Category: Best Practices

In Part 1 of this guide, we examined two common incident scenarios: cross-account Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data deletion with ransomware implications, and cryptocurrency mining deployed through AWS CloudFormation using exposed AWS Management Console credentials. We also introduced key incident response terminology and investigative frameworks for analyzing AWS CloudTrail events. In this second […]

AWS CloudTrail logs contain the evidence you need when investigating suspicious activity in your AWS environment, but knowing which fields matter and how to interpret them can mean the difference between surface-level analysis and uncovering the full scope of an incident. This guide walks you through real-world scenarios, showing you how to analyze CloudTrail events […]

A single alert from one security service tells you something happened. Read that signal alongside activity from other services and your own business context, and you will know whether what happened is part of a multi-stage attack. Consider a short sequence. An identity calls GetCallerIdentity from a source address it hasn’t previously used. Within minutes, […]

Ten years ago, we launched AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, a fully managed Microsoft Active Directory in the AWS Cloud. In that original announcement, Jeff Barr described a straightforward promise: “You will spend less time administering and more time working on your applications and your business.” A decade later, AWS Managed Microsoft AD […]

AI coding agents are part of the developer toolchain. Tools like Kiro and Claude Code generate features, tests, and code refactors from natural-language prompts. A single agent can open dozens of pull requests (PRs) across your repositories in an afternoon. That productivity comes with a trade-off: agents optimize for task completion at machine speed with […]

Choosing the right cryptographic key management service on Amazon Web Services (AWS) starts with understanding the difference between AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and AWS CloudHSM. Both provide key storage backed by a hardware security module (HSM) but serve very different needs. AWS KMS is a fully managed service that integrates with all AWS […]

If you’re building multi-agent AI systems, you need to prevent authorization scope from silently expanding as agents delegate tasks through multi-hop chains. Without proper controls, an agent can potentially act beyond what the originating user authorized, even when role-based access control (RBAC) policies are in place. The OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications classifies this […]

The AWS Customer Incident Response Team (AWS CIRT) encounters patterns that repeat across engagements when helping customers respond to security incidents. We’re passionate about making sure that information is accessible so that everyone can improve their security posture and their organization’s resilience to disruption. The primary method we use to share this information is the […]

August 4, 2026: We’ve updated the Data perimeters section. When securing an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment, teams naturally prioritize inbound controls, firewalls, WAFs, and access policies, because that’s where the most visible threats originate. Outbound traffic, on the other hand, tends to get less attention. It’s often left open by default to avoid breaking […]

In this blog post you’ll learn how to detect and prevent subdomain takeover – a tactic where threat actors exploit dangling DNS records to redirect traffic to attacker-controlled resources. We’ll explain the issue, how the situation arises, and how you can use various AWS features and services to help mitigate the impact of this tactic. […]