Relevant data that indicates security events

What AWS service would you use to detect unexpected and potentially unauthorized or malicious activity in your AWS environment?

AWS GuardDuty is the service designed to detect unexpected and potentially unauthorized or malicious activity in your AWS environment. It monitors for activities such as unusual API calls or potentially unauthorized deployments that indicate a possible AWS account compromise.

How does Amazon CloudWatch contribute to identifying security events?

Amazon CloudWatch enables monitoring of AWS resources and applications in real-time. You can use CloudWatch Logs to detect specific patterns, set alarms, and automatically respond to changes in your AWS resources which could indicate security events, such as a spike in network traffic or unauthorized API calls.

Can you name some of the relevant data sources for security analysis in an AWS environment?

Relevant data sources for security analysis in an AWS environment include VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail logs, AWS GuardDuty findings, Amazon CloudWatch Events, and Elastic Load Balancing logs. These sources provide detailed information regarding user activities and API usage, network traffic, and potential threats.

How would you differentiate between AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config when it comes to tracking security-relevant changes?

AWS CloudTrail provides a history of API calls for your AWS account, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command-line tools, and other AWS services. It helps in identifying who made what API call, from where, and when. AWS Config, on the other hand, tracks changes to your AWS resources and can help you maintain a history of the configurations of those resources over time, enabling compliance auditing and security analysis.

What is Amazon Inspector, and how does it assist in recognizing security events?

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. It automatically assesses applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices and generates detailed reports for recognized security events, including recommendations for remediation.

In the context of security events, what is the purpose of Amazon Macie, and what type of security risk does it identify?

Amazon Macie is a service that uses machine learning to automatically discover, classify, and protect sensitive data in AWS. It identifies and alerts on security risks regarding data access and movement, such as detecting unusual data access patterns that may indicate a potential data breach or exfiltration event.

How does the AWS WAF help identify and protect against web application security events?

AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) protects web applications against common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF allows you to monitor HTTP and HTTPS requests and set conditions such as IP addresses, SQL injection, or cross-site scripting to block attacks in real-time, thereby indicating and responding to potential web application security events.

How can you use AWS Systems Manager to detect potentially unauthorized changes that might indicate security events in your environment?

AWS Systems Manager provides visibility and control of your infrastructure on AWS. Using Systems Manager, you can track changes to your EC2 instances and other AWS resources using Inventory and State Manager. You can also automate the collection of software inventory, applying OS patches, and detect changes in instance system configurations that may indicate security events.

What role does Amazon Athena play in security event identification and analysis?

Amazon Athena allows you to query data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. When it comes to security event identification, you can use Athena to analyze large-scale security logs, such as VPC Flow Logs or DNS logs, by running queries directly against those data sets, enabling you to quickly identify potential security incidents.

How can enabling Amazon RDS Enhanced Monitoring provide insight into security-related events?

Amazon RDS Enhanced Monitoring provides metrics in real-time for the operating system that your RDS instance runs on. By monitoring OS-level metrics such as CPU, memory, file system, and network, you can gain insights that help in security event detection, such as unusual spikes in resource consumption that may indicate a DoS attack or system compromise.

What is the role of Amazon Detective when investigating security incidents?

Amazon Detective makes it easier to analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities. It automatically collects log data from your AWS resources and uses machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to build interactive visualizations that help you analyze and determine the nature of the security incident.

Can you explain how AWS Shield is utilized for detecting and protecting against security events?

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that defends applications running on AWS. For security events, AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency, offering protection against DDoS attacks without the need for user intervention.