Mcqs of Forensic
Mcqs of Forensic
Response
Guide
May 2019
Notices
Customers are responsible for making their own independent assessment of the
information in this document. This document: (a) is for informational purposes only, (b)
represents AWS current product offerings and practices, which are subject to change
without notice, and (c) does not create any commitments or assurances from AWS and
its affiliates, suppliers or licensors. AWS products or services are provided “as is”
without warranties, representations, or conditions of any kind, whether express or
implied. AWS responsibilities and liabilities to its customers are controlled by AWS
agreements, and this document is not part of, nor does it modify, any agreement
between AWS and its customers.
© 2019 Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Contents
Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1
Prerequisite Resources ....................................................................................................1
Security Perspective of Cloud Adoption Framework.......................................................2
Foundation of Incident Response ....................................................................................2
Educate ................................................................................................................................3
Shared Responsibility ......................................................................................................3
Incident Response in the Cloud .......................................................................................4
Cloud Security Incidents ..................................................................................................5
Understanding Cloud Capabilities ...................................................................................7
Prepare: People ...................................................................................................................9
Define Roles and Responsibilities ...................................................................................9
Define Response Mechanisms ......................................................................................10
Create a Receptive and Adaptive Security Culture.......................................................11
Predicting Response ......................................................................................................11
Prepare: Technology .........................................................................................................14
Prepare Access to AWS Accounts ................................................................................14
Prepare Processes.........................................................................................................18
Cloud Provider Support..................................................................................................23
Simulate .............................................................................................................................24
Security Incident Response Simulations .......................................................................24
Simulation Steps ............................................................................................................25
Simulation Examples ......................................................................................................26
Iterate .................................................................................................................................27
Runbooks .......................................................................................................................27
Automation .....................................................................................................................28
Incident Response Examples............................................................................................30
Service Domain Incidents ..............................................................................................30
Infrastructure Domain Incidents .....................................................................................32
Summary............................................................................................................................35
Additional Resources ........................................................................................................35
Media ..............................................................................................................................36
Third-Party Tools ............................................................................................................37
Industry References .......................................................................................................37
Appendix A: Examples ......................................................................................................38
Appendix B: Cloud Capability Definitions .........................................................................42
Logging and Events .......................................................................................................42
Visibility and Alerting ......................................................................................................44
Automation .....................................................................................................................45
Secure Storage ..............................................................................................................46
Custom ...........................................................................................................................47
About This Guide
This guide presents an overview of the fundamentals of responding to security incidents
within a customer’s AWS cloud environment. It focuses on an overview of cloud security
and incident response concepts, and identifies cloud capabilities, services, and
mechanisms that are available to customers for responding to security issues.
Amazon Web Services AWS Security Incident Response
Introduction
Security is the highest priority at AWS. As an AWS customer, you will benefit from a
data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most
security-sensitive organizations. The AWS Cloud enables a shared responsibility model.
While AWS manages security “of” the cloud, you are responsible for security “in” the
cloud. This means that you retain control of the security you choose to implement. You
get access to hundreds of tools and features to help you to meet your security
objectives. These capabilities help you establish a security baseline that meets your
objectives for your applications running in the cloud.
This paper is intended for those in technical roles and assumes that you are familiar
with the general principles of information security, have a basic understanding of
incident response in your current on-premises environments, and have some familiarity
with cloud services.
Prerequisite Resources
In addition to this document, we encourage you to review the AWS Security Best
Practices whitepaper and the Security Perspective of the AWS Cloud Adoption
Framework (CAF) whitepaper. The AWS CAF provides guidance that supports
coordinating the different parts of organizations that are moving to cloud computing. The
CAF guidance is broken into a number of areas of focus that are relevant to
implementing cloud-based IT systems, which we refer to as perspectives. The security
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• Directive controls establish the governance, risk, and compliance models within
which the environment operates.
• Detective controls provide full visibility and transparency over the operation of
your deployments in AWS.
Although incident response (IR) is generally viewed under the Responsive component,
responsive controls are dependent and influenced by the other components. For
example, directive and preventative security controls help establish a baseline, so you
can monitor and investigate any deviations from this baseline. This approach not only
eliminates noise, but it also contributes to a defense in-depth security design.
• Educate your security operations and incident response staff about cloud
technologies and how your organization intends to use them.
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• Prepare your incident response team to detect and respond to incidents in the
cloud, enabling detective capabilities, and ensuring appropriate access to the
necessary tools and cloud services. Additionally, prepare the necessary
runbooks, both manual and automated, to ensure reliable and consistent
responses. Work with other teams to establish expected baseline operations, and
use that knowledge to identify deviations from those normal operations.
• Simulate both expected and unexpected security events within your cloud
environment to understand the effectiveness of your preparation.
• Iterate on the outcome of your simulation to improve the scale of your response
posture, reduce time to value, and further reduce risk.
Educate
Shared Responsibility
The responsibility for security and compliance is shared between AWS and you. This
shared model relieves some of your operational burden because AWS operates,
manages, and controls the components from the host operating system and
virtualization layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the service
operates.
You are responsible for managing the guest operating systems (including updates and
security patches), application software, as well as configuring the AWS provided
security controls, like security groups, network access control lists, and identity and
access management. You should carefully consider the services you use, because your
responsibilities vary depending on the services used, the integration of those services in
your IT environment, and applicable laws and regulations.
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In addition to the direct relationship you have with AWS, there may be other entities that
have responsibilities in your particular responsibility model. For example, you may have
internal organizational units that take responsibility for some aspects of your operations.
You may also have partners or other third parties that develop, manage, or operate
some of your cloud technology.
• Respond using the cloud. Implement your response patterns where the event
and data occurs.
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• Know what you have and what you need. Preserve logs, snapshots, and other
evidence by copying them to a centralized security cloud account. Use tags,
metadata, and mechanisms that enforce retention policies. For example, you
may choose to use Linux dd command or a Windows equivalent to make a
complete copy of data for investigative purposes.
• Learn and improve your process. When you identify gaps in your process,
tools, or people, plan to fix them. Simulations are safe ways to find gaps and
improve processes.
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In these domains, you must consider the actors who may act against your account,
resources, or data. Whether internal or external, use a risk framework to determine what
the specific risks are to your organization and prepare accordingly.
