As we already know, the shared security model of Amazon Web Services (AWS) means that the user, i.e. the organization is responsible for securing their account, application, and data in the cloud. While AWS does provide a large set of security tools to help secure your AWS cloud infrastructure, figuring out exactly what your organization needs and why can be difficult, let alone implementing those tools effectively.

Choosing the right cloud security tools is, therefore, critical for effectively protecting your cloud resources and assets. But before you start, you need to understand where the vulnerabilities are and what are the attack vectors.

Difference Between Account Security And Application Security

There are two main attack vectors, i.e. pathways that hackers can use to access or penetrate your AWS cloud environment - your AWS account and the applications hosted in AWS. Each is exposed to different kinds of threats and therefore requires different security controls.

Account Security

Your resources and data stored in AWS are accessible through public application programming interfaces (APIs). This makes your AWS account a prime attack vector. If your AWS account is compromised, it can lead to the theft or corruption of all of your data such as those stored in S3 buckets as well as potential compromise of your security architecture.

Application Security

The applications and services that are hosted in AWS are also susceptible to external threats such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), and brute-force attacks. Such attacks have the potential to bring down your services driving your business to a standstill.

Therefore, it is of utmost importance that organizations using AWS improve their security posture by addressing both account security as well as application security.

This blog post is focused on AWS account security and introduces you to 6 critical AWS account security tools that will help you secure your AWS accounts, resources, and customer data.

Top 6 AWS Account Security Tools

1. AWS IAM

AWS offers an Identity and Access Management (IAM) service to help its customers secure their AWS accounts and resources. It provides the infrastructure necessary to control authentication and authorization for the organization’s AWS account. Using the AWS IAM, organizations can control who can sign in and what permission they get to use company resources.

IAM assists with the implementation of the least-privilege principle, making it easy to create users and roles with permissions to specific resources in your organization’s AWS environment. Even in the worst case, if there is a breach, AWS IAM minimizes the impact of the breach if the least privilege permissions are assigned. Further, AWS IAM also offers multi-factor authentication (MFA) and Single Sign-On (SSO) options for added security.

Given the benefits of AWS IAM, its implementation has to be a top priority if you want to secure your AWS account.

2. Amazon GuardDuty

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service offered by AWS. It can be activated with a few clicks from your console and allows you to continuously monitor all your AWS accounts without the need to deploy or manage any additional software. It also provides detailed security reports for visibility and remediation.

Amazon GuardDuty employs machine learning to detect malicious activities and guards against the use of compromised credentials, abnormal data access in Amazon S3, API calls from known malicious IP addresses, and much more. It integrates with other security services and event logging to continuously monitor and analyze all activities.

Amazon GuardDuty is an invaluable security tool as it not only stops unauthorized activity but also gives insight into security events and facilitates the determination of the root cause of suspicious activities.

3. Amazon Macie

Amazon Macie is a data security and data privacy service that discovers and protects sensitive data in your AWS account. It uses machine learning and pattern matching to identify sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information or personal health information. After sensitive data is discovered, Macie continuously analyzes your buckets and alerts you if any bucket is unencrypted, publicly accessible, or shared with AWS accounts outside your organization.

For organizations that manage large and growing volumes of data, identifying and protecting sensitive data is a complex, expensive, and time-consuming challenge. But, Amazon Macie automates the process of identifying and protecting data, simplifying the process and lowering the cost of data protection at scale.

4. AWS Config

AWS Config is a service that monitors and analyzes your AWS resources enabling you to assess, audit, and evaluate their configurations. It also maintains a historical record of changes to your resources, which is often necessary for compliance and legal requirements.

Config continuously monitors your AWS resources and enables you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired ones. It provides you with historical details of configurations and relationships between your AWS resources, making it much easier to ensure that resource configurations are according to your internal policies and guidelines.

AWS Config is an invaluable tool for organizations that need to conduct security and compliance audits, as well as for those looking for better change management and improved operational troubleshooting.

5. AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail is a security tool that monitors and records account activity across your AWS infrastructure. It tracks all activities, such as user actions and API calls in your AWS environment, giving you control over storage, analysis, and remediation actions.

With CloudTrail, you can view and search events to detect unauthorized access or unusual requests in your AWS environment. You can also use it alongside add-ons such as CloudTrail Insights and EventBridge to respond with rule-based alerts and automated workflows.

6. Security Hub

AWS Security Hub is a cloud security management service that combines information from all of the above services, giving you a comprehensive, unified view of your cloud security posture. Additionally, it also supports security standards such as CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This helps reduce business risk and simplify compliance management.

Security Hub performs best practice checks, aggregates alerts, enables automated remediation, collects data from third-party security products, giving you all the information needed to make informed security decisions.

Conclusion

AWS offers a large selection of security services and tools to its customers. While investing in security is always a good idea, it is unlikely that you need to implement each and every security tool available. Your requirement depends on a number of factors such as the AWS services you use, attack vectors, compliance requirements, etc.

A good understanding of your own business requirements is as important as the understanding of security services offered by AWS for picking the right set of security tools for your cloud environment. Selecting the right security tools and configuring them correctly is essential for protecting your AWS cloud environment from a majority of security incidents.

Is your organization looking for help improving AWS account and application security? Reach out to us to learn how we can help you choose the right tools and configure them correctly to secure your AWS environment.

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