How to pass the AWS Security – Specialty exam
Posted: May 20, 2020 Filed under: Career Opportunities, Cloud Computing Security, Information Security, Skills Development | Tags: AWS, Security Leave a comment
I previously wrote about how to prepare for the Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) and AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exams. Today, I would like to focus on AWS Security – Specialty.
Exam cost aside, preparing for this specialty can be rather expensive. There is a whole industry around mock practice tests, study books, video tutorials and hands-on labs. Here I’ll aim to outline how to maximise the benefit while minimising costs, focusing on free resources.
Whitepapers, user guides and service FAQs
AWS documentation is arguably the best source of study material out there. I don’t know a single person who passed the exam without reading through at least some of them. Check out the official exam guide for the overview of domains to select the relevant ones. I focused on IAM, KMS, CloudTail, CloudWatch, VPC, Lambda, Inspector, GuardDuty, Athena, Macie and AWS Microsoft AD. At a very minimum, you should read these:
I also wrote about my experience in using security-related AWS services in my blog.
Online courses
Who needs paid for online tutorials when the AWS YouTube channel has a lot of their re:Invent talks available for free? There is literally a video on pretty much every subject you are interested in. It’s probably too many to mention and you could conduct a simple search to find the latest talk on what you want, but I’ll recommend a few to get you started:
- Become an IAM Policy Master in 60 Minutes or Less
- Best Practices for Implementing AWS Key Management Service
- A Deep Dive into AWS Encryption Services
- Best Practices for DDoS Mitigation on AWS
- Advanced Security Best Practices Masterclass
- Your Virtual Data Center: VPC Fundamentals and Connectivity Options
- AWS PrivateLink: Fundamentals
- AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory Deep Dive
- Understanding AWS Secrets Manager
- Amazon Athena
- Amazon GuardDuty
- Amazon Macie: Data Visibility Powered by Machine Learning
- Introduction to AWS Security Hub
If you would rather have a structured online course instead and don’t mind paying a little bit for it, I recommend the Linux Academy and/or A Cloud Guru. I’ve done them both. Personally, I preferred the former as it had some hands-on labs, but A Cloud Guru is shorter and has some good exam tips. Besides, you can try both of them for free for 7 days and decide for yourself.
There is also the official AWS Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Security – Specialty course. It covers the exam structure, gives you tips on tackling questions and provides thorough explanations. I would save this one for last to get a view of your preparedness level.
Practice tests
The obvious thing to do is to buy the official practice exam from AWS, right? Well, maybe not. Unless you’ve got it for free for passing one of the other AWS exams previously, you might be better off finding an alternative. It only includes 20 questions (which works out at $2 per question plus tax), and you don’t get to see the answers! Instead, you are presented with a pass/fail summary that gives you the overall percentage broken down by exam domains. You might be better off using the free 15 questions from Whizlabs, although I can’t recommend their paid products. Practice tests are also included in the Linux Academy and A Cloud Guru courses I mentioned above. Plus, the free official Exam Readiness course also comes with 24 questions with answers and explanations at the end. That should be enough to give you the feel for types of question on the exam.
Getting ready
When revising, I found some good notes and a mindmap from other students on the internet. You can also go through a set of flashcards (e.g. on Quizlet) to recap on what you’ve learned.
With all this preparation, don’t lose track of why you are doing it in the first place: gaining the skills that you can apply in practice. The exam gives a good indication of your weaker areas and encourages you to fill these gaps. The best way to do this is, of course, through hands-on experience. If your organisation relies on AWS, find ways to apply the newly acquired knowledge there to make your cloud infrastructure more secure. If that’s not an option, there is always the Free Tier, where you can put your skills into practice. Finally, the Linux Academy (and some other providers) for a small cost offer you some hands-on labs and even a whole sandboxed playground for you to experiment in.
AWS constantly evolve and refine their services, and add new ones too. Keep this in mind while studying, as things move pretty fast in the cloud world. This also means that your learning is never finished, even if you pass the exam. But I think this is a good thing and I’m sure you agree!
AWS Security Hub: all your security alerts in one place
Posted: April 16, 2020 Filed under: Cloud Computing Security, Compliance, Cyber, DevSecOps, PCI DSS, Software Security | Tags: AWS, Cloud, DevSecOps, Security Leave a comment
If you are following my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been focusing on security-specific AWS services in my previous several posts. It’s time to bring them all together into one consolidated view. I’m talking, of course, about the AWS Security Hub.
Security Hub allows you to aggregate and centrally analyse security alerts and findings from Config, GuardDuty, IAM, Inspector, Firewall Manager and more.
You can group, filter and prioritise findings from these services in many different ways. And, of course, you can visualise and make dashboards out of them.
Apart from consolidating findings from other services, it also assesses your overall AWS configuration against PCI DSS and/or the CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations Benchmark, which covers identity and access management, logging, monitoring and networking, giving you the overall score (example below) and actionable steps to improve your security posture.
Similar to the many other AWS services, Security Hub is regional, so it will need to be configured in every active region your organisation operates. I also recommend setting up your security operations account as a Security Hub master account and then inviting all other accounts in your organisation as members for centralised management (as described in this guidance or using a script).
If you are not a big fan of the Security Hub’s interface or don’t want to constantly switch between regions, the service sends all findings to CloudWatch Events by default, so you can forward them on to other AWS resources or external systems (e.g. chat or ticketing systems) for further analysis and remediation. Better still, you can configure automated response using Lambda, similar to what we did with Inspector findings discussed previously.
