AWS CIRT announces the release of five publicly available workshops

Greetings from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT)! AWS CIRT is dedicated to supporting customers during active security events on the customer side of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model.

Over the past year, AWS CIRT has responded to hundreds of such security events, including the unauthorized use of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials, ransomware and data deletion in an AWS account, and billing increases due to the creation of unauthorized resources to mine cryptocurrency.

We are excited to release five workshops that simulate these security events to help you learn the tools and procedures that AWS CIRT uses on a daily basis to detect, investigate, and respond to such security events. The workshops cover AWS services and tools, such as Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Athena, and AWS WAF, as well as some open source tools written and published by AWS CIRT.

To access the workshops, you just need an AWS account, an internet connection, and the desire to learn more about incident response in the AWS Cloud! Choose the following links to access the workshops.

Unauthorized IAM Credential Use – Security Event Simulation and Detection

During this workshop, you will simulate the unauthorized use of IAM credentials by using a script invoked within AWS CloudShell. The script will perform reconnaissance and privilege escalation activities that have been commonly seen by AWS CIRT and that are typically performed during similar events of this nature. You will also learn some tools and processes that AWS CIRT uses, and how to use these tools to find evidence of unauthorized activity by using IAM credentials.

Ransomware on S3 – Security Event Simulation and Detection

During this workshop, you will use an AWS CloudFormation template to replicate an environment with multiple IAM users and five Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. AWS CloudShell will then run a bash script that simulates data exfiltration and data deletion events that replicate a ransomware-based security event. You will also learn the tools and processes that AWS CIRT uses to respond to similar events, and how to use these tools to find evidence of unauthorized S3 bucket and object deletions.

Cryptominer Based Security Events – Simulation and Detection

During this workshop, you will simulate a cryptomining security event by using a CloudFormation template to initialize three Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. These EC2 instances will mimic cryptomining activity by performing DNS requests to known cryptomining domains. You will also learn the tools and processes that AWS CIRT uses to respond to similar events, and how to use these tools to find evidence of unauthorized creation of EC2 instances and communication with known cryptomining domains.

SSRF on IMDSv1 – Simulation and Detection

During this workshop, you will simulate the unauthorized use of a web application that is hosted on an EC2 instance configured to use Instance Metadata Service Version 1 (IMDSv1) and vulnerable to server side request forgery (SSRF). You will learn how web application vulnerabilities, such as SSRF, can be used to obtain credentials from an EC2 instance. You will also learn the tools and processes that AWS CIRT uses to respond to this type of access, and how to use these tools to find evidence of the unauthorized use of EC2 instance credentials through web application vulnerabilities such as SSRF.

AWS CIRT Toolkit For Automating Incident Response Preparedness

During this workshop, you will install and experiment with some common tools and utilities that AWS CIRT uses on a daily basis to detect security misconfigurations, respond to active events, and assist customers with protecting their infrastructure.

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