Title: Using Amazon Inspector and WAF to secure your resources on AWS
When a company has decided to put their SaaS product on AWS, their first few concerns always include security since all the valuable customer data would be on the cloud. AWS provides a Shared Responsibility Model for their customer that AWS manages the security responsibility of the datacentre, hardware infrastructure and services. The company, on the contrary, need to take care of not only application security but also the network security, OS patching and so on (assuming EC2 is in use). The best practice of managing cyber risk is to go through security scanning process and review regularly. Below are the four steps of the scanning process:
The first step of the process is to perform a vulnerability scanning to find out all the possible security weaknesses of the system. This can achieve by using vulnerability scanning tools. On AWS, we help our customers to adopt the Amazon Inspector to perform periodic vulnerability scanning.
The next step is to perform penetration testing on the vulnerabilities discovered. It simulated a cyber-attack against the system to check for exploitable vulnerabilities.
Risk assessment is then carried out to prioritize according to the risk. This step is often handled by security experts, either by internal staff, external services, or jointly together.
The last step is to perform risk mitigation of the identified vulnerabilities in a different aspect. We help our customers to adopt Amazon Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect the web attack against common web exploits and bots and encryption for both data-in-transit and at-rest on Amazon S3 and EBS services.
Amazon Inspector
Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. It automatically assesses applications for exposure, vulnerabilities, and deviations from best practices. After performing an assessment, Amazon Inspector produces a detailed list of security findings prioritized by level of severity.
Amazon Web Application Firewall (WAF)
AWS WAF is a special type of application firewall that helps protect your web application. It forms a shield between the web app and the Internet and helps to mitigate many common attacks, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting. You can get started quickly using Managed Rules for AWS WAF or AWS Marketplace Sellers to address issues like the OWASP Top 10 security risks and automated.
Amazon S3 and EBS Encryption of data-in-transit and at-rest
For more information about these topics, please visit the below two articles:
