Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) announced three new capabilities for Amazon GuardDuty,
AWS's threat detection service, that further strengthen customer
security through expanded coverage and continuous enhancements in
machine learning, anomaly detection, and integrated threat intelligence.
GuardDuty is part of a broad set of AWS security services that help
customers identify potential security risks, so they can respond
quickly, freeing security teams to focus on tasks with the highest
value. The three new capabilities expand GuardDuty protection to
container runtime behavior, as well as database and serverless
environments. EKS Runtime Monitoring deepens threat detection inside
customers' containerized workloads. GuardDuty RDS Protection helps
customers protect data stored in Amazon Aurora databases. GuardDuty
Lambda Protection helps customers detect threats to their serverless
applications. To get started with Amazon GuardDuty, visit aws.amazon.com/guardduty.
The ability to gather, synthesize, and alert on security-relevant events
is fundamental to any organization's risk management program. The
evolving cybersecurity landscape and multitude of security tools from
different vendors, combined with a shortage of IT security
professionals, make it challenging for customers to integrate and scale
security detection and response across their environments. Many security
teams today have to build or integrate multiple tools to detect
anomalies, such as web server vulnerabilities, compromised instances
used to serve malware or mine cryptocurrency, or compromised access
credentials. Integration challenges can lead to inefficiencies, data
inconsistencies, and increased costs. In addition, the workplace and
threat landscape continue to evolve, requiring chief information
security officers (CISOs) to continually raise the bar on enterprise
security to account for cloud adoption, remote working, and third-party
infrastructure integration. Demand for technologies and services such as
cloud threat detection, security analytics, cloud security posture
management, and threat intelligence has been rising to tackle new
vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other IT risks emerging from
this digital transformation.
GuardDuty helps protect customers from the latest threats through
ongoing innovation in machine learning, anomaly detection, and
integrated threat intelligence continuously derived from the broad
visibility AWS has across the global threat landscape. With a few clicks
in the AWS Management Console, customers can activate GuardDuty across
multiple accounts in multiple AWS Regions on highly trusted and
secure-by-design AWS Cloud infrastructure and mitigate threats early by
initiating automated responses. Since its launch in 2017, GuardDuty has
added more than 100 new threat detection capabilities, including the
ability to detect credential exfiltration and compromise even when
highly evasive techniques are used. GuardDuty uses machine learning
detections trained to identify highly suspicious data access and any
potential Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compromise, and uses
integrated threat intelligence to detect malware and malicious
container, database, and serverless access. GuardDuty comes with
pre-integrated and continuously updated threat intelligence feeds from
AWS and industry-leading, third-party providers such as CrowdStrike,
Proofpoint, and Bitdefender. AWS-developed threat intelligence offers
customers unique coverage against the latest global threat landscape,
including emerging Linux-based malware, evolving credential exfiltration
techniques, and new malicious domains identified through machine
learning-based reputation models.
The three new capabilities added to GuardDuty build on the hundreds of
features and enhancements available since its launch and expand security
coverage to other AWS workloads and core deployment use cases. The
capabilities can all be easily enabled organization-wide with a few
steps and no other requirements or prerequisites, resulting in
actionable, contextual, and timely security findings with
resource-specific details to help quickly investigate and respond. The
new capabilities include:
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New container runtime protection for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS):
GuardDuty EKS Runtime Monitoring introduces a fully managed,
lightweight security agent that profiles and monitors on-host operating
system-level behavior such as file access, process execution, and
network connections. In tight collaboration with Amazon EKS, the agent
performs without requiring customers to deploy, maintain, or update it. This
allows GuardDuty to add security coverage comparable to other
agent-based solutions, while maintaining easy-on enablement. It deepens
GuardDuty protection for Amazon EKS deployments and decreases the
operational overhead and complexity often required to achieve this level
of coverage, especially in highly dynamic, containerized compute
environments. GuardDuty now makes it easier to achieve runtime coverage
across all Amazon EKS workloads in an account or organization. Account
and data compromise can often start with a single compromised endpoint
or container that then escalates to credential compromise and can spread
to the broader AWS environment and data stored in it. With GuardDuty's
visibility across runtime events, Kubernetes audit logs, and broader AWS
control plane and networking logs, customers can identify steps in an
attack and are signaled early to contain potential security threats
before the threat escalates to broader business-impacting breaches. This
capability builds on the initial integration of GuardDuty EKS
Protection, which monitors control plane activity by analyzing
Kubernetes audit logs from existing and new Amazon EKS clusters in
customers' accounts.
