AWS Security Blog

Category: Management Tools

How to create SAML providers with AWS CloudFormation

August 10, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more about the name change here. June 24, 2020: We updated the first 3 paragraphs of this post to provide, and link to, more information. As organizations grow, they often […]

How to track changes to secrets stored in AWS Secrets Manager using AWS Config and AWS Config Rules

On April 20th, AWS Config announced support for AWS Secrets Manager, making it easier to track configuration changes to the secrets you manage in AWS Secrets Manager. You can now use AWS Config to track changes to secrets’ metadata — such as secret description and rotation configuration, relationship to other AWS sources such as the […]

Enable automatic logging of web ACLs by using AWS Config

In this blog post, I will show you how to use AWS Config, with its auto-remediation functionality, to ensure that all web ACLs have logging enabled. The AWS CloudFormation template included in this blog post will facilitate this solution, and will get you started being able to manage web ACL logging at scale. AWS Firewall […]

Manage your AWS KMS API request rates using Service Quotas and Amazon CloudWatch

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) publishes API usage metrics to Amazon CloudWatch and Service Quotas allowing you to both monitor and manage your AWS KMS API request rate quotas. This functionality helps you understand trends in your usage of AWS KMS and can help prevent API request throttling as you grow your use of AWS […]

How to import AWS Config rules evaluations as findings in Security Hub

August 10, 2022: The content in this blog post is no longer up-to-date. AWS Security Hub now automatically receives AWS Config managed and custom rule evaluation results as security findings. Please see the feature announcement and the documentation for more details. You no longer need the custom solution described in this blog post to import […]

Continuously monitor unused IAM roles with AWS Config

January 6, 2021: We updated this post to fix a bug related to allow listing noncompliant roles. January 6, 2020: We updated this post to reflect a valid STS session duration if configured to assume a role into other accounts. Developing in the cloud encourages you to iterate frequently as your applications and resources evolve. […]

How to Use AWS Config to Monitor for and Respond to Amazon S3 Buckets Allowing Public Access

AWS Config enables continuous monitoring of your AWS resources, making it simple to assess, audit, and record resource configurations and changes. AWS Config does this through the use of rules that define the desired configuration state of your AWS resources. AWS Config provides a number of AWS managed rules that address a wide range of […]

All AWS Services GDPR ready

Oct 3, 2019: We’ve updated a sentence to clarify that AWS services can be used in compliance with GDPR. Today, I’m very pleased to announce that all AWS services can be used in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This means that, in addition to benefiting from all of the measures that AWS […]

How to Patch Linux Workloads on AWS

Most malware tries to compromise your systems by using a known vulnerability that the operating system maker has already patched. As best practices to help prevent malware from affecting your systems, you should apply all operating system patches and actively monitor your systems for missing patches. In this blog post, I show you how to […]

Attend This Free December 14 Online Tech Talk: “Centralized AWS IAM Governance Using AWS CloudFormation StackSets and AWS Organizations”

As part of the AWS Online Tech Talks series, AWS will present Centralized AWS IAM Governance Using AWS CloudFormation StackSets and AWS Organizations on Thursday, December 14. This tech talk will start at 9:00 A.M. Pacific Time and end at 9:40 A.M. Pacific Time. With the introduction of AWS Organizations and AWS CloudFormation StackSets, you can create and manage […]