Configuring alerting based on unexpected or anomalous security events

What AWS service would you primarily use to monitor for unexpected or anomalous security events in your AWS environment?

AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch are the primary services used for monitoring unexpected or anomalous security events. CloudTrail tracks user activity and API usage, while CloudWatch collects and tracks metrics, sets alarms, and automatically reacts to changes in AWS resources. For anomaly detection, you can use CloudWatch Anomaly Detection to create alarms.

How can you create custom metrics to monitor security-related events that are not natively supported by CloudWatch?

You can use Amazon CloudWatch Logs and CloudWatch Logs Insights to create custom metrics. By sending your logs to CloudWatch Logs, you can then use metric filters to turn log data into numerical CloudWatch metrics that you can set alarms on.

Explain how you would set up an alert for unauthorized API calls in your AWS account.

To set up an alert for unauthorized API calls, you can utilize AWS CloudTrail to log the API calls and then create a CloudWatch Logs filter that matches log events for unauthorized API calls. After that, you can set up a CloudWatch Alarm to notify you when the metric reaches a threshold that indicates an anomaly.

What is the role of Amazon SNS in the context of security event alerting?

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fully managed messaging service used for sending notifications. When integrated with CloudWatch Alarms, it can be used to send notifications when an alarm changes state, which allows you to respond quickly to potential security incidents.

How can you ensure that the alerts for anomalous events are classified and prioritized correctly?

To ensure alerts are classified and prioritized correctly, implement a tagging system for resources and use structured log data that includes the severity level of the event. Then, use CloudWatch metric filters and alarms with different thresholds and actions for each priority level.

Describe the steps to configure AWS Config to monitor for non-compliant resource configurations that can lead to security vulnerabilities.

To configure AWS Config for monitoring non-compliant resources, first, you set up AWS Config to record and evaluate your AWS resource configurations. Then, you create AWS Config rules that represent your desired configurations, compliance criteria, or best practices. AWS Config continuously monitors and records resource configurations and flags resources that don’t adhere to your rules.

Can you integrate third-party security tools with AWS for better monitoring and alerting of security events?

Yes, AWS supports integrating third-party security tools through various APIs, SDKs, and AWS Marketplace partnerships. Security findings from these tools can be sent to Amazon EventBridge, AWS Security Hub, or directly to CloudWatch for centralized monitoring and alerting.

Illustrate how you would implement failover for critical security-related alerts to ensure availability.

To implement failover for alerts, you can use multiple Amazon SNS topics in different AWS regions or availability zones, subscribing them to the same CloudWatch Alarm. This redundancy ensures that if one notification pathway fails, another can still deliver the alert. Additionally, using AWS Lambda functions to handle notifications can increase the robustness of the notification system.

How does AWS Lambda extend the functionality of CloudWatch alarms in the context of security alerting?

AWS Lambda extends the functionality of CloudWatch alarms by allowing you to write custom code that can execute automatically in response to alarms. This enables automated remediation of security issues or to perform detailed analysis and routing of the alert to appropriate stakeholders or systems.

When configuring alarm notifications, how can you implement mechanisms to reduce false positives and alert fatigue?

To reduce false positives and alert fatigue, you can adjust the thresholds of CloudWatch Alarms to a more suitable level, set up CloudWatch Anomaly Detection to create alarms based on ML models, and use Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights to perform advanced queries and filter out expected behaviors.

What AWS service would you use to aggregate and standardize security findings from various AWS services and supported third-party solutions?

AWS Security Hub can be used to aggregate and standardize security findings from various AWS services, such as Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, AWS Config, and supported third-party solutions. It provides a comprehensive view of your security posture across your AWS environment.

Describe a method to automatically remediate security issues found during monitoring that trigger alerts.

A method to automatically remediate security issues is to use AWS Lambda in combination with CloudWatch Events or Amazon EventBridge. When a specific security alert is triggered, the event can invoke a Lambda function that is programmed to remediate the issue, such as revoking insecure security group rules or applying patches to vulnerable systems.