In Part 1 of this guide, we examined two common incident scenarios: cross-account Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data deletion with ransomware implications, and cryptocurrency mining deployed through AWS CloudFormation using exposed AWS Management Console credentials. We also introduced key incident response terminology and investigative frameworks for analyzing …

AWS CloudTrail logs contain the evidence you need when investigating suspicious activity in your AWS environment, but knowing which fields matter and how to interpret them can mean the difference between surface-level analysis and uncovering the full scope of an incident. This guide walks you through real-world scenarios, showing …

A single alert from one security service tells you something happened. Read that signal alongside activity from other services and your own business context, and you will know whether what happened is part of a multi-stage attack. Consider a short sequence. An identity calls GetCallerIdentity from a source address …

Ten years ago, we launched AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, a fully managed Microsoft Active Directory in the AWS Cloud. In that original announcement, Jeff Barr described a straightforward promise: “You will spend less time administering and more time working on your applications and your business.” A …

AI coding agents are part of the developer toolchain. Tools like Kiro and Claude Code generate features, tests, and code refactors from natural-language prompts. A single agent can open dozens of pull requests (PRs) across your repositories in an afternoon. That productivity comes with a trade-off: agents optimize for …

Choosing the right cryptographic key management service on Amazon Web Services (AWS) starts with understanding the difference between AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and AWS CloudHSM. Both provide key storage backed by a hardware security module (HSM) but serve very different needs. AWS KMS is a fully managed …

If you’re building multi-agent AI systems, you need to prevent authorization scope from silently expanding as agents delegate tasks through multi-hop chains. Without proper controls, an agent can potentially act beyond what the originating user authorized, even when role-based access control (RBAC) policies are in place. The OWASP …

The AWS Customer Incident Response Team (AWS CIRT) encounters patterns that repeat across engagements when helping customers respond to security incidents. We’re passionate about making sure that information is accessible so that everyone can improve their security posture and their organization’s resilience to disruption. The primary method …

When securing an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment, teams naturally prioritize inbound controls, firewalls, WAFs, and access policies, because that’s where the most visible threats originate. Outbound traffic, on the other hand, tends to get less attention. It’s often left open by default to avoid breaking application …

In this blog post you’ll learn how to detect and prevent subdomain takeover – a tactic where threat actors exploit dangling DNS records to redirect traffic to attacker-controlled resources. We’ll explain the issue, how the situation arises, and how you can use various AWS features and services to …

Enabling security tooling is the starting point. Making it operational—where findings drive decisions, response times are measurable, and your security posture improves week over week—is where most organizations struggle. This blog post provides a phased maturity roadmap for organizations that have already enabled AWS Security Hub and …

As you scale your use of Amazon Web Services (AWS), managing KMS keys becomes increasingly important. Whether you manage a handful of keys or thousands across multiple AWS accounts and AWS Regions, there’s often a need to audit key usage to help you meet compliance requirements, evaluate your …

There have been multiple notable supply chain attacks using the npm Registry since September: Shai-Hulud, Chalk/Debug, one abusing tea.xyz tokens, and recently axios. Thanks to community efforts involving the Amazon Inspector team, the Open Source Security Foundation, and others, the affected packages were quickly flagged, which reduced …

The AWS Customer Incident Response Team works with customers to help them recover from active security incidents. As part of this work, the team often uncovers new or trending tactics used by various threat actors that take advantage of specific customer configurations and designs. Understanding these tactics can help …

Organizations often struggle to enforce security and compliance requirements consistently across their cloud infrastructure. In one environment, a workload might be deployed in an AWS Region that was never approved for that class of data. In another, a security group might allow broader access than intended. Required tags might …

TL;DR for busy executives The AWS AI Security Framework helps security leaders move fast and stay secure with AI. Security compounds from day 1 as workloads evolve from prototype to production to scale. Assess first. Request a no-cost SHIP engagement to baseline your posture and build a prioritized …

This article guides you on how to use Amazon GuardDuty to identify and mitigate cryptocurrency mining threats in your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. You’ll learn about the specialized detection capabilities of GuardDuty and best practices to build a multi-layered defense strategy that protects your infrastructure costs and …

This article shows you how to identify and secure open proxies in your AWS environment to prevent abuse, protect your IP address reputation, and control costs. An open proxy is a server that forwards traffic on behalf of internet users without requiring authentication. While proxies can support legitimate use …

Generative AI brings promising innovation, transforming how individuals and organizations approach everything from customer service to content creation and more. As AI continues to expand its capabilities, organizations are increasingly focused on how they can integrate the responsible AI concepts into the development lifecycle of their AI applications. Research …

The AWS Customer Incident Response Team (AWS CIRT) regularly encounters patterns that repeat across their engagements when helping customers respond to security incidents. We’re passionate about making sure that information is widely accessible so that everyone can improve their security posture and their organization’s resilience to disruption …

Understanding what AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies can control helps you build better security controls and avoid spending time on approaches that won’t work. You’ve likely encountered questions like: Can I use AWS Organizations service control policies (SCPs) to prevent the creation of security groups …

As outlined in the AWS post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration plan, addressing the risk of harvest now, decrypt later (HNDL) attack is an important part of your post-quantum plan. Upgrading the client-side of your workloads to support quantum-resistant confidentiality is an important aspect of your side of the PQC shared …

AI agents and coding assistants interact with AWS resources through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Unlike traditional applications with deterministic code paths, agents reason dynamically, choosing different tools or accessing different data depending on context. You must assume an agent can do anything within its granted entitlements, whether OAuth …

If your organization relies on AWS IAM Identity Center for workforce access, you can now extend that access across multiple AWS Regions with multi-Region replication. Previously, AWS access portal was only available in one Region, when you add an additional Region, users get an active access portal endpoint there …

As AI agents become part of your development workflows on Amazon Web Services (AWS), you want them to work with your existing AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions, not force you to build a separate permissions model. At the same time, you need the flexibility to apply different …