In the service domain, you are working to achieve your goals exclusively with AWS
APIs. For example, handling a data disclosure incident from an S3 bucket involves API
calls to retrieve the bucket's policy, analyzing the S3 access logs, and possibly looking
at AWS CloudTrail logs. In this example, your investigation is unlikely to involve data
forensic tools or network traffic analysis tools.
In the infrastructure domain, you may use a combination of AWS APIs and familiar
digital forensics/incident response (DFIR) software within the operating system of a
workstation, such as an EC2 instance that you've prepared for IR work. Infrastructure
domain incidents may involve analyzing network packet captures, disk blocks on an
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume, or volatile memory acquired from
an instance.
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• Logs and Monitors: Review AWS logs, such as Amazon CloudTrail, Amazon
S3 access logs, and VPC Flow Logs, and security monitoring services such as
Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Macie. In addition, use monitors like Amazon
Route 53 health checks and Amazon CloudWatch Alarms. Similarly, use
Windows Events, Linux syslog logs, and other application-specific logs that you
may generate in your applications.
• Billing Activity: A sudden change in billing activity may indicate a security event.
• Partner Tools: Partners within AWS Partner Network (APN) offer hundreds of
industry-leading products that can help you meet your security objectives. See
the Security Partner Solutions and Security Solutions in the AWS Marketplace for
additional information.
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Additionally, there are a number of AWS partner products that can simplify your process
for analyzing these logs, such as those described in the APN Security Competency
program. Further, there are several AWS services that can help you gain valuable
insights into this data, such as Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service, and AWS
Security Hub, which can give you a comprehensive view of your high-priority security
alerts and compliance status across AWS accounts. For more information about
additional cloud capabilities that you can leverage during your investigations, see
Appendix B: Cloud Capability Definitions.
Data Privacy
We know customers care deeply about privacy and data security, and so we implement
responsible and sophisticated technical and physical controls designed to prevent
unauthorized access to or disclosure of customer content. Maintaining customer trust is
an ongoing commitment. You can learn more about AWS data privacy commitments by
visiting our Data Privacy FAQ web page.
These intentional, self-imposed controls, limit AWS ability to assist in responding within
a customer's environment. Focusing on understanding and building capabilities within
the Shared Responsibility Model is key to success. Although enabling logging and
monitoring capabilities in your AWS accounts before an incident occurs is important,
there are additional aspects to incident response that are imperative to a successful
program.
AWS detects abuse activities in your resources using mechanisms, such as:
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Although the AWS abuse response team aggressively monitors and shuts down
unauthorized activity running on AWS, the majority of abuse complaints refer to
customers who have legitimate business on AWS. Common causes of unintentional
abuse activities include:
• Secondary abuse: For example, an end user of the service provided by an AWS
customer might post malware files on a public Amazon S3 bucket.
AWS is committed to working with AWS customers to prevent, detect, and mitigate
abuse, and to defend against future recurrences. We encourage you to review the AWS
Acceptable Use Policy, which describes prohibited uses of the web services offered by
Amazon Web Services and its affiliates. To support timely response to abuse
notifications from AWS, ensure that your AWS account contact information is accurate.
When you receive an AWS abuse warning, your security and operational staff should
immediately investigate the matter. Delay can prolong the reputation impact and legal
implications to others and to yourself. More importantly, the implicated abuse resource
may be compromised by malicious users, and ignoring the compromise could magnify
damages to your business.
Prepare: People
Automated processes enable organizations to spend more time focusing on measures
to increase the security of their cloud environment and applications. Automated incident
response makes humans available for correlating events, practicing in simulations,
devising new response procedures, performing research, developing new skills, and
testing or building new tools. Even with increased automation, analysts and responders
within a security organization still have much to do.
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must do whatever the automation cannot. Handling unclear security events requires
cross-organizational discipline, bias for decisive action, and the ability to deliver results.
Within your organizational structure, there are probably many people who are
responsible, accountable, consulted, or kept informed during an incident. Consider
these roles and responsibilities, and whether any third-parties must be involved.
Provide Training
To reduce dependency and decrease response time, ensure that security teams and
responders are educated about cloud services and have opportunities to practice
hands-on with the specific cloud platforms that your organization uses. AWS provides a
number of training options and learning paths through digital training, classroom
training, partners, and certifications. To learn more, see AWS Training.
Beyond general cloud experience, most customers need to significantly invest in their
people to be successful. Your organization would benefit by providing additional training
to your staff to learn programming skills, development processes (i.e. version control
systems, deployment practices, etc.), and infrastructure automation. As tempting as it
may be to hire new staff who have the new skills, it is important to retain and retrain
existing staff so that you maintain the institutional memory and experience that is vital to
good incident response.
Although the cloud can provide you with greater visibility and capabilities through
service APIs, you must document where these are, and how to use them. Identify your
team's AWS account numbers, the IP ranges of your Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs),
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corresponding network diagrams, logs, data locations, and data classifications. Many of
these technological processes are included in the Prepare: Technology section. Then,
begin documenting your incident response procedures, often referred to as procedures
or runbooks, that define the steps to investigate and remediate an incident.
In some organizations, staff may fear retribution if they report a security problem.
Sometimes they simply don't know how to report an issue.
In other cases, they may not want to waste time or be embarrassed by reporting
something as a security incident that turns out to be no problem at all. From the
leadership team down, it is important to promote a culture of acceptance and invite
everyone to feel part of the organization's security. Provide a clear channel for anyone
to open a high-severity ticket, whenever they believe there may be a potential risk or
threat. Welcome these notifications with an eager and open mind, but more importantly,
make it clear to non-security staff that you welcome these notifications. Emphasize that
you would rather be over-notified of potential issues, than to receive no notifications at
all.
Predicting Response
Human analysis must be relied upon wherever automation cannot as it is impossible to
predict all potential events. Taking the time to carefully train your staff and prepare your
organization will help you anticipate the unexpected. However, your organization does
not have to prepare in isolation. This section includes the benefits of teaming up with
trusted security partners and methods for identifying unexpected security events.
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Your trusted security partners can help you identify potential risks or threats that you
may not be familiar with, which can be represented with a simple visual depiction.
