AWS Cloud: Proactive Security & Forensic Readiness

This post kicks off a series examining proactive security and forensic readiness in the AWS cloud environment. 

By Neha Thethi, Information Security Analyst, BH Consulting

In a time where cyber-attacks are on the rise in magnitude and frequency, being prepared during a security incident is paramount. This is especially crucial for organisations adopting the cloud for storing confidential or sensitive information.

This blog is an introduction to a five-part blog series that provides a checklist for proactive security and forensic readiness in the AWS cloud environment.

Cyber-attack via third party services
A number of noteworthy information security incidents and data breaches have come to light recently that involve major organisations being targeted via third-party services or vendors. Such incidents are facilitated in many ways, such as a weakness or misconfiguration in the third-party service, or more commonly, a failure to implement or enable existing security features.

For example, it has been reported that several data breach incidents in 2017 occurred as a result of an Amazon S3 misconfiguration. Additionally,  the recent data breach incident at Deloitte appears to have been caused by the company’s failure to enable two-factor authentication to protect a critical administrator account in its Azure-hosted email system.

Security responsibility
Many of our own customers at BH Consulting have embraced the use of cloud, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is estimated that the worldwide cloud IT infrastructure revenue has almost tripled in the last four years. The company remains the dominant market leader, with an end-of-2016 revenue run rate of more than $14 billion.  It owes its popularity to its customer focus, rich set of functionalities, pace of innovation, partner and customer ecosystem as well as implementation of secure and compliant solutions.

AWS provides a wealth of material and various specialist partners to help customers enhance security in their AWS environment. A significant part of these resources is a shared responsibility model for customers, to better understand their security responsibilities based on the service model being used (infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service or software-as-a-service).

Figure 1: AWS Shared Responsibility Model

When adopting third-party services, such as AWS, it is important that customers understand their responsibility for protecting data and resources that they are entrusting to these third parties.

Security features
Numerous security measures are provided by AWS, however, awareness of relevant security features and appropriate configuration, are key to taking full advantage of these measures. There may be certain useful and powerful features that a customer may be unaware of.  It is the responsibility of the customer to identify all the potential features so as to determine how best to leverage each one, if at all.

Five-part best practice checklist
The blog series will offer the following five-part best practice checklists, for proactive security and forensic readiness in AWS Cloud.

1. Identity and Access Management in AWS
2. Infrastructure Level Protection in AWS
3. Data Protection in AWS
4. Detective Controls in AWS
5. Incident Response in AWS

Stay tuned for further installments.

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