AWS Security Blog

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. May 3, 2017: We published a related blog post also written by Guy Denney, How to Visualize and Refine Your Network’s Security by Adding Security Group IDs to Your VPC Flow Logs. Many organizations start their journey with AWS by experimenting […]

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 […]

March 10, 2020: This blog post is out of date. Please refer to this post for updated info: How to set up federated single sign-on to AWS using Google Workspace The AWS Security Blog has covered a variety of solutions for federating single sign-on (SSO) to the AWS Management Console. For example, How to Connect […]

Today, we continue a series of AWS cloud compliance FAQs by focusing on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and protected health information (PHI). AWS’s Healthcare and Life Science customers are doing important things for their customers in the AWS cloud, and we are excited to work with our partners to help tackle […]

On March 23, 2016, AWS announced that Amazon Relational Database Service for SQL Server (RDS for SQL Server) now supports authentication to AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as Microsoft AD. On April 7, 2016, AWS launched a new console feature for Microsoft AD that makes it easy for you […]

Today, we made it easier for you to configure trust relationships between AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also referred to as Microsoft AD, and your on-premises Microsoft Active Directory. Establishing trust relationships requires conditional forwarders, which resolve Domain Name System (DNS) queries between the domain names of trusting directories. Now, by […]

May 22, 2019 update: We’ve removed a reference to the IT-Grundschutz Certification Workbook. AWS now recommends that customers refer to the Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5) instead. Learn more about C5 here: https://usvm.9mmj.com/compliance/bsi-c5/ Every month, AWS Compliance fields thousands of questions about how to achieve and maintain compliance in the cloud. Among other things, […]

Update on October 24, 2018: Note that if you do not author the Lambda function correctly, this setup can create an infinite loop (in this case, a rule that is fired repeatedly, which can impact your AWS resources and cause higher than expected charges to your account). The example Lambda function I provide in Step […]

Starting today, you can use AWS CloudTrail to track the activity of your federated users (web identity federation and Security Assertion Markup Language [SAML]). For example, you can now use CloudTrail to identify a SAML federated user who terminated an Amazon EC2 instance in your AWS account, or to identify a mobile application user who […]

To celebrate 10 years of AWS, qwikLABS is offering 95 free online labs through the end of March 2016. Here are some of the labs related to security and compliance that you can take for free while the offer is live: Introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Introduction to AWS Key Management Service Performing […]