Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

Today, we launched a new Twitter handle: @AWSSecurityInfo. The purpose of this new handle is to share security bulletins, security whitepapers, compliance news and information, and other AWS security-related and compliance-related information. The scope of this handle is broader than that of @AWSIdentity, which focuses primarily on Security Blog posts. However, feel free to follow both handles! […]

As part of the Professional Services Enterprise Accelerator – Compliance program, AWS has published two new Quick Start reference deployments to assist federal government customers and others who need to meet National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) SP 800-53 (Revision 4) security control requirements, including those at the high-impact level. The new Quick Starts are […]

In December, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) released service last accessed data, which shows the time when an IAM entity (a user, group, or role) last accessed an AWS service. This provided a powerful tool to help you grant least privilege permissions. Starting today, it’s easier to identify where you can reduce permissions based […]

AWS already has a number of federal agencies onboarded to the cloud, including the Department of Energy, The Department of the Interior, and NASA. Today we are pleased to announce the addition of two more ATOs (authority to operate) for the Department of Commerce (DOC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Specifically, the DOC will […]

Released today, the PCI DSS Quick Start includes learnings from AWS field teams that have migrated and deployed workloads that are in scope for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance. The AWS CloudFormation templates and scripts included in this Quick Start can help you build a standardized environment that supports compliance with the […]

August 4, 2023: This blog post is out of date, and is in the process of being updated. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) allows you to use keys under your control to encrypt data at rest stored in Amazon S3. The two primary methods for implementing this encryption are server-side encryption (SSE) and client-side […]

July 19, 2021: We’ve updated this post to clarify PHI encryption requirements for Amazon CloudWatch Logs. In a previous blog post, Frequently Asked Questions About HIPAA Compliance in the AWS Cloud, I looked at some of the broad questions you have asked us about running protected health information (PHI) in the AWS cloud. In this […]

We are happy to announce that we recently launched improved search functionality on the Users page in the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) console. For starters, we have enabled you to find an IAM user by their access key ID. Simply paste an access key ID in the Filter box on the Users page. If […]

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. With the recent release of Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES), you now can build applications without setting up and maintaining your own search cluster on Amazon EC2. One of the key benefits of using Amazon ES is that you can […]

Note from July 3, 2017: The solution in this post has been integrated into AWS WAF Security Automations, and AWS maintains up-to-date solution code in the companion GitHub repository.   You can use AWS WAF (a web application firewall) to help protect your web applications from exploits that originate from groups of IP addresses that are known […]