Category: Best Practices

AWS Management Console Private Access is an advanced security feature to help you control access to the AWS Management Console. In this post, I will show you how this feature works, share current limitations, and provide AWS CloudFormation templates that you can use to automate the deployment. AWS Management Console Private Access is useful when […]

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 this blog post, I show you how to deploy a solution that uses AWS Lambda to automatically manage the lifecycle of Amazon VPC Network Access Control List (ACL) rules to mitigate network floods detected using Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights and Amazon Timestream. Application teams should consider the impact unexpected traffic floods can have on an application’s availability. Internet-facing applications can […]

Effective collaboration is central to business success, and employees today depend heavily on messaging tools. An estimated 3.09 billion mobile phone users access messaging applications (apps) to communicate, and this figure is projected to grow to 3.51 billion users in 2025. This post highlights the risks associated with consumer messaging apps and describes how you […]

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 […]

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 […]

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to automate the validation of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies by using a combination of the IAM Policy Validator for AWS CloudFormation (cfn-policy-validator) and GitHub Actions. Policy validation is an approach that is designed to minimize the deployment of unwanted IAM identity-based and resource-based policies […]

Amazon Security Lake automatically centralizes the collection of security-related logs and events from integrated AWS and third-party services. With the increasing amount of security data available, it can be challenging knowing what data to focus on and which tools to use. You can use native AWS services such as Amazon QuickSight, Amazon OpenSearch, and Amazon […]