In 1955, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham created the Johari Window, an exercise for
mapping traits to categories. The window is depicted as a grid consisting of four
quadrants, similar to the following diagram.
Although Luft and Ingham’s window was not intended for information security, we can
adjust the concept slightly to use it as a simple mental model to consider the difficulty in
assessing an organization's threats. In our modified concept, the four quadrants (as
depicted above) are:
• Obvious: Risk of which both your team and your partner are aware.
• Internally Known: Risk with which your team is familiar, but that your partner
isn't. This could mean that you have internal expertise or tribal knowledge.
• Blind Spot: Risk with which your partner is familiar, but that your team is not.
• Unknown: Risk with which neither you or your partner are familiar.
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Although this diagram is simple, it is suitable to represent the value that having trusted
partners can achieve. Most critically, there may be blind spot items that you are
unaware of, but a partner with the right expertise can bring them to your attention.
Although you may both be familiar with those risks in the obvious quadrant, your partner
could recommend controls and solutions with which you are unfamiliar. Additionally,
although you might bring those risks in the internally known quadrant to your partner's
attention, your partner may also be able to identify optimized controls for mitigating that
risk. As you're measuring yourself for improvement, bring in these partners to provide
expert advice.
The Unknown
Assuming you've been laser-focused on tailoring alerts, improving your incident
response procedures with automation, and improving your security defenses, you may
be wondering what to improve next. You may be curious about your unknown risk, as
represented in the unknown category of Figure 2: Window of Response. You can
reduce unknown risk through the following ways:
• Define security assertions: What are some truths that you can assert? What
are the security primitives that should absolutely be true in your environment?
Clearly defining these allows you to search for the inverse. This is something
that’s easier to do early in your cloud journey, rather than attempting to reverse
engineer your security assertions later.
• Reducing attack surface: Improve your defense to avoid risk and give yourself
more time against unknown attacks. Block and slow down attackers; force them
to be noisy.
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Amazon Web Services provides you with the tools and services to tackle all of these
issues yourself. Using machine learning to identify malicious patterns is a well-
researched field of study, with patterns being implemented by customers, AWS
Professional Services, AWS Partners, and through AWS services like
Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Macie. Some of these patterns have been discussed
at a number of AWS re:Invent conference sessions. See the Media section in Additional
Resources for more information.
Customers are also expanding their traditionally business-centric data lakes to leverage
similar architecture patterns to develop security data lakes. Security operations teams
are also expanding their use of traditional logging and monitoring tools, such as
ElasticSearch and Kibana, to big data architectures.
Those customers are collecting internal data from AWS CloudTrail event logs, VPC
Flow Logs, Amazon CloudFront access logs, database logs, and application logs and
blending this data with public data and threat intelligence. With this valuable data,
customers have expanded to include data science and data engineering skills on their
security operations teams to leverage tools such as Amazon EMR, Amazon Kinesis
Data Analytics, Amazon Redshift, Amazon QuickSight, AWS Glue, Amazon
SageMaker, and Apache MXNet on AWS to build custom solutions that identify and
predict anomalies that are unique to their business.
Prepare: Technology
Prepare Access to AWS Accounts
During an incident, your incident response teams must have access to the
environments and resources involved in the incident. Ensure that your teams have
appropriate access to perform their duties before an event occurs. To do that, you must
know what level of access your team members require (for example, what kinds of
actions they are likely to take) and you must provision access in advance. Your team
members’ authentication and authorization should be documented and tested well
before an event occurs to ensure they can perform a timely response without delays.
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Customers at this stage must work closely with their cloud architecture and
development teams to understand what level of access is necessary for responders.
Identify and discuss the AWS account strategy and cloud identity strategy with your
organization's cloud architects to understand what authentication and authorization
methods are configured, such as:
The preceding options define the technical choices for authentication to AWS, and how
you may gain access during a response, but some organizations may rely on another
team or a partner to assist in the response. User accounts that are used to respond to a
security incident are often privileged in order to provide sufficient access. Therefore,
access to use these user accounts should be restricted and they should not be used for
daily activities.
Before creating new access mechanisms, first work with your cloud teams to
understand how your AWS accounts are organized and governed. Many customers use
AWS Organizations to help centrally manage billing; control access, compliance, and
security; and share resources across their AWS accounts. A core feature of AWS
Organizations is that it can be leveraged to apply Service Control Policies to groups of
accounts, enabling you to gain policy management at scale. For additional information
about implementing governance mechanisms at scale, see AWS Governance at Scale.
Once you have understood how your organization has organized and governed your
AWS accounts, consider the following generalized response patterns to assist in
identifying which approaches are right for your organization.
Indirect access
Customers that use indirect access require the account owners or application teams to
perform authorized remediations in their AWS accounts with tactical guidance from the
incident response team acting as security experts. This method is a slower and more
complex way to execute tasks, but it can be successful when the responders are
unfamiliar with the account or cloud environment.
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Direct Access
To grant incident responders direct access, customers deploy an AWS IAM role into the
AWS accounts that can be assumed by security engineers or incident responders
during a security event. The incident responder authenticates either through a normal
federated process, or through a special emergency process if the incident impacts your
normal authentication process. The permissions you give the incident response IAM
role depend on the actions you anticipate the responders to perform.
Alternative Access
If you believe a security event is impacting your security, identity, or communication
systems, you may need to seek alternative mechanisms and access to investigate and
remediate the impact. By using a new, purpose-built AWS account, your responders
can collaborate and work from an alternate, secure infrastructure.
For example, responders can leverage new infrastructure launched in the cloud, such
as remote workstations via Amazon WorkSpaces and email services provided by
Amazon WorkMail. You'll need to prepare appropriate access controls (via IAM policies)
to delegate access so that your secure alternative AWS account can assume
permissions into the impacted AWS account.
Once you have delegated appropriate access, you can use the AWS APIs in the
affected account to share relevant data, such as logs and volume snapshots, to perform
investigative work in the isolated environment. You can learn more about this cross-
account access by reading Tutorial: Delegate Access Across AWS Accounts Using IAM
Roles.
