AWS GuardDuty is a security solution that specializes in identifying suspicious traffic and API activity in clients’ AWS environments. It uses machine learning to detect anomalous behavior and warn clients about specific types of potentially dangerous conduct.
In AWS, data breaches and exposures have become all too regular. Most are triggered by user misconfigurations rather than intrinsic cloud platform issues, making AWS infrastructure security an essential necessity for every organization.
Fortunately, AWS offers a variety of security services that can meet the needs of most businesses.
Using Amazon GuardDuty to Perform Log Analysis
CloudTrail event logs, VPC Flow Logs, and DNS Logs are just a few of the data sources that Amazon GuardDuty can monitor and analyze.
GuardDuty identifies and prioritizes potential threats using advanced machine learning, anomaly detection, and integrated threat intelligence. GuardDuty also keeps an eye on your AWS account for signals of unauthorized access, such as unexpected API calls or deployments in a new region.
GuardDuty collects important data from logs to aid in the profiling and detection of anomalies. These discoveries can be reviewed in your AWS management portal, integrated into event management or workflow systems, or triggered by AWS Lambda for automated remedy or prevention.
By sending invites to all of your member accounts, GuardDuty findings can be consolidated into a single account (managed by your security staff). This method provides more insight into all of an organization’s accounts.
Findings from GuardDuty can be sent to an S3 bucket or to CloudWatch Events. Teams may then automate the assessment and alerting of any results from the GuardDuty service using AWS Lambda Functions.
GuardDuty can be accessed via the GuardDuty Console, AWS SDKs, or AWS CLI.
How Does Amazon GuardDuty Work?
AWS GuardDuty is powered by Machine Learning, which evolves and learns about your infrastructure over time. Amazon GuardDuty scans your AWS account for anomalous trends that could indicate potential threats to your environment.
These dangers could be predicated on a user’s behavior, such as credential leakage or unexpected API calls that violate security best practices, or even messages from suspicious sources.
This service delivers unending and automatic security analysis for securing the entirety of your AWS environment by using a threat detection feed that can be generated from public sources or given by AWS itself.
Prominent Features of AWS GuardDuty
AWS comes packed with features and some of the most prominent ones include:
Account-Level Threat Detection in Amazon Guard Duty: In real-time, GuardDuty can reliably detect an AWS account compromise as it happens continuously.
Automating Remediation and Threat Response: GuardDuty supports automated security responses via HTTPS APIs, CLI tools, and AWS CloudWatch Events.
GuardDuty monitors and analyzes the whole AWS account, as well as all future workloads event data available in AWS CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and DNS Logs, without requiring additional security software or equipment.
GuardDuty simplifies deployment and management with quick enabling and one-click deployment without the need for extra infrastructure to deploy and maintain.
Threat Detection Techniques Developed and Tuned for the Cloud: GuardDuty includes detection techniques that were developed and optimized exclusively for the AWS Cloud. GuardDuty also offers threat intelligence interfaces with industry-leading third-party security providers like Proofpoint and CrowdStrike.
Threat Detection with High Availability: GuardDuty can manage resource use based on overall activity levels within AWS accounts and workloads. It increases detection capacity when it’s needed and decreases it when it’s not.
Threat Severity Levels for Efficient Prioritization: GuardDuty includes threat severity levels for low, medium, and high priority threats, allowing customers to respond appropriately.
Reasons for using AWS GuardDuty
To allow for continuous monitoring and analysis
With findings dedicated to providing context, metadata, and specifics on impacted resources, you can develop a better understanding of security incidents.
Unauthorized activities are stopped
Protect yourself from the use of stolen credentials, anomalous data access in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), API calls from suspicious network IP addresses, and more.
To simplify the forensics process
Using Amazon GuardDuty’s console interface with Amazon Detective, you can quickly uncover the underlying cause of suspicious actions.
How To Configure AWS GuardDuty
To configure AWS GuardDuty, go through the steps below:
Obtain the Detector ID
- Log in to the Amazon Web Services application.
- Select Guard Duty Services from the drop-down menu.
- Make a note of the name of the region in which the GuardDuty program is installed. US-East-1, for example.
- Go to the Settings tab. The Detector ID is displayed on the screen.
IAM User Authorization
1. Add the AmazonGuardDutyReadOnlyAccess AWS managed policies to the user.
2. Copy and save this user information:
- Access ID
- Secret Key
SNYPR Secret Key Access ID Configuration
Before you begin configuring in SNYPR, you must have the necessary AWS GuardDuty information:
- Access Key
- GuardDuty Detector ID
- GuardDuty Region
- Secret Key
Menu > Add Data > Activity is where you can set up AWS GuardDuty in SNYPR.
AWS GuardDuty Findings
Amazon GuardDuty displays the results for accounts that have been monitored. These results are called “findings” and are provided in the form of a report, which is divided into the following categories:
High Severity: A resource that is totally used by a third party, such as a hacked EC2 instance that is constantly transmitting your data elsewhere, is classified as a high severity finding.
Medium Severity: A medium severity finding would be resources targeted by a TOR network, from which your network packets are regularly observed.
Low Severity: If a resource was compromised and Amazon GuardDuty intervened to stop malicious behavior, it would be considered a low severity finding.
The master account provides access to the findings, which are kept for 90 days. Operators can save or export findings from the last 90 days to S3, which we find handy for more strategic, trending research.
You’ll probably want to take action based on the findings. You can automate your threat response using Amazon GuardDuty. Amazon GuardDuty, in particular, allows you to automate security responses using CLI tools, HTTPS APIs, and AWS CloudWatch Events.
We can activate a Lambda function that performs a custom action using CloudWatch Events as an event source. For example, if you discovered that your EC2 instance had been hacked, you might set up a CloudTrail event with the instance ID, which would then be passed on to another AWS service to bring the instance down.
Final Thoughts
AWS GuardDuty’s primary goal is to help you automate tedious security processes so you can focus on growing and expanding your organization. If you haven’t already, you should absolutely use this service to provide data localization, protection, and secrecy in your AWS architecture.