Category: Intermediate (200)

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) helps customers build secure and scalable applications. IMDS solves a security challenge for cloud users by providing access to temporary and frequently-rotated credentials, and by removing the need to hardcode or distribute sensitive credentials to instances manually or programmatically. The Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) […]

You can now deploy AWS WAF managed rules as part of the Security Automations for AWS WAF solution. In this post, we show you how to get started and set up monitoring for this automated solution with additional recommendations. This article discusses AWS WAF, a service that assists you in protecting against typical web attacks […]

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) services help customers automate deployments of infrastructure as code and software within the cloud. Common native Amazon Web Services (AWS) CI/CD services include AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy. You can also use third-party CI/CD services hosted outside the AWS Cloud, such as Jenkins, GitLab, and Azure DevOps, […]

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) events occur when a threat actor sends traffic floods from multiple sources to disrupt the availability of a targeted application. DDoS simulation testing uses a controlled DDoS event to allow the owner of an application to assess the application’s resilience and practice event response. DDoS simulation testing is permitted on […]

In March 2022, AWS announced support for custom certificate extensions, including name constraints, using AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA). Defining DNS name constraints with your subordinate CA can help establish guardrails to improve public key infrastructure (PKI) security and mitigate certificate misuse. For example, you can set a DNS name constraint that restricts […]

In the first three blog posts in the Establishing a data perimeter on AWS series, we covered the identity and resource perimeters. In this post, we dive into the third dimension, the network. A key part of protecting your organization’s non-public, sensitive data is to understand who can access it and from where. One of […]

Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) released Amazon Corretto Crypto Provider (ACCP) 2, a cryptography provider built by AWS for Java virtual machine (JVM) applications. ACCP 2 delivers comprehensive performance enhancements, with some algorithms (such as elliptic curve key generation) seeing a greater than 13-fold improvement over ACCP 1. The new release also brings […]

In 2017, AWS announced the release of Rate-based Rules for AWS WAF, a new rule type that helps protect websites and APIs from application-level threats such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, brute force log-in attempts, and bad bots. Rate-based rules track the rate of requests for each originating IP address and invokes a […]

Over the past few decades, digital technologies have brought tremendous benefits to our societies, governments, businesses, and everyday lives. However, the more we depend on them for critical applications, the more we must do so securely. The increasing reliance on these systems comes with a broad responsibility for society, companies, and governments. At Amazon Web […]

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 […]