AWS Chatbot to the rescue: never miss an AWS Security alert
Tags: aws, security, devops, chatops
Published: 2021-03-17 13:30:53

To secure our AWS Cloud setup we use quite some tools: [AWS Security Hub](https://aws.amazon.com/security-hub/), [AWS Inspector](https://aws.amazon.com/inspector/), [AWS Guardduty](https://aws.amazon.com/guardduty/) and [ECR Vulnerability Scanning](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECR/latest/userguide/image-scanning.html) just to name a few. 

All these tools are both easy to set up and do a very nice job finding weaknesses and treats. The only issue I had, is that often their findings stayed under the radar way too long. I'm not the person to check all these dashboards on a daily basis for new findings, I simply forget to do so. 

## Chatops
On the other side, we heavily use Slack for chat and notifications from build pipelines, service changes, system errors, etc. All these notifications are collected in a dedicated room for which a company policy dictates those should be all read.

So ideally, we just had to add our security notifications to the same chatroom to get notified and to never miss a security issue again.

### AWS Eventbridge, AWS SNS and AWS Chatbot

It turns out that showing all your security findings and alerts in your chat client is quite easy. This is how our setup looks like:

![Security alerts](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/bjm96bfp72petwn9vlsd.png)

**Using [AWS Eventbridge](https://aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/), we collect all notifications on a single [SNS topic](https://aws.amazon.com/sns) named 'security-issues'. On top of that [AWS Chatbot](https://aws.amazon.com/chatbot/) is configured to listen to that SNS topic and to forward all messages to Slack.**

Creating the SNS Topic and setting up AWS Chatbot to listen to the SNS Topic and forward the messages to your chat client is very easy and done in a few clicks. The hardest part is capturing the EventBridge events and forwarding them to SNS, so here the CloudFormation to help you out on that part:

```
AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09'
Description: Forward EventBridge security events to AWS SNS

Parameters:
  SecurityIssuesSnsTopic:
    Type: String
    Description: Contains the ARN of the SNS topic on which security issues are published.

Resources:
  GuardDutyEventRule:
    Type: AWS::Events::Rule
    Properties:
      Name: detect-guardduty-findings
      Description: A CloudWatch Event Rule that triggers on Amazon GuardDuty findings.
      State: ENABLED
      EventPattern:
        source:
          - aws.guardduty
        detail-type:
          - GuardDuty Finding
      Targets:
        - Arn:
            Ref: SecurityIssuesSnsTopic
          Id: SecurityTopic

  SecurityHubFindingEventRule:
    Type: AWS::Events::Rule
    Properties:
      Name: detect-securityhub-findings
      Description: A CloudWatch Event Rule that triggers on Amazon Security Hub findings.
      State: ENABLED
      EventPattern:
        source:
          -  aws.securityhub
        detail-type:
          - Security Hub Findings - Custom Action
        resources:
          - !Sub arn:aws:securityhub:${AWS::Region}:${AWS::AccountId}:action/custom/reportfindings
      Targets:
        - Arn:
            Ref: SecurityIssuesSnsTopic
          Id: SecurityTopic

  SecurityHubInsightsEventRule:
    Type: AWS::Events::Rule
    Properties:
      Name: detect-securityhub-insights
      Description: A CloudWatch Event Rule that triggers on Amazon Security Hub insights.
      State: ENABLED
      EventPattern:
        source:
          -  aws.securityhub
        detail-type:
          - Security Hub Insight Results
        resources:
          - !Sub arn:aws:securityhub:${AWS::Region}:${AWS::AccountId}:action/custom/reportfindings
      Targets:
        - Arn:
            Ref: SecurityIssuesSnsTopic
          Id: SecurityTopic

  EcrVulnerabilitiesEventRule:
    Type: AWS::Events::Rule
    Properties:
      Name: detect-ecr-vulnerabilities
      Description: A CloudWatch Event Rule that triggers on Amazon ECR vulnerabilities.
      State: ENABLED
      EventPattern:
        source:
          -  aws.ecr
        detail-type:
          - ECR Image Scan
        detail:
          finding-severity-counts:
            CRITICAL:
              - exists: false
              - numeric: [ ">", 0 ]
            HIGH:
              - exists: false
              - numeric: [ ">", 0 ]
            MEDIUM:
              - exists: false
              - numeric: [ ">", 0 ]
            # UNDEFINED:
            #   - exists: false
            #   - numeric: [ ">", 0 ]
      Targets:
        - Arn:
            Ref: SecurityIssuesSnsTopic
          Id: SecurityTopic

```

This should get you started in a matter of minutes :smile:

Here's how the result looks like in Slack. Pretty neat, isn't it!?

![Slack example](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/w6idos19yxpg807w6hpo.png)


Currently, all of the above message types are [supported by AWS Chatbot](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/chatbot/latest/adminguide/chatbot-troubleshooting.html) except for the ECR Vulnerabilities. Hopefully this changes in the near future (for now I also have an email subscription on the SNS Topic to cover those).

Enjoy and until next time!