Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

Note from July 3, 2017: The solution in this post has been integrated into AWS WAF Security Automations, and AWS maintains up-to-date solution code in the companion GitHub repository.   You can use AWS WAF (a web application firewall) to help protect your web applications from exploits that originate from groups of IP addresses that are known […]

The AWS Security Blog has covered a variety of solutions for federating single sign-on (SSO) to the AWS Management Console. For example, How to Connect Your On-Premises Active Directory to AWS Using AD Connector, How to Set Up SSO to the AWS Management Console for Multiple Accounts by Using AD FS and SAML 2.0, and […]

At some point, you might have to deal with hotlinking: when third parties embed in their websites the content they find on your websites. The third-party website does not incur the cost of hosting the content, which means your website can end up paying for the content other sites use. Now, you can use AWS […]

Yesterday, AWS announced that Amazon Inspector, an automated security assessment service, is now available to all customers. Inspector helps you improve the security and compliance of your applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) by identifying potential security issues, vulnerabilities, or deviations from security standards. You pay only for the assessments you run, with […]

Today, we continue a series of AWS cloud compliance FAQs by focusing on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and protected health information (PHI). AWS’s Healthcare and Life Science customers are doing important things for their customers in the AWS cloud, and we are excited to work with our partners to help tackle […]

On March 23, 2016, AWS announced that Amazon Relational Database Service for SQL Server (RDS for SQL Server) now supports authentication to AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as Microsoft AD. On April 7, 2016, AWS launched a new console feature for Microsoft AD that makes it easy for you […]

Today, we made it easier for you to configure trust relationships between AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also referred to as Microsoft AD, and your on-premises Microsoft Active Directory. Establishing trust relationships requires conditional forwarders, which resolve Domain Name System (DNS) queries between the domain names of trusting directories. Now, by […]

Every month, AWS Compliance fields thousands of questions about how to achieve and maintain compliance in the cloud. Among other things, customers are eager to take advantage of the cost savings and security at scale that AWS offers while still maintaining robust security and regulatory compliance. Because regulations across industries and geographies can be complex, […]

Update on October 24, 2018: Note that if you do not author the Lambda function correctly, this setup can create an infinite loop (in this case, a rule that is fired repeatedly, which can impact your AWS resources and cause higher than expected charges to your account). The example Lambda function I provide in Step […]

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 […]