Reinforce Your AWS Security Posture, At Multiple Levels, in Seconds
Tags: awssecurity, ec2securitygroups, devsecops, howto
Published: 2018-11-28 16:05:57

---
title: Reinforce Your AWS Security Posture, At Multiple Levels, in Seconds
published: true
description: AWS security audits cannot be a fortnightly activity. It must be an everyday activity. As AWS practitioners, we all know this is effort intensive. With TotalCloud Security View, it is effortless! Check out this post to know more.
tags: AWS Security, EC2 Security Groups, DevSecOps, howto
---

<span style="color: #000000;">Often, we hear about publicly exposed AWS S3 buckets or security attacks, such as DDoS, brute-force, etc. Every problem in AWS, be it security, compliance, or bill spikes, was/is due to engineering problems. When it comes to AWS security, wrong Security Group (SG) configurations seems to top the charts.    </span>
<blockquote><span style="color: #000000;">AWS security audits cannot be a fortnightly activity as generally practiced. It must be an everyday activity. As AWS practitioners, we all know this is effort intensive, especially with manual approach of using AWS console. </span></blockquote>
<span style="color: #000000;">If you are an SMB or an enterprise, you will have hundreds of instances running in multiple SGs. Just imagine the amount of time invested just for DeSecOps activities to maintain the security posture.  </span>

<span style="color: #000000;">Moreover, maintaining security posture on AWS is not an one-man army fight. Security is everyone’s responsibility. It’s teamwork between a CISO or a CTO and his team of DevSecOps or DevOps engineers. Everyone needs to understand the security posture of their AWS accounts at multiple levels, from their respective job roles’ perspective, right from top level to granular level, to this end.</span>
<h1><span style="color: #000000;"><b>A Focused Visual Environment Offering Real-Time AWS Security Cues </b></span></h1>
<span style="color: #000000;">In a dynamic AWS ecosystem, where several resources are provisioned, scaled up or scaled down on-demand, chances of overlooking misconfigurations are high. Because, rules defined under SGs are buried under KBs of code and visualizing traffic flow from logs of VPC flow log data is immensely challenging for a human mind.  </span>
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<h3><span style="color: #000000;">A single console offering visual cues to any security vulnerabilities, to everyone in the team, helps identify such vulnerabilities 100X faster!</span></h3>
</blockquote>
<span style="color: #000000;">Lets walk you through a couple of security audits a CXO or a DevSecOps engineer must perform. Watch how easy it is to perform on a visual console!
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<h1><span style="color: #000000;"><b>Case in Point #1 </b></span></h1>
<h2><span style="color: #000000;"><b>Checking for open TCP/UDP ports associated with relevant IP and security groups</b>:</span></h2>
<span style="color: #000000;">Unrestricted inbound/ingress access to TCP/UDP ports can invite malicious activity. The typical plan of action is to keep a check on instances’ SGs for inbound rules that allow unrestricted access (i.e. 0.0.0.0/0) to any of these ports and restrict access to only those IP addresses that require it to implement the principle of least privilege.</span>

<span style="color: #000000;">On the AWS console, you need to hop between Network and Security section and then Security groups via EC2 or RDS dashboard. Check for the tabs shown below the tabulated list. <b>This might take few minutes depending on the number of instances.</b></span>

<span style="color: #000000;">However, using TotalCloud, you can check the ingress and egress and check for SGs containing resources that allow data outside the Infrastructure at a glance.</span>

<span style="color: #000000;">Observe the video below:</span>

{% youtube aZI0oS11BS0 %}



<span style="color: #000000;">This will take anywhere between 5 to 10 seconds, irrespective of the number of instances you are using.</span>
<h1><span style="color: #000000;"><b>Case in Point #2</b></span></h1>
<h2><span style="color: #000000;"><b>Finding SSH open ports and ensuring they are used only for jump box/bastion hosts</b></span></h2>
<span style="color: #000000;">Network security at the subnet level using a bastion host, NAT instances, or NAT Gateways helps in protecting data. An SG allowing bastion connectivity for existing private instances must only accept SSH or RDP inbound requests from bastion hosts across AZs. </span>

<span style="color: #000000;">Whereas, the inbound &amp; outbound traffic must be restricted at the protocol level, where in the inbound rule base should accept SSH connections only from the specific IP addresses. The outbound connection should again be restricted to SSH or RDP access to the private instances of your AWS infrastructure.  </span>

<span style="color: #000000;">On the AWS console, you need to go to VPC console, scroll down to SGs and check for inbound and outbound data under each SG. This might take few minutes to hours depending on the number of instances.</span>

<span style="color: #000000;">However, using TotalCloud, you can check the ingress and egress and check for SGs containing resources that allow data outside the Infrastructure at a glance.</span>

<span style="color: #000000;">Observe the video below:</span>

{% youtube YZhnHimyvOI %}


<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YZhnHimyvOI" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>



<h2><span style="color: #000000;"><b>Conclusion: A Centralized Focus View with Visual Cues for Real-time DevSecOps </b></span></h2>
<span style="color: #000000;">Change is the only constant. In a dynamic cloud setup, several teams engage. Having a centralized view of live data that acts as visual cues to vulnerabilities, helps identifying security issues in real-time. The ability to zoom in and zoom out at multiple levels, along with the capability to filter out traffic rules, helps everyone in the team to act and secure their infrastructure.</span>
<blockquote>
<h3><span style="color: #000000;">With immersive visualization of such data, anyone in the team can perform continuous security and understand security posture 100X faster and better compared to dashboards. TotalCloud’s <i>Security View</i> is exactly that!</span> <a href="https://totalcloud.io/user-signup.html">Do give it a try!</a></h3>
</blockquote>

<span style="color: #000000;"> Note: Originally published at <a href="https://blog.totalcloud.io/reinforce-aws-security-posture-multiple-levels-seconds/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> blog.totalcloud.io </a> on November 28, 2018.
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