AWS Security Hub: The Key to Enhanced AWS Cloud Security
AWS Security Hub serves as a pivotal component within Amazon Web Services' formidable suite of cloud security solutions. Its primary mission is the fortification of cloud environments by offering a comprehensive suite of security and compliance management functionality.
In doing so, AWS Security Hub empowers organizations to systematically detect, assess, and mitigate security vulnerabilities, compliance shortcomings, and emerging threats within their AWS environment. Additionally, it facilitates the execution of security best practice assessments, consolidates alerts, and supports automated remediation throughout their AWS infrastructure.
The Key Features & Functions of AWS Security Hub
1. Centralized Security Oversight: AWS Security Hub provides an elegant solution for the centralization and rationalization of security findings and alerts. It carefully collates security data flowing from a multitude of AWS services, as well as external security tools and services.
2. Automated Security Assessments: A cornerstone feature of AWS Security Hub is its capacity to autonomously conduct security evaluations across the expanse of AWS resources. It scrutinizes configurations, identifies vulnerabilities, and recognizes potential security incidents. The tool functions as a sentinel, continuously monitoring and vigilantly safeguarding the AWS environment.
3. Consolidated View of Findings Across Accounts: AWS Security Hub collects findings from AWS-native services (e.g., Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Macie) and third-party integrations. Analysts can access detailed information about each finding, including severity, description, affected resources, and recommended remediation steps. Findings can be categorized, filtered, and sorted based on various attributes, simplifying the prioritization and management of security incidents.
4. Integration With AWS Services: AWS Security Hub seamlessly integrates with numerous AWS services, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Config, AWS GuardDuty, AWS Inspector, and more, allowing it to gather security data from across your AWS environment.
5. Ability to automate finding updates and remediation: You can create automation rules that modify or suppress findings based on your defined criteria. Security Hub also supports an integration with Amazon EventBridge. To automate the remediation of specific findings, you can define custom actions to take when a finding is generated. For example, you can configure custom actions to send findings to a ticketing system or an automated remediation system.
Benefits of Using AWS Security Hub
1. Automatic security checks against best practices and standards: AWS Security Hub offers automated, continuous security best practice checks, including the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard, which provides event-based continuous monitoring or scheduled assessments with specific severity ratings for prioritizing remediation efforts.
2. Cost Optimization: Security Hub's pricing is determined by three factors:
- The number of security checks
- The volume of ingested findings
- The number of rule evaluations processed each month
Security Hub also comes with a perpetual free tier that allows you to ingest up to 10,000 findings per account per region each month, ensuring cost control from the get-go.
3. Unified view of findings: In AWS Security Hub, the "Findings" option is a central component that plays a critical role in identifying, managing, and responding to security and compliance issues within your AWS environment. It gathers data by leveraging multiple other Amazon services for detailed findings.
4. Integration and Customization: AWS Security Hub seamlessly integrates with various AWS services, including AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), enabling the collection of security-related data. Moreover, security analysts can craft personalized integrations utilizing the AWS Security Finding Format (ASFF) to incorporate insights from external security solutions
5. Scalability and Flexibility: AWS Security Hub adapts to expanding AWS environments, facilitating SOC analysts in efficiently managing large-scale security monitoring and analysis. Additionally, it provides the flexibility needed for custom integrations, empowering security analysts to seamlessly incorporate their existing security tools and processes into the Security Hub ecosystem.
Analysis of AWS Security Hub's Findings
The Findings option in AWS Security Hub is the core interface through which security teams gain visibility into security events, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues within their AWS environment.
The Findings option offers a wealth of information about a specific discovery. AWS Security Hub furnishes pertinent details, including the compliance status, product name (Security Hub, comprising various AWS security products such as Inspector and GuardDuty), severity classification of the discovery, and a comprehensive description of the finding, inclusive of the affected AWS account ID.
AWS Security Hub also offers comprehensive details regarding identified vulnerabilities. It supplies a hyperlink to the associated Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) reference, in addition to presenting the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score and scoring vector.
Furthermore, it enumerates the affected component's name, coupled with its installed version and the recommended fixed version, facilitating streamlined system patching.
AWS Security Hub conducts scans for both software and configuration vulnerabilities within AWS resources. For vulnerabilities it identifies, it furnishes comprehensive information about the affected resource, including its Resource ID, instance particulars, associated regions, subnets, and the date of resource launch.
Furthermore, the AWS Security Hub indicates the availability of remediation steps for each finding, assisting in the mitigation process. Users also have the option to delve deeper into the findings through Amazon Detective.
Detailed information regarding findings and vulnerabilities can be accessed and downloaded in JSON format. This information encompasses a wide range of details, including instance and resource names, package and library data, reference URLs, CVSS scores, architectural specifics, vendor details, and more.
Best Practices for AWS Security Hub
According to the 2022 State of Enterprise Security Posture Report, cybersecurity teams are having trouble keeping track of threats, endpoints, access rights, and other crucial security controls needed for a strong cybersecurity posture. Proper use of AWS Security Hub can help AWS-focused organizations improve across these areas.
- Ensure that AWS Security Hub is activated in every AWS region for all of your AWS accounts.
- Enable and manage AWS Security Hub from a single master account and not an individual AWS account.
- Assess and use the findings in AWS Security Hub to create workflows in your organization for the triage of serious security incidents.
- Build out customized remediation playbooks using Amazon CloudWatch Events, AWS Systems Manager Automation documents, and AWS Step Functions to resolve findings that don’t require human intervention automatically.
- Conduct a comprehensive review of resource policies within your accounts to identify and rectify any instances of unauthorized third-party subscriptions that could potentially result in false security incidents.
- Use specific managed IAM policies for different types of Security Hub users.
- Establish a mechanism for feeding AWS Security Hub findings to Security Operations.
- DeDevelop custom actions that allow you to send a duplicate of a Security Hub finding to an internal or external resource in your AWS account, enabling additional visibility and remediation options for the finding.
Connecting AWS Security Hub with your broader ecosystem
AWS Security Hub offers a great set of cloud security tools for AWS environments. If you’d like to aggregate your AWS Security Hub findings with findings from your other application, cloud, and/or infrastructure scanners in order to better identify, articulate, and remediate your most critical risks, ArmorCode has an AWS Security Hub integration. Schedule a demo to see how you can get more out of ArmorCode& the AWS Security Hub for your organization.
