AWS Security Blog

Tag: Amazon EC2

IAM Access Analyzer makes it easier to implement least privilege permissions by generating IAM policies based on access activity

In 2019, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer was launched to help you remove unintended public and cross account access by analyzing your existing permissions. In March 2021, IAM Access Analyzer added policy validation to help you set secure and functional permissions during policy authoring. Now, IAM Access Analyzer takes that a step […]

How you can use Amazon GuardDuty to detect suspicious activity within your AWS account

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. Amazon GuardDuty is an automated threat detection service that continuously monitors for suspicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data stored in Amazon S3. In this post, I’ll share how you can use GuardDuty with […]

Secure and automated domain membership management for EC2 instances with no internet access

In this blog post, I show you how to deploy an automated solution that helps you fully automate the Active Directory join and unjoin process for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that don’t have internet access. Managing Active Directory domain membership for EC2 instances in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud is a typical […]

Automatically update security groups for Amazon CloudFront IP ranges using AWS Lambda

June 21, 2023: This blog post is out of date. You should now use the new managed prefix list for CloudFront in your Security Group instead of this custom Lambda solution. Please refer to this blog post for detailed info. Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network that can help you increase the performance of […]

How to automate incident response in the AWS Cloud for EC2 instances

One of the security epics core to the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) is a focus on incident response and preparedness to address unauthorized activity. Multiple methods exist in Amazon Web Services (AWS) for automating classic incident response techniques, and the AWS Security Incident Response Guide outlines many of these methods. This post demonstrates […]

Quickly build STIG-compliant Amazon Machine Images using Amazon EC2 Image Builder

In this post, we discuss how to implement the operating system security requirements defined by the Defence Information Systems Agency (DISA) Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs). As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer, you can use Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) published by AWS or APN partners. These AMIs, which are owned and published by AWS, […]

Add defense in depth against open firewalls, reverse proxies, and SSRF vulnerabilities with enhancements to the EC2 Instance Metadata Service

July 27, 2021: We’ve updated the link to the 2019 re:Invent session on this topic. Since it first launched over 10 years ago, the Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) has helped customers build secure and scalable applications. The IMDS solved a big security headache for cloud users by providing access to temporary, frequently rotated […]

Now You Can Use AWS Shield Advanced to Help Protect Your Amazon EC2 Instances and Network Load Balancers

Starting today, AWS Shield Advanced can help protect your Amazon EC2 instances and Network Load Balancers against infrastructure-layer Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Enable AWS Shield Advanced on an AWS Elastic IP address and attach the address to an internet-facing EC2 instance or Network Load Balancer. AWS Shield Advanced automatically detects the type of AWS resource behind the […]

AWS Earns Department of Defense Impact Level 5 Provisional Authorization

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has granted the AWS GovCloud (US) Region an Impact Level 5 (IL5) Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (CC SRG) Provisional Authorization (PA) for six core services. This means that AWS’s DoD customers and partners can now deploy workloads for Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) exceeding IL4 […]