AWS Solutions

Automated Security Response on AWS

This AWS Solution is an add-on that works with AWS Security Hub and provides predefined response and remediation actions based on industry compliance standards and best practices for security threats. It helps AWS Security Hub customers to resolve common security findings and to improve their security posture in AWS.

Benefits

AWS Security Hub integration

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Initiate remediations and findings using custom actions in the Security Hub console.

One-click cross-account remediation

Easily deploy the Solution across primary and member accounts.

Remediation playbooks

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Access remediation playbooks supporting the Center for Internet Security (CIS) AWS Foundations benchmarks v1.2.0, AWS Foundational Security Best Practices (AFSBP) v1.0.0, and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) v3.2.1.

Automatic remediations

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Deploy a predefined set of response and remediation actions to respond to threats automatically.

AWS Solution overview

The diagram below presents the serverless architecture you can build using the Solution's implementation guide and accompanying AWS CloudFormation template.

AWS Security Hub Automated Response and Remediation | Architecture Diagram

Automated Security Response on AWS architecture

AWS Security Hub Automated Response and Remediation contains the following main workflows: detect, ingest, remediate, and log.

1. Detect: AWS Security Hub provides customers with a comprehensive view of their AWS security state. It helps them to measure their environment against security industry standards and best practices. It works by collecting events and data from other AWS services, such as AWS Config, Amazon Guard Duty, and AWS Firewall Manager. These events and data are analyzed against security standards, such as CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark. Exceptions are asserted as findings in the AWS Security Hub console. New findings are sent as Amazon CloudWatch Events.

2. Ingest: AWS Security Hub Custom Actions and Amazon CloudWatch Events rules initiate Security Hub Automated Response and Remediation playbooks to address findings. Two CloudWatch Event Rules are deployed for each supported control by the Solution: one rule to match the custom action event (user-initiated remediation), and one rule (disabled by default) to match the real-time finding event. Customers can use the Security Hub Custom Action menu to initiate automated remediation, or after careful testing in a non-production environment, they can enable automatic triggering for automated remediation. This decision can be made per remediation—it is not necessary to enable automatic triggers on all remediations.

3. Remediate: Using cross-account AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, the automated remediation uses the AWS API to perform the tasks needed to remediate findings. All playbooks in this solution are implemented as AWS Systems Manager documents. These documents are catergorized based on the security control ID. An AWS Step Function receives the finding from the Amazon Eventbridge events, then the AWS Step Function invokes the documents with AWS Systems Manager API calls.

4. Log: The playbook logs the results to an Amazon CloudWatch Logs group, sends a notification to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic, and updates the Security Hub finding. An audit trail of actions taken is maintained in the finding notes. On the Security Hub dashboard, the finding workflow status is changed from NEW to either NOTIFIED or RESOLVED on the Security Hub dashboard. The security finding notes are updated to reflect the remediation performed.

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