Automation Access
As you migrate to using automation for responding to security events, you will need to
create IAM roles specifically for your automation resources to use (such as Amazon
EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions). Then, these resources can assume the IAM
roles and inherit the permissions assigned to the role. Instead of creating and
distributing AWS credentials, you delegate permission to your AWS Lambda function or
Amazon EC2 instance. The AWS resource automatically receives a set of temporary
credentials and uses them to sign API requests.
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Manager Run Command, which enables you to remotely and securely administrate
instances via an agent that you install on your Amazon EC2 instance operating system.
The AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) is installed by default on some
Amazon EC2 Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), such as for Windows Server and
Amazon Linux. However, you may need to manually install the agent on other versions
of Linux and hybrid instances. Whether you use Run Command or another tool, go
through any prerequisite setup and configuration before you receive your first security-
related alert to investigate.
For example, AWS Managed Services (AMS) provides ongoing management of your
AWS infrastructure so that you can focus on your applications. By implementing best
practices to maintain your infrastructure, AWS Managed Services helps to reduce your
operational overhead and risk. AWS Managed Services automates common activities
such as change requests, monitoring, patch management, security, and backup
services, and provides full-lifecycle services to provision, run, and support your
infrastructure.
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Prepare Processes
Once appropriate access has been provisioned and tested, your incident response team
must define and prepare the related processes necessary for investigation and
remediation. This stage is effort intensive, as you will need to sufficiently plan the
appropriate response to security events within your cloud environments.
Work closely with your internal cloud services teams and partners to identify the tasks
required to ensure that these processes are possible. Collaborate or assign each other
response activity tasks and ensure necessary account configurations are in place. We
recommend preparing processes and prerequisite configurations in advance to give
your organization the following response capabilities.
Decision Trees
Sometimes, different conditions may require different actions or steps. For example, you
may take different actions based on the type of AWS account (development versus
production), the tags of the resources, the AWS Config Rules compliance status of
those resources, or other inputs.
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This approach requires you to work with your cloud services and architect teams to
determine an appropriate AWS account process that can be used for investigations. For
example, your cloud services teams could use AWS Organizations to generate new
accounts and assist you in preconfiguring those accounts using a templated or scripted
method.
As an example, responders may want to make a point-in-time copy of data, such as the
AWS CloudTrail logs, from an Amazon S3 bucket in one account to another account.
The permissions provided by the ReadOnlyAccess managed policy, for example, would
enable the responder to perform these actions. To understand how to use the AWS
Command Line Interface (CLI) to perform this, see How can I copy objects between
Amazon S3 buckets.
If your snapshot is encrypted, you must also share the custom KMS Customer Managed
Key (CMK) used to encrypt the snapshot. You can apply cross-account permissions to a
custom CMK either when it is created or at a later time. Snapshots are constrained to
the region in which they were created, but you can share a snapshot with another
region by copying the snapshot to that region. For more information about copying a
snapshot, see Copying an Amazon EBS Snapshot.
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Using the native features of Amazon S3, you can configure an Amazon S3 bucket to
protect the integrity of your data. By managing access permissions with S3 bucket
policies, configuring S3 versioning, and enabling MFA Delete, you can restrict how data
can be written or read. This type of configuration is useful for storing investigation logs
and evidence, and is often referred to as write once, read many (WORM). Further, you
can protect the data by using server-side encryption with AWS Key Management
Service (KMS) and ensuring only appropriate IAM principals are authorized to decrypt
the data.
Additionally, if you want to securely keep data in a long-term storage after the
investigation is completed, consider moving the data from Amazon S3 to Amazon S3
Glacier using object lifecycle policies. Amazon S3 Glacier is a secure, durable, and
extremely low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. It is
designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability, and provides comprehensive security
and compliance capabilities that can help meet even the most stringent regulatory
requirements.
Moreover, you can protect the data in Amazon S3 Glacier by using the Amazon S3
Glacier Vault Lock, which allows you to easily deploy and enforce compliance controls
for individual Amazon S3 Glacier vaults with a vault lock policy. You can specify security
controls, such as WORM, in a vault lock policy and lock the policy from future edits.
Once locked, the policy can no longer be changed. Amazon S3 Glacier enforces the
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controls set in the vault lock policy to help achieve your compliance objectives, such as
for data retention. You can deploy a variety of compliance controls in a vault lock policy
using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy language.
The best practice is to perform investigations and forensics in the cloud, where the data
is, rather than attempting to transfer the data to a data center before investigating. You
can use the secure compute and storage capabilities of the cloud practically anywhere
in the world to perform the secure response operations. Many customers choose to pre-
build a separate AWS account that is ready to perform an investigation, though there
may be cases where you choose to operate your analysis in the same AWS account. If
your organization is expected to retain records or proof of criminal activity, then it may
be prudent to maintain separate accounts for long-term storage and legal activities.
It is also a best practice to perform the investigation in the same AWS Region where the
event occurred, rather than replicating the data to another AWS Region. We
recommend this practice primarily because of the additional time required to transfer the
data between regions. For each AWS Region you choose to operate in, ensure that
both your incident response process and the responders abide by the relevant data
privacy laws. If you do need to move data between AWS Regions, consider the legal
implications of moving data between jurisdictions. It is generally a best practice to keep
the data within the same national jurisdiction.
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Isolate Resources
In the course of your investigation, you may need to isolate resources as part of your
response to a security anomaly. The intention behind isolating resources is to limit the
blast radius of potential impact, prevent further propagation of affected resources, limit
the unintended exposure of data, and prevent further unauthorized access.
As with any response, other business, regulatory, legal, or other considerations may
apply. Make sure to weigh your intended actions against expected and unexpected
consequences. If your cloud teams use resource tags, these tags can help you identify
the criticality of the resource or the owner to contact.
1. Choose a base Amazon Machine Image (AMI) (e.g. Linux or Windows operating
system) that can be used as a forensic workstation.
2. Launch an EC2 instance from that base AMI.
3. Harden the operating system, remove unnecessary software packages, and
configure relevant auditing and logging mechanisms.
4. Install your preferred suite of open source or private toolkits, as well as any
vendor software and packages you need.
5. Stop the EC2 instance, and create a new AMI from the stopped instance.
6. Create a weekly or monthly process to update and rebuild the AMI with latest
software patches.
