AWS Security Blog

How to analyze AWS WAF logs using Amazon Elasticsearch Service

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. Log analysis is essential for understanding the effectiveness of any security solution. It can be valuable for day-to-day troubleshooting and also for your long-term understanding of how your security environment is performing. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that […]

How to create and manage users within AWS IAM Identity Center

April 25, 2023: We’ve updated this blog post to include more security learning resources. September 12, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more about the name change here. AWS IAM Identity Center is a cloud service that allows […]

How to rotate a WordPress MySQL database secret using AWS Secrets Manager in Amazon EKS

AWS Secrets Manager recently announced a feature update to rotate credentials for all Amazon RDS database types. This allows you to automatically rotate credentials for all types of databases hosted on Amazon RDS. In this post, I show you how to rotate database secrets for a non-RDS database using AWS Secrets Manager. I use a […]

Setting the Record Straight on Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Erroneous Article

Today, Bloomberg BusinessWeek published a story claiming that AWS was aware of modified hardware or malicious chips in SuperMicro motherboards in Elemental Media’s hardware at the time Amazon acquired Elemental in 2015, and that Amazon was aware of modified hardware or chips in AWS’s China Region. As we shared with Bloomberg BusinessWeek multiple times over […]

How to seamlessly domain join Amazon EC2 instances to a single AWS Managed Microsoft AD Directory from multiple accounts and VPCs

You can now share a single AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (also known as an AWS Managed Microsoft AD) with multiple AWS accounts within an AWS Region. This capability makes it easier and more cost-effective for you to manage directory-aware workloads from a single directory across accounts and Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon […]

Use YubiKey security key to sign into AWS Management Console with YubiKey for multi-factor authentication

April 25, 2023: We’ve updated this blog post to include more security learning resources. Update on October 8, 2018: After we launched support for security devices manufactured by Yubico on September 25, 2018, we received feedback from customers to support other U2F security key providers, as well. Starting October 8, 2018, you can now enable […]

AWS Organizations now requires email address verification in order to invite accounts to an organization

AWS Organizations, the service for centrally managing multiple AWS accounts, enables you to invite existing accounts to join your organization. To provide additional assurance about your organization’s identity to AWS accounts that you invite, AWS Organizations is adding a new feature. Beginning on September 27, 2018, you’ll need to verify the email address associated with […]

Visualizing Amazon GuardDuty findings

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. Amazon GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behavior to help protect your AWS accounts and workloads. Enable GuardDuty and it begins monitoring for: Anomalous API activity Potentially unauthorized deployments and compromised instances […]

How to use AWS Secrets Manager to rotate credentials for all Amazon RDS database types, including Oracle

August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. You can now use AWS Secrets Manager to rotate credentials for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, […]