Inventory & Configurations Monitoring
It is important to have an inventory of assets, and to keep track of configuration changes in your assets. AWS has a service called AWS Config that monitors configuration changes, allows you to remediate undesirable configurations, or restore previous configurations thus correcting configuration deviations.
Rules that verify the existence of open SSH or RDP ports (accessible from any IP) as well as other native rules help strengthen the security posture significantly.
You can perform remediation actions that are based on AWS Systems Manager Automation Documents and identify when a resource becomes non-compliant and send notifications.
If you enabled AWS Control Tower , AWS Config will be configured automatically. AWS Security Hub security standards and AWS Firewall Manager require AWS Config to be enabled.
AWS Config Demo
AWS Config Mindmap
https://www.xmind.net/m/ACQQq3/
Risk Mitigation
- Tracking changes helps reducing misconfigurations.
Guidance for assessments
- Do you have an inventory of your assets ? (ideally including criticality, to which business process it’s related, accounts)
- Is AWS Config enabled in your organization ? (if you have AWS Control Tower, AWS Config is enabled when enabling Control Tower)
- Is your team trained on how to use AWS Config to detect what changed and when ? (particularly important for Incident response, can your team query resources or enable rules?)