Once the forensic system is provisioned using an AMI, your incident response team can
use this instance to create a new AMI to launch a new forensic workstation for each
investigation. The process for launching the AMI as an EC2 instance can be
preconfigured to simplify the deployment process. For example, you can template the
forensic infrastructure resources you need within a text file and deploy it into your AWS
account through AWS CloudFormation.
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Templating the resources means your well-trained forensic experts are able to use new
forensic workstations for each investigation, rather than having to reuse infrastructure.
This process ensures there is no cross-contamination from other forensic examinations.
AWS enhanced networking uses single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) to provide high-
performance networking capabilities on supported instance types. SR-IOV is a method
of device virtualization that provides higher I/O performance and lower CPU utilization
when compared to traditional virtualized network interfaces. Enhanced networking
provides higher bandwidth, higher packet per second (PPS) performance, and
consistently lower inter-instance latencies. There is no additional charge for using
enhanced networking. To find out which instance types support 10 or 25 Gbps network
speeds, as well as other advanced capabilities, see Amazon EC2 Instance Types.
You should consider the Support Center in the AWS Console as the central point of
contact when engaging support for issues that affect your AWS resources. Access to
AWS Support is controlled by AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). For more
information about granting access to AWS support features, see Accessing Support.
If you need to report abuse of Amazon EC2, contact the AWS Abuse team using this
page: https://aws.amazon.com/forms/report-abuse
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AWS offers customers AWS Shield, which provides a managed DDoS protection
service that safeguards web applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides
always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime
and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to benefit from DDoS
protection. There are two tiers of AWS Shield: Standard and Advanced.
All AWS customers benefit from the automatic protections of AWS Shield Standard, at
no additional charge. AWS Shield Standard defends against most common, frequently
occurring network and transport layer DDoS attacks that target your website or
applications. When you use AWS Shield Standard with Amazon CloudFront and
Amazon Route 53, you receive comprehensive availability protection against all known
infrastructure (Layer 3 and 4) attacks.
For higher levels of protection against attacks targeting your web applications running
on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB),
Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Route 53 resources, you can subscribe to AWS
Shield Advanced. Additionally, AWS Shield Advanced gives you 24x7 access to the
AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT). You can learn more about AWS Shield Standard
and AWS Shield Advanced by visiting the AWS Shield web page.
Simulate
Security Incident Response Simulations
Security Incident Response Simulations (SIRS) are internal events that provide a
structured opportunity to practice your incident response plan and procedures during a
realistic scenario. SIRS events are fundamentally about being prepared and iteratively
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improving your response capabilities. Customers have expressed the following reasons
why they find value in performing SIRS activities, including:
• Validating readiness
For these reasons, the value derived from participating in a SIRS activity increases an
organization's effectiveness during stressful events. Developing a SIRS activity that is
both realistic and beneficial can be a difficult exercise. Although testing your runbooks
or automation that handles well-understood events has certain advantages, it is just as
valuable to participate in creative SIRS activities to test yourself against the unexpected.
Simulation Steps
Regardless if you design your own SIRS, or lean on a trusted partner to provide the
groundwork, simulations generally follow these steps:
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Simulation Examples
Security simulations must be realistic to provide the expected value. When you or your
partners work toward creating your own simulations, always consider past, real-world
events as a valuable source for potential simulation exercises. Here are a few examples
that AWS customers have found useful to use for their initial simulations:
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Iterate
When a security anomaly is detected, containing the event and returning to a known
good state are important elements of a response plan. As an example, if the anomaly
occurred because of a security misconfiguration, the remediation might be as simple as
removing the variance through a re-deployment of the resources with the proper
configuration. In this section, we explain how you can leverage the principles,
preparation, data sources, and automation to build your own security response
capability on AWS.
Runbooks
A runbook is the documented form of an organization's procedures for conducting a task
or series of tasks. This documentation is usually stored within an internal digital system
or on printed paper. You may currently have IR runbooks, or you may need to create
them to be compliant to a security assurance framework. However, humans following
written runbooks manually could potentially make mistakes, and it is optimal to shift the
burden of repeatable tasks onto automation. Automation frees human responders from
common tasks, making them available for more important tasks, such as correlating
events, practicing in simulations, devising new response procedures, performing
research, developing new skills, and testing or building new tools. However, writing a
runbook is generally the first place to start, before you can decompose the tasks into
programmable logic and iterate towards proper automation.
Creating Runbooks
To create runbooks for the cloud, we recommend that you first focus on the alerts you
currently generate. If you are generating an alert, it is ideally accompanied by an
investigation. Start by defining the manual descriptions of the processes you perform.
After this, test the processes and iterate on the runbook pattern to improve the core
logic of your response. Determine what the exceptions are, and what the alternative
resolutions are for those scenarios. For example, you may want to terminate a
misconfigured EC2 instance in a development environment, but if the same event
occurred in production, you may want to only stop the instance and verify with the rest
of the organization that critical data will not be lost and that termination is acceptable.
Once suitable, this logic can then be decomposed into a code-based solution, and can
be used as a tool by many responders to automate the response and remove variance
or guess-work by responders. This speeds up the lifecycle of a response. The next goal
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is to enable this code to be fully automated by being invoked by the alerts or events
themselves, rather than them being executed by a human responder.
Getting Started
If you're not sure where to start, consider beginning with the alerts that could be
generated by AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Config Rules. Then, progress further,
focusing on events generated by Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Macie. The
documentation for Amazon GuardDuty findings are available on the Amazon GuardDuty
documentation page, whereas the Amazon Macie alerts are available via the Amazon
Macie service in the AWS Management Console.
Automation
Automation is a force multiplier, scaling the responders' efforts to match the speed of
the organization. Moving away from manual processes to automated processes enables
you to spend more time focusing on measures to increase the security of your AWS
cloud environment.
Your incident response team runs the risk of alert fatigue if they continually respond to
the same alerts in the same way. Over time, the team may become desensitized to
alerts and can either make mistakes handling ordinary situations or miss unusual alerts.
Automation helps avoid alert fatigue by using functions that process the repetitive and
ordinary alerts, leaving humans to handle the sensitive and unique incidents.