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Extended coverage for data stored in Amazon Aurora:
GuardDuty RDS Protection identifies potential threats to data stored in
Aurora databases without compromising performance, productivity, or
availability. GuardDuty RDS Protection profiles and monitors access
activity to existing and new databases in customer accounts, and using
integrated threat intelligence and a machine learning model that is
trained with highly contextual RDS login activity, it can detect
suspicious login activity to Aurora databases.
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Support for serverless applications in AWS Lambda: GuardDuty
Lambda Protection mitigates security risks in customers' serverless
applications, which can be challenging for traditional threat detection
methods to identify due to the added abstraction layers in serverless
workloads. Once enabled, GuardDuty Lambda Protection continuously
monitors serverless workloads, analyzing network communications mapped
back to individual Lambda functions to detect malicious communications
and popular compromise activity, such as cryptocurrency mining.
"Tens of thousands of organizations across virtually
every industry and geography use Amazon GuardDuty, including more than
90% of our 2,000 largest customers, helping to protect more than half a billion EC2 instances and millions of S3 buckets," said
Jon Ramsey, vice president for Security Services at AWS. "GuardDuty's
new capabilities build on this powerful foundation to expand security
detection and monitoring even further, to where customers tell us they
need it most: containers' runtime monitoring, databases, and serverless
applications. We've now more than tripled the number of managed
detections since we introduced GuardDuty."
Arctic Wolf Networks is a global leader in security operations that
provides security monitoring to detect and respond to cyberthreats.
"Continuous monitoring is a required component for effective security
operations, and as both a customer and partner of AWS, GuardDuty is a
service we entrust across all of our AWS workloads," said Adam Marrè,
CISO at Arctic Wolf. "With real-time threat detection, Amazon EKS audit
log monitoring, and now database protection provided via RDS Protection,
GuardDuty plays a key role in helping us secure our internal security
tooling and processes with the most advanced technologies, allowing us
to stay focused on our mission of ending cyber risk for our customers."
Best Buy is an American multinational consumer electronics retailer.
"Security is always top of mind for us, especially as we expanded our
use of Amazon Aurora for our migrated and cloud native applications,"
said Vaibhav Sonawane, enterprise risk and compliance cloud security
engineer at Best Buy. "With GuardDuty RDS Protection, our security
posture around legitimate and nonlegitimate login attempts remains
strong thanks to its machine learning and intelligent threat detection
capabilities. We are excited to see Amazon GuardDuty expand into new
categories in AWS environments like databases because of its seamless
integration, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use."
GE Digital, a business unit of General Electric (GE), is an industrial
software leader bringing simplicity, speed, and scale to their
customers' digital transformations. "As a longtime customer of
GuardDuty, we're very pleased to see the continued additions of critical
detections and increased coverage across AWS's compute native
services," said Chuck Rees, senior director of cyber engineering and
architecture at GE Digital. "We rely on GuardDuty and its machine
learning detections to monitor access to our S3 buckets, allowing us to
safeguard our sensitive data. Using GuardDuty is an easy choice for us,
and the service is an integral part of securing our workloads on AWS."
Siemens, a technology and industrial manufacturing company based in
Munich, produces equipment and components for energy, healthcare, and
other industries around the world. "We initially selected Amazon
GuardDuty to monitor our AWS accounts for malicious activity," said
Scott Schwartz, senior infrastructure engineer at Siemens. "One of the
primary drivers of our decision to use AWS was to strengthen our
security posture and automate important tasks. We also wanted to have
centralized access to all of our information by aggregating it from
accounts across the organization. The ease with which we could adopt AWS
services and integrate them into our existing tools made GuardDuty a
clear choice for us."
Wiz is a cybersecurity startup with a mission to help organizations
create secure cloud environments that accelerate their business. "Wiz
uses Amazon GuardDuty, fully integrated with the Wiz platform's Cloud
Events & Detection, to continuously monitor our AWS environment,"
said Ryan Kazanciyan, CISO at Wiz. "We are excited to see GuardDuty
broaden as a comprehensive threat detection solution with the addition
of detections for databases and container environments."