Cloud security threats are becoming increasingly common, and AWS is no exception. With the rise of cybercrime, it’s important to be aware of the different types of threats and how to prevent them. Fortunately, there are a variety of tools and techniques that can help you protect your data from malicious actors. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the most common AWS security threats, as well as AWS monitoring software to detect and prevent them. We’ll also look at some specific use cases for threat detection software in the context of AWS cloud security. By understanding these threats and taking steps to mitigate them, you can ensure that your data remains safe from potential data breaches.
Types of visibility you need to focus on
Today, most organizations rely on many types of controls for security visibility. All of these are readily available in the cloud, often in both cloud-native formats and third-party vendor solutions:
• Network visibility— Network firewalls, network intrusion detection, and load tools for network traffic data (behavioural) collection and balancing, proxies, and monitoring are commonly used controls for achieving network visibility. Top network vendors’ characteristics have been modified to incorporate into an architecture for a virtual private cloud (VPC), allowing the same security expertise and skills between network and security teams internal network traffic they’ve accumulated Cloud-native access restrictions. Using security groups and flow logs occurrences and conduct, security teams can monitor and trace network traffic.
• Application visibility— It is critical to monitor events and behaviours in order to ensure application visibility. Furthermore, when workloads communicate with one another across the cloud environment, the local application logs on specific systems and containers.
Making authentic applications Visibility frequently depends on adding events to event management and SIEM tools, which have also been efficiently adapted to the cloud via API integration in many environments.
• Instance/container visibility— Events and logs generated by services and applications, as well as operating systems, should be automatically collected from cloud instances and delivered to a centralised platform for collection. Many security teams and businesses are already familiar with remote and automated logging.
Simply put, creating robust cloud security architectures must ensure that
They are collecting the required logs and transferring them to a secure central logging facility monitoring services or cloud-based event management systems SIEM and/or analytics tools should be used with caution. Containers and containers are examples of management tools; many well-known and emerging vulnerability scanning service providers and configuration assessment services have modified their products to function in deep visibility into container image setup and other aspects of running event tracking.
• Database/storage visibility— Many cloud deployments make use of a variety of storage options, including block storage, blob-type storage, databases, and others.
Access controls are frequently critical to security visibility for storage components and authorizations, as well as events related to encryption and other protective changes made to the storage platform. Every major cloud storage type includes numerous logging methods, many of which also include access control controls.
There are numerous encryption and data monitoring solutions available for public cloud storage.
• Control plane visibility— There is also another type of visibility available in the Cloud is a component of the control plane, which is the cloud environment. Along with vast a variety of additional features, including the logging of any activity within the environment itself are available to regularly check cloud environments and accounts for best practises security controls status and configuration. Think about one service that simultaneously observe the configuration of the complete data center!
Building a Cloud Security Visibility Strategy
Consider the following process to select and implement the most effective cloud
security visibility strategy:
1. Make sure to look into alternative vendors and service providers that can strengthen and expand the monitoring and visibility plan.
2. Prior to taking into account the most recent cloud-native technologies and capabilities from cloud providers, take into account the important variables that could determine how long you should products from your internal vendor in place (or potentially selecting something completely different) third-party programmes rather to the ones you now use) rather than switching to a new cloud offered from service providers. It makes logical to continue using your present tools if:
• You have a well-supported vendor product that has been cloud-adapted and scaled effectively.
• You have a highly distributed cloud deployment and need to minimize operating overhead and expertise.
Your vendor’s product has clear and distinct advantages over the cloud provider services available, and this matters to you. However, in some cases, a combination of vendor and cloud provider services/controls may make more sense than either solution alone.
To that end, make sure to evaluate the provider’s cloud-native controls. In-house services may provide easier operations, improved performance, expanded capabilities, or deeper and more natural integration than existing tools. Cloud-native solutions, on the other hand, will be better implemented to augment and enhance security visibility alongside third-party tools in many large enterprises.
Finally, to create a true continuous monitoring strategy, make sure you combine event monitoring, vulnerability scanning/monitoring, and control plane visibility.
AWS Security Monitoring Best Practices
Some of the most important security monitoring recommendations for the team include:
- Turn on AWS CloudTrail logging in all regions and connect it to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Check that log file validation is turned on and that logs are encrypted with AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
- Enable Amazon VPC Flow Logs for all VPCs, or at least those with critical assets.
- Use Amazon S3 bucket versioning for secure storage and Object Lock to prevent object version deletion. Amazon S3 Glacier can be used to create Write-Once-Read-Many Archive Storage for long-term storage.
- AWS CloudTrail log files from multiple accounts should be consolidated into a single bucket. It is a good security practise to create a separate account and replicate logs to that account so that logs for a specific account cannot be deleted.
- Monitor events and set up Amazon CloudWatch alarms for:
– User and identity and access management (IAM) activity, particularly login events and admin user activity
– Inadequate access to resources
– Policy and configuration modifications
– Changes to VPC configuration such as security groups, NACs, network gateways, route tables, and so on.
– Billing notifications
– API calls such as changes to storage attributes, unauthorised calls, and AWS Lambda events
– Activity in unusual locations and at unusual times. The CIS has AWS monitoring and logging benchmarks, providing basic but sound recommendations that anyone can implement and use as a starting point.
• The CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations document describes how to configure security options for a subset of AWS.
• CIS Amazon Web Services (AWS) Three-tier Web describes how to establish a secure operational posture for a three-tier web architecture deployed in an AWS environment.
Summary
In terms of security monitoring and visibility, the cloud has a lot to offer. Organizations can now monitor for both event-driven and behavior-driven activity, and they have a single environment to query for all of the cloud control plane visibility they could want.
Organizations can build a powerful threat detection strategy and gradually improve their monitoring capabilities by relying on the most common data sources. The emphasis should be on data types that can provide the most value and cover not only network and system monitoring but also information required for cloud environment monitoring. Monitoring advancements, such as Amazon VPC Traffic Mirroring, can be used to adapt traditional security monitoring techniques to the cloud.
The ultimate goal is to leverage automation tools that, by automating the most common tasks, can serve as a force multiplier and greatly assist security teams in incident response and vulnerability remediation.