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However, the objective should be to further reduce the time gap between detective
mechanisms and responsive mechanisms. Historically, this time gap can take hours,
days, or even months. An Incident Response survey by SANS in 2016 found that 21%
of respondents stated their time to detection took two to seven days, and only 29% of
respondents were able to remediate events within the same time frame. In the cloud,
you can shrink that response time gap to seconds by building event-driven response
capabilities.
Event-Driven Response
Event-driven response is a system where a detective mechanism triggers a responsive
mechanism to automatically remediate the event. You can use event-driven response
capabilities to reduce the time-to-value between detective mechanisms and responsive
mechanisms. To create this event-driven architecture, we provide an example using
AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs your code in
response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for
you.
You can decompose the logic into simple code to run within an AWS Lambda function
to perform these tasks. You can then use Amazon CloudWatch Events to monitor for
the specific cloudtrail:StopLogging event, and invoke the function if it happens.
When this AWS Lambda responder function is invoked by Amazon CloudWatch Events,
you can pass it the specific event's detail that contains the information of the principal
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that disabled CloudTrail, when it was disabled, the specific AWS CloudTrail resource
that was affected, and so on. You can use this information to essentially perform a log
dive, and then generate a notification or alert with just the specific values that a
response analyst would require.
Ideally, the goal of event-driven response is for the Lambda responder function to
perform the response tasks and then notify the responder that the anomaly has been
successfully resolved with any pertinent contextual information. It is then up to the
human responder to decide how to follow-up on why it occurred and how future
reoccurrences might be prevented. This feedback loop drives further security
improvement into your cloud environments. Achieving this objective requires you to shift
to a culture of security working closer with development and operations teams.
Identities
Amazon Web Services provides APIs to cloud services that are used by millions of
customers to build new applications and drive business outcomes. These APIs can be
invoked through many ways, such as by software development kits (SDKs), the AWS
CLI, and the AWS Management Console. To interact with AWS through these methods,
the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service helps you securely control
access to AWS resources. You use IAM to control who is authenticated (signed in) and
authorized (has permissions) to use resources at the Account Level. For a list of AWS
services that work with IAM, see AWS Services That Work with IAM.
When you first create an AWS account, you begin with a single sign-on (SSO) identity
that has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. This
identity is called the AWS account root user and is accessed by signing in with the email
address and password that you used to create the account. We strongly recommend
that you do not use the root user for your everyday tasks, even the administrative ones.
Instead, adhere to the best practice of using the root user only to create your first IAM
user. Securely lock away the root user credentials and use them to perform only a few
account and service management tasks.
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Although these APIs provide value to millions of customers, some of them can be
abused if the wrong individuals acquire access to your IAM or root credentials. For
example, you can use the APIs to enable logging within your account, such as AWS
CloudTrail. However, if your credentials fall into the wrong hands, an attacker may be
able to also use the API to disable these logs. You can prevent abuse of this nature by
configuring appropriate IAM permissions that follow a least privilege model, and by
properly protecting your IAM credentials. See the IAM Best Practices documentation
page to learn more. If this example event does occur, there are multiple detective
controls to identify that your AWS CloudTrail logging was disabled, such as AWS
CloudTrail itself, AWS Config, AWS Trusted Advisor, and AWS CloudWatch Events.
Resources
Other features that can be abused or misconfigured vary from organization to
organization based on how each customer operates in the cloud. For example, some
organizations intend to make certain data or applications publicly accessible, whereas
others keep their applications and data internal and confidential. Not all security events
are malicious in nature, as you may also respond to unintentional or improper
configurations. Consider which APIs or features have a high impact to your
organization, and if they are frequently or infrequently used.
The following are some examples of features that could be abused or configured
inappropriately:
• An Amazon SNS topic could have a policy that allows anyone to publish to it.
• An AWS IAM role could have a trust policy that allows anyone to assume it.
• A VPC Security Group could have a rule added that allows all traffic inbound.
Many security misconfigurations can quickly be identified using tools and services. AWS
Trusted Advisor provides a number of checks for best practices. Further, partners within
the AWS Partner Network (APN) offer hundreds of industry-leading products that are
equivalent, identical to, or integrate with existing controls in your on-premises
environments. A number of these products and solutions have been pre-qualified by the
AWS Partner Competency Program. We encourage you to visit the Configuration and
Vulnerability Analysis section of the APN Security Competency program to browse
these solutions and to determine if they can satisfy your requirements.
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Directive controls establish the governance, risk, and compliance models within which
the environment operates. These directive controls help you define what a secure
configuration that meets your business objectives is and what it is not. You can then
configure your preventative controls, such as AWS IAM, to prevent the directive control
from being violated. After this, you can enable the detective controls, such as AWS
CloudTrail and AWS Config, to identify if a violation has occurred. Finally, prescribe
your responsive control on how you remediate the issue, and use that as a feedback
loop to improve on your preventative and detective controls.
For example, assume that your monitoring solution notified you of a potential security
anomaly on your Amazon EC2 instance. The following are common steps taken to
address this issue:
1. Capture the metadata about the EC2 instance, before any environment changes
are made.
2. Protect the EC2 instance from accidental termination, by enabling termination
protection on the instance.
3. Isolate the EC2 instance by switching the VPC Security Group or explicitly
denying network traffic to the instance's IP address via the Network Access
Control List.
4. Detach the EC2 instance from any AWS Auto Scaling groups.
5. Deregister the EC2 instance from any related Elastic Load Balancing service.
6. Snapshot the Amazon EBS data volumes that are attached to the EC2 instance
for preservation and follow-up investigations.
7. Tag the EC2 instance that it has been quarantined for investigation, and add any
pertinent metadata, such as the trouble ticket associated with the investigation.
Note that all of the preceding steps can be performed using the AWS APIs, AWS SDKs,
the AWS CLI, and the AWS Management Console (via your web browser). To interact
with AWS via these methods, the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) web
service helps you securely control access to AWS resources. You use IAM to control
who is authenticated (signed in) and authorized (has permissions) to use resources at
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the Account Level. The AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service is what
provides the authentication and authorization for you to perform these actions and
interact with the service domain.
