Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

In December, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) released service last accessed data, which shows the time when an IAM entity (a user, group, or role) last accessed an AWS service. This provided a powerful tool to help you grant least privilege permissions. Starting today, it’s easier to identify where you can reduce permissions based […]

AWS already has a number of federal agencies onboarded to the cloud, including the Department of Energy, The Department of the Interior, and NASA. Today we are pleased to announce the addition of two more ATOs (authority to operate) for the Department of Commerce (DOC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Specifically, the DOC will […]

Released today, the PCI DSS Quick Start includes learnings from AWS field teams that have migrated and deployed workloads that are in scope for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance. The AWS CloudFormation templates and scripts included in this Quick Start can help you build a standardized environment that supports compliance with the […]

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) allows you to use keys under your control to encrypt data at rest stored in Amazon S3. The two primary methods for implementing this encryption are server-side encryption (SSE) and client-side encryption (CSE). Each method offers multiple interfaces and API options to choose from. In this blog post, I […]

July 19, 2021: We’ve updated this post to clarify PHI encryption requirements for Amazon CloudWatch Logs. In a previous blog post, Frequently Asked Questions About HIPAA Compliance in the AWS Cloud, I looked at some of the broad questions you have asked us about running protected health information (PHI) in the AWS cloud. In this […]

Today, I’m pleased to announce that we have completed our semiannual AWS Service Organization Control (SOC) assessments and the reports are available to NDA customers now. The AWS SOC program is an intense, period-in-time audit performed every six months. We have been releasing AWS services SOC Reports (or their SAS 70 predecessors) regularly since 2009, […]

We are happy to announce that we recently launched improved search functionality on the Users page in the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) console. For starters, we have enabled you to find an IAM user by their access key ID. Simply paste an access key ID in the Filter box on the Users page. If […]

In case you missed any of the AWS Security Blog posts from March and April, they are summarized and linked to below. The posts are shown in reverse chronological order (most recent first), and the subject matter ranges from the AWS Config Rules repository to automatically updating AWS WAF IP blacklists. April April 28, AWS […]

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. With the recent release of Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES), you now can build applications without setting up and maintaining your own search cluster on Amazon EC2. One of the key benefits of using Amazon ES is that you can […]

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 […]