AWS Security Blog

Tag: Security Blog

Use Macie to discover sensitive data as part of automated data pipelines

Data is a crucial part of every business and is used for strategic decision making at all levels of an organization. To extract value from their data more quickly, Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers are building automated data pipelines—from data ingestion to transformation and analytics. As part of this process, my customers often ask how […]

Get started with fine-grained access control in Amazon Elasticsearch Service

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) provides fine-grained access control, powered by the Open Distro for Elasticsearch security plugin. The security plugin adds Kibana authentication and access control at the cluster, index, document, and field levels that can help you secure […]

How to protect a self-managed DNS service against DDoS attacks using AWS Global Accelerator and AWS Shield Advanced

In this blog post, I show you how to improve the distributed denial of service (DDoS) resilience of your self-managed Domain Name System (DNS) service by using AWS Global Accelerator and AWS Shield Advanced. You can use those services to incorporate some of the techniques used by Amazon Route 53 to protect against DDoS attacks. […]

New AWS Workbook for Australian energy sector customers now available

I’m pleased to announce the Amazon Web Services (AWS) AESCSF 2019 Workbook, a resource designed to help energy sector customers align with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO)’s Australian Energy Sector Cyber Security Framework (AESCSF) 2019. The workbook helps energy sector customers to: Conduct due diligence on the AWS control environment, by mapping the AESCSF […]

Three common cloud encryption questions and their answers on AWS

August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we encourage our customers to take advantage of encryption to […]

Enforce your AWS Network Firewall protections at scale with AWS Firewall Manager

As you look to manage network security on Amazon Web Services (AWS), there are multiple tools you can use to protect your resources and keep your data safe. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), security groups (SGs), network access control lists (network ACLs), AWS WAF, and the recently launched AWS Network Firewall all offer points […]

Techniques for writing least privilege IAM policies

December 4, 2020: We’ve updated this post to use s3:CreateBucket to simplify the intro example, replaced figure 8 removing the IfExists reference, and clarified qualifier information in the example. In this post, I’m going to share two techniques I’ve used to write least privilege AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. If you’re not familiar […]

Configuring AWS VPN for UK public sector use

In this post, we explain the United Kingdom (UK) National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)’s guidance on VPN profiles configuration, and how the configuration parameters for the AWS Virtual Private Network (AWS VPN) align with the NCSC guidance. At the end of the post, there are links to code to deploy the AWS VPN in line […]

Announcing Cloud Audit Academy AWS-specific for audit and compliance teams

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of Cloud Audit Academy AWS-specific (CAA AWS-specific). This is a new, accelerated training program for auditing AWS Cloud implementations, and is designed for auditors, regulators, or anyone working within a control framework. Over the past few years, auditing security in the cloud has become one of the fastest […]

re:Invent 2020 – Your guide to AWS Identity and Data Protection sessions

August 16, 2021: We’ve updated this post to include links to recordings of the sessions. AWS re:Invent will certainly be different in 2020! Instead of seeing you all in Las Vegas, this year re:Invent will be a free, three-week virtual conference. One thing that will remain the same is the variety of sessions, including many […]