New Security & Compliance Service: AWS Security Hub

This morning’s Andy Jassy keynote was followed by the announcement of over 20 new services across a spectrum of AWS categories, including those in Security and Compliance, Database, Machine Learning, and Storage.  

One service that jumped out to me was the AWS Security Hub, currently in Preview. This is a new service designed to help you manage security and compliance by using a single-pane-of-glass approach.

AWS has always treated security as their number one focus and this new service enforces the importance of implementing a culture of security while managing an effective strategy across your AWS account.  AWS Security Hub provides another example of how AWS can help you more effectively and easily find and resolve any security vulnerabilities, identifying unexpected behavioral patterns and non-compliant configurations.

Security Hub is fully integrated with Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Macie, and Amazon Inspector and uses the data gathered from these existing security services to present any findings within the Security Hub console via a series of interactive graphs, tables, and statistics. In addition, it integrates with a number of AWS partners such as Sumo Logic, Splunk, and Dome9.  This enables you to use Security Hub to receive and present data from not only the AWS security services mentioned but also the security data gathered by tools and services offered by AWS partners that you may already be using as a part of your infrastructure.

For a full list of Security Hub integration partners see here: https://aws.amazon.com/security-hub/partners/

Deploying the AWS Security Hub across multiple accounts is easy since all you need to do is configure the service as a master/member relationship across your accounts to centralize your findings, in much the same way as you would in Amazon GuardDuty.  These centralized findings are presented using a standard format within the console as Security Hub will automatically manage the conversion of security data from GuardDuty, Macie, Inspector, and any partners being used. When findings are generated and found, the Security Hub will prioritize each one allowing you to focus on the key security threats and weaknesses detected across your multi-account configuration.  All findings will remain in the console for 90 days.

The service itself is continually running and provides an automatic assessment of compliance and security best practice checks based on the information being ingested from the different feeds.  These security checks are based on industry standards, such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks. Based on the results of these automatic checks, Security Hub is able to define and present which AWS accounts and resources are most affected by potential security issues allowing you to rectify and remediate them as soon as possible. 

Using Security Hub Insights, you can quickly identify and highlight any ingested data that meet the detail of the insight.  There are a number of pre-configured managed insights to help spot common trends or issues that can lead to a security concern, such as S3 buckets that are exposed to the public.  Additionally, you can also create your own insights allowing you to customize what is important to you and your organization from a security standpoint.

From with the Security Hub console, you are able to carry out a number of immediate actions on the findings, such as being able to send the details of the findings to your engineers via email, chat or even to a ticketing system.  As the service is supported by Amazon CloudWatch Events, you can also configure automated responses based on metric information.

In summary, AWS Security Hub saves you time by centralizing security findings from multiple accounts, from multiple security services and partner tools enabling you to quickly identify and spot security threats, weaknesses, and trends allowing you to provide a more efficient way of maintaining a safe, secure and protected environment.  

For more information on some of the services mentioned within this post, please see our existing courses found here:

Amazon GuardDuty: https://cloudacademy.com/course/understanding-amazon-guardduty/

Amazon GuardDuty is a regional based intelligent threat detection service, the first of its kind offered by AWS, which allows users to monitor their AWS account for unusual and unexpected behavior by analyzing AWS CloudTrail Event Logs, VPC Flow Logs, and DNS Logs. It then uses the data from logs and assesses them against multiple security and threat detection feeds looking for anomalies and known malicious sources, such as IP addresses and URLs.

Amazon Macie: https://cloudacademy.com/course/enforcing-compliance-security-controls-amazon-macie/

The main function of Amazon Macie is to provide an automatic method of detecting, identifying and also classifying data that you are storing within your AWS account.  The service is backed by Machine Learning allowing your data to be actively reviewed as different actions are taken within your AWS account. ML can spot access patterns and user behavior my analyzing CloudTrail event data to alert against any unusual or irregular activity.

Amazon Inspector: https://cloudacademy.com/course/amazon-inspector/

Amazon inspector is a managed service that is used to help you find security vulnerabilities within your EC2 instances and any applications running on them, during any stage of development and deployment.  

Interested in learning more? Schedule a demo with one of our solutions engineers and see how Cloud Academy can help take your organization to the next level.