AWS Security Blog

Category: Best Practices

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Use backups to recover from security incidents

Greetings from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT)! AWS CIRT is dedicated to supporting customers during active security events on the customer side of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. Over the past three years, AWS CIRT has supported customers with security events in their AWS accounts. These include the unauthorized use of AWS Identity […]

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Simplify management of Network Firewall rule groups with VPC managed prefix lists

In this blog post, we will show you how to use managed prefix lists to simplify management of your AWS Network Firewall rules and policies across your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) in the same AWS Region. AWS Network Firewall is a stateful, managed, network firewall and intrusion detection and prevention service for your […]

Establishing a data perimeter on AWS: Allow only trusted resources from my organization

Companies that store and process data on Amazon Web Services (AWS) want to prevent transfers of that data to or from locations outside of their company’s control. This is to support security strategies, such as data loss prevention, or to comply with the terms and conditions set forth by various regulatory and privacy agreements. On […]

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Three ways to boost your email security and brand reputation with AWS

April 11, 2023: This post had been updated to provide clarifications: The recommendation to use SES or WorkMail as part of this solution is for receiving TLS reports sent via email from mail receiving organizations. It is unrelated to the BIMI and MTA-STS aspects or any core functionality of the solution.. If you own a […]

How to use granular geographic match rules with AWS WAF

How to use granular geographic match rules with AWS WAF

In November 2022, AWS introduced support for granular geographic (geo) match conditions in AWS WAF. This blog post demonstrates how you can use this new feature to customize your AWS WAF implementation and improve the security posture of your protected application. AWS WAF provides inline inspection of inbound traffic at the application layer. You can […]

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How to use AWS Private Certificate Authority short-lived certificate mode

AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA) is a highly available, fully managed private certificate authority (CA) service that you can use to create CA hierarchies and issue private X.509 certificates. You can use these private certificates to establish endpoints for TLS encryption, cryptographically sign code, authenticate users, and more. Based on customer feedback for […]

AWS IAM Identity Center

Define a custom session duration and terminate active sessions in IAM Identity Center

September 12, 2023: This post has been updated to reflect the increased maximum session duration limit from 7 days to 90 days in IAM Identity Center. Managing access to accounts and applications requires a balance between delivering simple, convenient access and managing the risks associated with active user sessions. Based on your organization’s needs, you […]

Reduce risk by implementing HttpOnly cookie authentication in Amazon API Gateway

September 8, 2023: It’s important to know that if you activate user sign-up in your user pool, anyone on the internet can sign up for an account and sign in to your apps. Don’t enable self-registration in your user pool unless you want to open your app to allow users to sign up. Some web […]

Approaches for authenticating external applications in a machine-to-machine scenario

December 8, 2022: This post has been updated to reflect changes for M2M options with the new service of IAMRA. This blog post was first published November 19, 2013. 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 […]

Establishing a data perimeter on AWS: Allow only trusted identities to access company data

As described in an earlier blog post, Establishing a data perimeter on AWS, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a set of capabilities you can use to implement a data perimeter to help prevent unintended access. One type of unintended access that companies want to prevent is access to corporate data by users who do not […]