Simplify setup of Amazon Detective with AWS Organizations

Amazon Detective makes it easy to analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities by collecting log data from your AWS resources. Amazon Detective simplifies the process of a deep dive into a security finding from other AWS security services, such as Amazon GuardDuty and AWS SecurityHub. Detective uses machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to build a linked set of data that enables customers to easily conduct faster and more efficient security investigations.

In this post you will learn about the new AWS Organizations integration with Amazon Detective, where new and existing Detective customers can delegate any account in their organization to be the delegated Detective administrator account, and can centrally manage the Detective behavior graph database for an organization with up to 1,200 accounts.

Customers tell us that they want to manage security findings and investigations across multiple AWS Accounts. Depending on the customer this can be 100s or 1000s of accounts. AWS Organizations integration with security services, including GuardDuty, Security Hub and AWS IAM Access Analyzer comes in handy by helping customers centralize management and governance of their environments as they scale and grow their AWS accounts and resources. Adding to the list, Detective is now integrated with AWS Organizations to simplify security posture management across all existing and future AWS accounts across an organization. Organizations integration is available in all AWS Regions that Detective supports.

Detective is aware of your existing delegated administrator accounts for other AWS Security services such as GuardDuty or Security Hub. Using this awareness, Detective recommends that you choose the same account as the administrator account for Detective, as shown in Figure 1. For a more complete walk though of how to enable your accounts, visit the AWS Detective Documentation.

Figure 1. Setting delegated administrator

You can then use the same account to manage all of your security services. AWS recommends you align your Detective administrator account with your GuardDuty and SecurityHub administrator accounts, to enable seamless integration between Detective and those services.

• In GuardDuty or Security Hub, when viewing details for a GuardDuty finding, you can pivot from the finding details to the Detective finding profile.
• In Detective, when investigating a GuardDuty finding, you can choose the option to archive that finding.

Once designated, the chosen account becomes the administrator account for the organization behavior graph. They can enable any organization account as a member account in the organization behavior graph, and can configure Detective to automatically enable organization accounts when they join the organization.

Figure 2. Auto-enabling Organization accounts

The Detective administrator account can also manually invite other accounts to join the organization behavior graph.

Figure 3. Inviting accounts to join the Organization behavior graph

From Detective, the administrator account can centrally conduct security investigations across the organization

Considerations for AWS Organizations support

Some considerations and recommendations around Organizations support for Detective:

1. Detective allows up to 1,200 member accounts in each behavior graph.
2. The Detective administrator account becomes the administrator account for the organization’s behavior graph.
3. An account can be a member account of multiple behavior graphs in the same Region. An account can accept multiple invitations. An organization account can be enabled as a member account in the organization behavior graph, and can then also accept invitations to other behavior graphs.
4. An account can only be the administrator account of one behavior graph per Region, but can be an administrator account in different Regions.
5. Changes to an organization are not immediately reflected in Detective. For most changes, such as new and removed organization accounts, it can take up to an hour for Detective to be notified.

Other recent updates from Amazon Detective

Additional support for all GuardDuty findings

With the recent expansion of security investigation support for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and DNS-related findings on Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Detective now provides full coverage of all detections from GuardDuty. Security analysts can now easily investigate and analyze the root cause of all GuardDuty findings using Detective, using the Investigate in Detective option in GuardDuty and Security Hub for further investigation.

New resource focused view

In addition to these integrations with AWS Organization and GuardDuty, Detective now makes it even easier for a security analyst to investigate entities and behaviors using a revamped user experience as seen in Figure 4. Amazon Detective presents a unified view of user and resource interactions over time, with all the context and details in one place, to help you quickly analyze the root cause of a security finding.

Figure 4. New resource focused view

New finding overview

The new finding overview provides an expanded set of details for each finding, and provides links to the profiles for each involved entity as seen in the right panel in Figure 4. With this unified view, you can visualize all of the details and context in one place, while identifying the underlying reasons for the findings. This resource-focused view helps you understand the connections between resources affected by a security finding, and further helps you drill down into relevant historical activity to quickly determine the root cause.

Integration with Splunk

Amazon Detective, in coordination with the Splunk Trumpet project, has released the ability to pivot from an Amazon GuardDuty finding in Splunk directly to an Amazon Detective entity profile. Customers can now quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities. This setting can be enabled on the Splunk Trumpet project installation page by selecting Detective GuardDuty URLs from the AWS CloudWatch Events dropdown.

Amazon Detective’s interactive visualizations make it easy to investigate and analyze issues more thoroughly and effectively, with minimal effort. Using these visualizations, customers can easily filter large sets of event data into specific timelines, with all the details, context, and guidance needed to help you to investigate quickly. For example; Amazon Detective enables you to view login attempts on a geolocation map, drill down into relevant historical activity, quickly determine a root cause, and if necessary, take action to resolve the issue.

Amazon Detective makes it easy to analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues. To get started, enable a 30-day free trial of Amazon Detective with just a few clicks in the AWS Management console. See the AWS Regions page for a list of all Regions where Detective is available. To learn more, visit the Amazon Detective product page.

 
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