Availability is of paramount importance in the cloud. AWS customers benefit from AWS services and technologies built from the ground up to provide resilience in the face of DDoS attacks.

A combination of AWS services may be used to implement a defense in depth strategy and thwart DDoS attacks. Services designed with an automatic response to DDoS help minimize time to mitigate and reduce impact.

Learn about how to use AWS technologies like autoscaling, Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 help to mitigate Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

Learn more about DDoS »

 

 

AWS offers you the ability to add an additional layer of security to your data at rest in the cloud, providing scalable and efficient encryption features. This includes:

• Data encryption capabilities available in AWS storage and database services, such as EBS, S3, Glacier, Oracle RDS, SQL Server RDS, and Redshift
• Flexible key management options, including AWS Key Management Service, allowing you to choose whether to have AWS manage the encryption keys or enable you to keep complete control over your keys
• Encrypted message queues for the transmission of sensitive data using server-side encryption (SSE) for Amazon SQS
  
• Dedicated, hardware-based cryptographic key storage using AWS CloudHSM, allowing you to satisfy compliance requirements

In addition, AWS provides APIs for you to integrate encryption and data protection with any of the services you develop or deploy in an AWS environment.

AWS offers a range of tools to allow you to move fast while still ensuring that your cloud resources comply with organizational standards and best practices. This includes:

• A security assessment service, Amazon Inspector, that automatically assesses applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices, including impacted networks, OS, and attached storage
• Deployment tools to manage the creation and decommissioning of AWS resources according to organization standards
• Inventory and configuration management tools, including AWS Config, that identify AWS resources and then track and manage changes to those resources over time
• Template definition and management tools, including AWS CloudFormation to create standard, preconfigured environments

AWS provides tools and features that enable you to see exactly what’s happening in your AWS environment. This includes:

• Deep visibility into API calls through AWS CloudTrail, including who, what, who, and from where calls were made
• Log aggregation options, streamlining investigations and compliance reporting
• Alert notifications through Amazon CloudWatch when specific events occur or thresholds are exceeded

These tools and features give you the visibility you need to spot issues before they impact the business and allow you to improve security posture, and reduce the risk profile, of your environment.

AWS offers you capabilities to define, enforce, and manage user access policies across AWS services. This includes:

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets you define individual user accounts with permissions across AWS resources
• AWS Multi-Factor Authentication for privileged accounts, including options for hardware-based authenticators
• AWS Directory Service allows you to integrate and federate with corporate directories to reduce administrative overhead and improve end-user experience

AWS provides native identity and access management integration across many of its services plus API integration with any of your own applications or services.

Please complete and submit the AWS Vulnerability / Penetration Testing Request Form to request authorization for penetration testing to or originating from any AWS resources. There are several important things to note about penetration testing requests:

• Permission is required for all penetration tests.
• To request permission, you must be logged into the AWS portal using the root credentials associated with the instances you wish to test, otherwise the form will not pre-populate correctly. If you have hired a third party to conduct your testing, we suggest that you complete the form and then notify your third party when we grant approval.
• Our policy only permits testing of EC2 and RDS instances that you own. Tests against any other AWS services or AWS-owned resources are prohibited
• At this time, our policy does not permit testing small or micro RDS instance types. Testing of m1.small or t1.micro EC2 instance types is not permitted. This is to prevent potential adverse performance impacts on resources that may be shared with other customers.