Investigation Decisions
At this point, customers choose between an offline investigation (immediately shutting
down the instance) or and online investigation (keeping the instance running). One
advantage to the offline investigation is that once the instance is shut down, it can no
longer affect the existing environment. Additionally, you can create a copy of the
affected instance from the EBS snapshots into an isolated AWS account with an
isolated environment designed specifically for your investigative purposes. However,
some customers choose to not immediately shut down the instance, as an “online”
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investigation enables them to potentially capture volatile evidence from the host
operating system itself, such as memory or network traffic.
Systems Manager, which includes Run Command, is integrated with AWS CloudTrail, a
service that captures API calls made by or on behalf of Systems Manager and delivers
the log files to an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. Using the information collected
by AWS CloudTrail, you can determine what request was made, the source IP address
from which the request was made, who made the request, when it was made, and
more. CloudTrail logs all Systems Manager API actions, including API requests to
execute commands using Run Command or to create Systems Manager documents.
You can use the AWS Systems Manager Run Command service to invoke the SSM
Agent to execute Linux shell scripts and Windows PowerShell commands. These scripts
could load and execute specific tools to capture additional data from the host, such as
the Linux Memory Extractor (LiME) kernel module. You can then transfer the memory
capture to your forensic EC2 instance within the VPC network, or to an Amazon S3
bucket for durable storage.
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Summary
In this paper, we defined the concepts of security incident response within your AWS
environment, reviewed the controls and capabilities at your disposal, and reviewed
some topical examples for remediating these issues. In addition, we’ve reviewed how
customers can start small and iterate, moving toward the adoption of automation
capabilities that improve the speed of response.
Many AWS customers have expanded the role of their security teams to build custom
security features and services for their organization to use. Their goal is to assist the
organization through their cloud journey by building custom security services or
capabilities that can be consumed by other teams, or that protect the business
holistically. A security team that can help the business move faster while being safer,
will help drive the business outcomes and goals that the organization is trying to
achieve.
Working closely with your cloud teams and stakeholders, we encourage you to seek out
opportunities to incorporate security into every aspect of your development and
architecture process, such as deploying automation capabilities that make detective
controls and responsive actions simpler and faster. This will enable you to begin
transforming your organization’s development culture towards a culture of “DevSecOps”
– integrating development teams, security teams, and operations teams together,
working as one team toward business objectives. With such a culture, you’ll be better
prepared for when security events occur.
Additional Resources
For additional information, see the following:
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• Visualize AWS Cloudtrail Logs using AWS Glue and Amazon QuickSight blog
post
• How to Visualize and Refine Your Network's Security by Adding Security Group
IDs to Your VPC Flow Logs
• Store and Monitor OS & Application Log Files with Amazon CloudWatch
• S3 Versioning
Media
• AWS re:Invent 2014 (SEC402): Intrusion Detection in the Cloud
• AWS re:Invent 2015 (SEC316): Harden Your Architecture with Security Incident
Response Simulations
• AWS re:Invent 2016 (SEC313): Automating Security Event Response, from Idea
to Code to Execution
• AWS re:Invent 2017 (SID302): Force Multiply Your Security Team with
Automation and Alexa
• AWS re:Invent 2016 (SAC316): Security Automation: Spend Less Time Securing
Your Applications
• AWS re:Invent 2016 (SAC304): Predictive Security: Using Big Data to Fortify
Your Defenses
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Third-Party Tools
Note that the following third-party links are external and are not endorsed by AWS.
AWS offers no guarantees or representations of any kind about the tools or the
webpages that are linked here.
• AWS_IR: Python installable command line utility for mitigation of host and key
compromises.
• ThreatPrep: Python module for evaluation of AWS account best practices around
incident handling readiness.
• ThreatResponse Web: Web based analysis platform for use with the AWS_IR
command line tool.
• Linux Write Blocker: The kernel patch and userspace tools to enable Linux
software write blocking
Industry References
• NIST SP 800-61R2: Computer Security Incident Handling Guide
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Appendix A: Examples
Example AWS CloudTrail Event
The following example shows that an IAM user named Alice used the AWS CLI to call
the Amazon EC2 StopInstancesaction by using ec2-stop-instances.
{"Records": [{
"eventVersion": "1.0",
"userIdentity": {
"type": "IAMUser",
"principalId": "EX_PRINCIPAL_ID",
"arn": "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/Alice",
"accountId": "123456789012",
"accessKeyId": "EXAMPLE_KEY_ID",
"userName": "Alice"
},
"eventTime": "2014-03-06T21:01:59Z",
"eventSource": "ec2.amazonaws.com",
"eventName": "StopInstances",
"awsRegion": "us-east-2",
"sourceIPAddress": "205.251.233.176",
"userAgent": "ec2-api-tools 1.6.12.2",
"requestParameters": {
"instancesSet": {"items": [{"instanceId": "i-ebeaf9e2"}]},
"force": false
},
"responseElements": {"instancesSet": {"items": [{
"instanceId": "i-ebeaf9e2",
"currentState": {
"code": 64,
"name": "stopping"
},
"previousState": {
"code": 16,
"name": "running"
}
}]}}
}]}
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{
"check-name": "Exposed Access Keys",
"check-item-detail": {
"Case ID": "02648f3b-e18f-4019-8d68-ce25efe080ff",
"Usage (USD per Day)": "0",
"User Name (IAM or Root)": "jane-roe-test",
"Deadline": "1440453299248",
"Access Key ID": "AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE",
"Time Updated": "1440021299248",
"Fraud Type": "Exposed",
"Location": "www.github.com"
},
"status": "ERROR",
"resource_id": "",
"uuid": "cce6d28f-e44b-4e61-aba1-5b4af96a0f59"
}
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Validated log files are invaluable in security and forensic investigations. To determine
whether a log file was modified, deleted, or unchanged after CloudTrail delivered it, you
can use CloudTrail log file integrity validation. This feature is built-in using industry
standard algorithms: SHA-256 for hashing and SHA-256 with RSA for digital signing.
This makes it computationally infeasible to modify, delete or forge CloudTrail log files
without detection.
By default, the log files delivered by CloudTrail to your bucket are encrypted by Amazon
server-side encryption, though you can optionally use the AWS Key Management
Service (KMS) managed keys (SSE-KMS) for your CloudTrail log files.
