Category: Management Tools

In this post, we describe a practical approach that you can use to detect anomalous behaviors within Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud workloads by using behavioral analysis techniques that can be used to augment existing threat detection solutions. Anomaly detection is an advanced threat detection technique that should be considered when a mature security baseline […]

This blog post is Part 2 of Hands-on walkthrough of the AWS Network Firewall flexible rules engine – Part 1. To recap, AWS Network Firewall is a managed service that offers a flexible rules engine that gives you the ability to write firewall rules for granular policy enforcement. In Part 1, we shared how to […]

In this blog post, I introduce IAM Policy Validator for AWS CloudFormation (cfn-policy-validator), an open source tool that extracts AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies from an AWS CloudFormation template, and allows you to run existing IAM Access Analyzer policy validation APIs against the template. I also show you how to run the tool […]

Incident response is a core security capability for organizations to develop, and a core element in the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF). Responding to security incidents quickly is important to minimize their impacts. Automating incident response helps you scale your capabilities, rapidly reduce the scope of compromised resources, and reduce repetitive work by your […]

In this blog post, we will show you how you can use AWS Systems Manager Change Manager to control access to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance interactive shell sessions, to enforce separation of duties. Separation of duties is a design principle where more than one person’s approval is required to conclude a critical […]

October 13, 2021: We’ve added a section on redacting and transforming personally identifiable information with Amazon S3 Object Lambda. In this post, we describe the AWS services that you can use to both detect and protect your data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). When you analyze security in depth for your Amazon […]

August 3, 2021: We’ve updated the link to download the CloudFormation template in “Step 2: Deploy the CloudFormation template.” In this post, I show you how to implement a centralized patching solution across Amazon Web Services (AWS) Regions by using AWS Systems Manager in your AWS account. This helps you to initiate, track, and manage […]

Following the example of the EU in implementing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), many countries are implementing similar data protection laws. In response, many companies are forming teams that are responsible for data protection. Considering the volume of information that companies maintain, it’s essential that these teams are alerted when sensitive data is at […]

US federal government agencies use the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) framework to provide security and compliance guidance for their IT systems. The US Department of Defense (DoD) also requires its IT systems to follow the Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) produced by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). To aid in managing […]

March 24, 2021: We’ve corrected errors in the policy statements in steps 2 and 3 of the section “To create the IAM policy document.” AWS CloudFormation is a service that lets you create a collection of related Amazon Web Services and third-party resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion. A typical access […]