AWS Security Blog

Category: Management Tools

How to Easily Identify Your Federated Users by Using AWS CloudTrail

Starting today, you can use AWS CloudTrail to track the activity of your federated users (web identity federation and Security Assertion Markup Language [SAML]). For example, you can now use CloudTrail to identify a SAML federated user who terminated an Amazon EC2 instance in your AWS account, or to identify a mobile application user who […]

How to Automate Restricting Access to a VPC by Using AWS IAM and AWS CloudFormation

Back in September, I wrote about How to Help Lock Down a User’s Amazon EC2 Capabilities to a Single VPC. In that blog post, I highlighted what I have found to be an effective approach to the virtual private cloud (VPC) lockdown scenario. Since that time, I have worked on making the related information easier […]

Announcing the AWS Config Rules Repository: A New Community-Based Source of Custom Rules for AWS Config

Today, we’re happy to release the AWS Config Rules repository, a community-based source of custom AWS Config Rules. This new repository gives you a streamlined way to automate your assessment and compliance against best practices for security of AWS resources. AWS Config Rules is a service that provides automated, periodic security and compliance checking of […]

How to Use AWS Config to Help with Required HIPAA Audit Controls: Part 4 of the Automating HIPAA Compliance Series

In my previous posts in this series, I explained how to get started with the DevSecOps environment for HIPAA that is depicted in the following architecture diagram. In my second post in this series, I gave you guidance about how to set up AWS Service Catalog (#4 in the following diagram) to allow developers a […]

How to Translate HIPAA Controls to AWS CloudFormation Templates: Part 3 of the Automating HIPAA Compliance Series

In my previous post, I walked through the setup of a DevSecOps environment that gives healthcare developers the ability to launch their own healthcare web server. At the heart of the architecture is AWS CloudFormation, a JSON representation of your architecture that allows security administrators to provision AWS resources according to the compliance standards they […]

How to Use AWS Service Catalog for Code Deployments: Part 2 of the Automating HIPAA Compliance Series

In my previous blog post, I discussed the idea of using the cloud to protect the cloud and improving healthcare IT by applying DevSecOps methods. In Part 2 today, I will show an architecture composed of AWS services that gives healthcare security administrators necessary controls, allows healthcare developers to interact with the system using familiar […]

How to Record and Govern Your IAM Resource Configurations Using AWS Config

AWS Config recently added the ability to record changes to the configuration of your AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, groups, and roles (collectively referred to as IAM entities) and the policies associated with them. Using this feature, you can record configuration details for these IAM entities, including details about which policies are associated […]

New Security Services Launched at AWS re:Invent 2015—Amazon Inspector, AWS WAF, and AWS Config Rules

Today at re:Invent, AWS announced two new security services and one new feature to help you improve your security posture and protect applications deployed on AWS. Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps minimize the likelihood of introducing security or compliance issues when deploying applications on AWS. Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications […]

Register for and Attend This July 29 Webinar–Troubleshoot Operational & Security Incidents with CloudTrail

Update: The on-demand recording and slides from this webinar are now available. As part of the AWS Webinar Series, AWS will present Troubleshoot Operational & Security Incidents with CloudTrail on Wednesday, July 29. This webinar will start at 12:00 P.M. (noon) and end at 1:00 P.M. Pacific Time (UTC-7). AWS Senior Product Manager Sivakanth Mundru will help you understand the […]

How to Receive Alerts When Specific APIs Are Called by Using AWS CloudTrail, Amazon SNS, and AWS Lambda

Let’s face it—not all APIs were created equal. For example, you may be really interested in knowing when any of your Amazon EC2 instances are terminated (ec2:TerminateInstance), but less interested when an object is put in an Amazon S3 bucket (s3:PutObject). In this example, you can delete an object, but you can’t bring back that […]