AWS CloudTrail Security Resources

Explore curated resources to strengthen your AWS CloudTrail security practices, improve incident response, and enhance monitoring capabilities. This page is divided into two sections: AWS Blog Posts for practical guidance and AWS CloudTrail Security Workshops for hands-on simulations of common security scenarios.

AWS Blog Posts

These blog posts provide actionable insights for leveraging AWS CloudTrail to secure your AWS environment, detect incidents, and automate responses. Resources are grouped by focus area for easy navigation.

Incident Investigation and Forensics

• Investigate Security Events with CloudTrail Lake
  Use CloudTrail Lake queries to analyze security incidents like compromised access keys.
• CloudTrail Insights: Detect Unusual API Activity
  Learn to identify and respond to anomalous API calls with CloudTrail Insights.
• Announcing CloudTrail Lake – Managed Audit and Security Lake
  Discover CloudTrail Lake for centralized audit and security log management.

Monitoring and Alerts

• Monitor Root User Activity
  Set up notifications to track AWS account root user activity for enhanced security.
• Alerts for IAM Access Key Usage
  Configure alerts to detect when IAM access keys are used.
• Notifications for IAM Configuration Changes
  Implement alerts for changes to IAM configurations.
• Monitor IAM User Creation
  Set up notifications for new IAM user creation to detect unauthorized changes.
• Track Account and EC2 Security Group Changes
  Monitor configuration changes and API calls to EC2 security groups.
• Analyze CloudTrail in CloudWatch
  Integrate CloudTrail with CloudWatch for real-time log analysis.

Security Best Practices and Automation

• Prevent CloudTrail Modifications
  Learn techniques to protect CloudTrail from unauthorized changes.
• Automate Responses to Compromised Access Keys
  Use GitHub tools to automate responses to exposed access keys.

AWS CloudTrail Security Workshops

These hands-on workshops simulate common security events and demonstrate detection and response using AWS CloudTrail and related services. Each workshop includes a CloudFormation template or script to replicate real-world scenarios.

Workshop List

• Unauthorized IAM Credential Use
  Description: Simulate unauthorized IAM credential use via a CloudShell script, mimicking reconnaissance and privilege escalation.
  Why It Matters: Learn to detect and mitigate unauthorized access, a common attack vector in AWS environments.

• Ransomware on S3
  Description: Use a CloudFormation template to create S3 buckets and simulate ransomware via data exfiltration and deletion in CloudShell.
  Why It Matters: Protect against data loss or exposure by detecting unauthorized S3 modifications.

• Cryptominer Security Events
  Description: Deploy EC2 instances via CloudFormation to simulate cryptomining through DNS requests to known domains.
  Why It Matters: Identify resource-intensive cryptomining to reduce costs and secure EC2 instances.

• SSRF on IMDSv1
  Description: Simulate a server-side request forgery (SSRF) attack on EC2 instance credentials via IMDSv1 vulnerabilities.
  Why It Matters: Prevent unauthorized access to instance credentials through SSRF mitigation.

Get Started with CloudTrail

For comprehensive guidance, explore the AWS CloudTrail User Guide to master security monitoring, incident response, and best practices.