re:Inforce is a security learning conference where you can gain skills and confidence in cloud security, compliance, identity, and privacy. As an attendee, you will have access to hundreds of technical and non-technical sessions, an Expo featuring AWS experts and security partners with AWS Security Competencies, and keynote and leadership sessi ..read more

Effective security incident response depends on adequate logging, as described in the AWS Security Incident Response Guide. If you have the proper logs and the ability to query them, you can respond more rapidly and effectively to security events. If a security event occurs, you can use various log sources to validate what occurred and understand the scope. Then, you can use the results of your analysis to take remediation actions. To learn more about logging best practices, see Configure service and application logging and Analyze logs, findings, and metrics centrally. In this blog post, we w ..read more

Greetings from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT)! AWS CIRT is dedicated to supporting customers during active security events on the customer side of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. Over the past three years, AWS CIRT has supported customers with security events in their AWS accounts. These include the unauthorized use of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials, ransomware, and data deletion in an AWS account. In this post, I will walk you through key AWS services and features that provide backup and recovery solutions to restore your data based upon the lessons ..read more

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