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AWS Config: AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate
the configurations of your AWS resources. Config continuously monitors and records
your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of
recorded configurations against desired configurations. With Config, you can review
changes in configurations and relationships between AWS resources-manually or
automatically. You can dive into detailed resource configuration histories, and determine
your overall compliance against the configurations specified in your internal guidelines.
This enables you to simplify compliance auditing, security analysis, change
management, and operational troubleshooting.
Amazon CloudWatch Logs: You can use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to monitor, store,
and access your log files (such as your operating system, application, and custom log
files) from your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances using the
CloudWatch Logs agent. Additionally, Amazon CloudWatch Logs can capture logs from
AWS CloudTrail, Route 53 DNS Queries, VPC Flow Logs, Lambda functions, and other
sources. You can then retrieve the associated log data from CloudWatch Logs.
Amazon VPC Flow Logs: VPC flow logs enable you to capture information about the
IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your VPC. After you've created a flow
log, you can view and retrieve its data in Amazon CloudWatch Logs. VPC flow logs can
help you with a number of tasks. For example, you can use flow logs to troubleshoot
why specific traffic is not reaching an instance, which in turn can help you diagnose
overly restrictive security group rules. You can also use flow logs as a security tool to
monitor the traffic that is reaching your instance.
AWS WAF Logs: AWS WAF now supports full logging of all web requests inspected by
the service. Customers can store these logs in Amazon S3 for compliance and auditing
needs as well as use them for debugging and additional forensics. The logs help
customers understand why certain rules are triggered and why certain web requests are
blocked. Customers can also integrate the logs with their SIEM and log analysis tools.
Other AWS Logs: With the pace of innovation, we continue to deploy new features and
capabilities for customers practically every day. As such, there are dozens of AWS
services that provide logging and monitoring capabilities, though it is not the purpose of
this document to enumerate each of them. Refer to individual service documentation
pages to determine the features that service offers.
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Amazon Macie: Amazon Macie is an AI-powered security service that helps you
prevent data loss by automatically discovering, classifying, and protecting sensitive data
stored in AWS. Amazon Macie uses machine learning to recognize sensitive data such
as personally identifiable information (PII) or intellectual property, assigns a business
value, and provides visibility into where this data is stored and how it is being used in
your organization. Amazon Macie continuously monitors data access activity for
anomalies, and delivers alerts when it detects risk of unauthorized access or inadvertent
data leaks.
AWS Config Rules: An AWS Config Rule represents desired configurations for a
resource and is evaluated against configuration changes on the relevant resources, as
recorded by AWS Config. The results of evaluating a rule against the configuration of a
resource are available on a dashboard. Using Config Rules, you can assess your
overall compliance and risk status from a configuration perspective, view compliance
trends over time and pinpoint which configuration change caused a resource to drift out
of compliance with a rule.
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AWS Trusted Advisor: AWS Trusted Advisor is an online resource to help you reduce
cost, increase performance, and improve security by optimizing your AWS environment,
Trusted Advisor provides real time guidance to help you provision your resources
following AWS best practices. The full set of Trusted Advisor checks, including
CloudWatch Events integration, is available to Business and Enterprise support plan
customers.
Automation
AWS Lambda: AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs your code in
response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for
you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or
create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and
security. Lambda runs your code on high-availability compute infrastructure and
performs all the administration of the compute resources for you. This includes server
and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code
and security patch deployment, and code monitoring and logging. All you need to do is
supply the code.
AWS Step Functions: AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the
components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Step
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Functions provides a graphical console to arrange and visualize the components of your
application as a series of steps. This makes it simple to build and run multistep
applications. Step Functions automatically triggers and tracks each step, and retries
when there are errors, so your application executes in order and as expected.
Step Functions logs the state of each step, so when things do go wrong, you can
diagnose and debug problems quickly. You can change and add steps without even
writing code, so you can easily evolve your application and innovate faster. AWS Step
Functions is part of the AWS Serverless Platform, and makes it simple to orchestrate
AWS Lambda functions for serverless applications. You can also use Step Functions for
microservices orchestration using compute resources such as Amazon EC2 and
Amazon ECS.
AWS Systems Manager: AWS Systems Manager gives you visibility and control of
your infrastructure on AWS. Systems Manager provides a unified user interface so you
can view operational data from multiple AWS services and allows you to automate
operational tasks across your AWS resources. With Systems Manager, you can group
resources by application, view operational data for monitoring and troubleshooting, and
take action on your groups of resources. Systems Manager can keep your instances in
their defined state, perform on-demand changes like updating applications or running
shell scripts, and perform other automation and patching tasks.
Secure Storage
Amazon S3: Amazon S3 is object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data
from anywhere. It is designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability, and stores data for
millions of applications used by market leaders in every industry. S3 provides
comprehensive security and compliance capabilities that meet even the most stringent
regulatory requirements. It gives customers flexibility in the way they manage data for
cost optimization, access control, and compliance. S3 provides query-in-place
functionality, allowing you to run powerful analytics directly on your data at rest in S3.
And Amazon S3 is the most supported cloud storage service available, with integration
from the largest community of third-party solutions, systems integrator partners, and
other AWS services.
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analytics directly on your archive data at rest. To keep costs low yet suitable for varying
retrieval needs, Amazon S3 Glacier provides three options for access to archives, from
a few minutes to several hours.
Custom
Although the services and features mentioned here are not an exhaustive list, Amazon
Web Services is continuously adding new capabilities. We encourage you to visit the
AWS What's New web page, as well as the AWS Security web page for additional
information. In addition to the security services that AWS offers as native cloud
services, you may be interested in building your own capabilities on top of AWS
services.
Although we recommend enabling a base set of security services within your accounts,
such as AWS CloudTrail, Amazon GuardDuty, and Amazon Macie, you may eventually
want to extend these capabilities to derive additional value from your log assets. There
are a number of partner tools available, such as those listed in our APN Security
Competency program. Furthermore, you may want to write your own queries to search
your logs. With the extensive number of managed services that AWS offers, this has
never been easier. There are many additional AWS services that can assist you with
investigation that are outside the scope of this whitepaper, such as Amazon Athena,
Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Machine Learning,
Amazon EMR, and so on.
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