Setting up a Web Application Firewall in AWS
Posted: April 15, 2020 Filed under: Cloud Computing Security, Cyber, DevSecOps, Software Security | Tags: AWS, Cloud, DevSecOps 1 Comment
I wrote about automating application security testing in my previous blog. If you host your application or API on AWS and would like an additional layer of protection agains web attacks, you should consider using AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF).
It is relatively easy to set up and Amazon kindly provide some preconfigured rules and tutorials. AWS WAF is deployed in front of CloudFront (your CDN) and/or Application Load Balancer and inspects traffic before it reaches your assets. You can create multiple conditions and rules to watch for.
If you’ve been configuring firewalls in datacentres before the cloud services became ubiquitous, you will feel at home setting up IP match conditions to blacklist or whitelist IP addresses. However, AWS WAF also provides more sophisticated rules for detecting and blocking known bad IP addresses, SQL Injections and Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks.
Additionally, you can chose to test your rules first, counting the times it gets triggered rather than setting it to block requests straight away. AWS also throw in a standard level of DDoS protection (AWS Shield) with WAF at no extra cost, so there is really no excuse not to use it.
Automating the detection and remediation of security vulnerabilities in AWS
Posted: April 14, 2020 Filed under: Agile, Cloud Computing Security, DevSecOps, Information Security, Software Security | Tags: AWS, Cloud, DevSecOps, Security 1 Comment
If you rely on EC2 instances in at least some parts of your cloud infrastructure, it is important to reduce the attack surface by hardening them. You might want to check out my previous blogs on GuardDuty, Config, IAM and CloudTrail for other tips on securing your AWS infrastructure. But today we are going to be focusing on yet another Amazon service – Inspector.
To start with, we need to make sure the Inspector Agent is installed on our EC2 instances. There are a couple of ways of doing this and I suggest simply using the Inspector service Advance Setup option. In addition, you can specify the instances you want to include in your scan as well as its duration and frequency. You can also select the rules packages to scan against.
After the agent is installed, the scan will commence in line with the configuration you specified in the previous step. You will then be able to download the report detailing the findings.
The above setup gives you everything you need to get started but there is certainly room for improvement.
It is not always convenient to go to the Inspector dashboard itself to check for discovered vulnerabilities. Instead, I recommend creating an SNS Topic which will be notified if Inspector finds new weaknesses. You can go a step further and, in the true DevSecOps way, set up a Lambda function that will automatically remediate Inspector findings on your behalf and subscribe it to this topic. AWS kindly open sourced a Lambda job (Python script) that automatically patches EC2 instances when an Inspector assessment generates a CVE finding.
You can see how Lambda is doing its magic installing updates in the CloudWatch Logs:
Or you can connect to your EC2 instance directly and check yum logs:
You will see a number of packages updated automatically when the Lambda function is triggered based on the Inspector CVE findings. The actual list will of course depend on how many updates you are missing and will correspond to the CloudWatch logs.
You can run scans periodically and still choose to receive the notifications but the fact that security vulnerabilities are being discovered and remediated automatically, even as you sleep, should give you at least some peace of mind.
Continuous configuration and compliance monitoring with AWS Config
Posted: March 22, 2020 Filed under: Cloud Computing Security, Cyber, DevSecOps | Tags: AWS, Cloud, DevSecOps, Security 3 Comments
I wrote previously about inventorying your assets in AWS using an external open source tool. An alternative to this approach is to use AWS Config.
This AWS service certainly has its imperfections (e.g. it doesn’t support all AWS resources) but it is easy to set up and can be quite useful too. When you first enable it, Config will analyse the resources in your account and make the summary available to you in a dashboard (example below). It’s a regional service, so you might want to enable it in all active regions.
Config, however, doesn’t stop there. You can now use this snapshot as a reference point and track all changes to your resources on a timeline. It can be useful when you need to analyse historical records, demonstrate compliance or gain visibility in your change management practices. It can also notify you of any configuration changes if you set up SNS notifications.
Config rules allow you to continuously track compliance with various baselines. AWS provide quite a few out of the box and you can create your own to tailor to the specific environment you operate in. You have to pay separately for rules, so I encourage you to check out pricing first.
As with some other AWS services, you can aggregate the data in a single account. I recommend using the account used for security operations as a master. You will then need to establish a two-way handshake, inviting member accounts and authorising the master account to be able to consolidate the results.
How to detect threats in AWS with GuardDuty
Posted: March 13, 2020 Filed under: Agile, Cyber, DevSecOps, Threat Model | Tags: AWS, Cyber, DevSecOps, Security 2 Comments
Once some basic asset management, identity and access management and logging capabilities in AWS have been established, it’s time to move to the threat detection phase of your security programme.
There are several ways to implement threat detection in AWS but by far the easiest (and perhaps cheapest) set up is to use Amazon’s native GuardDuty. It detects root user logins, policy changes, compromised keys, instances, users and more. As an added benefit, Amazon keep adding new rules as they continue evolving the service.
To detect threats in your AWS environment, GuardDuty ingests CloudTrail, VPC FlowLogs and VPC DNS logs. You don’t need to configure these separately for GuardDuty to be able to access them, simplifying the set up. The price of the service depends on the number of events analysed but it comes with a free 30-day trial which allows you to understand the scope, utility and potential costs.
It’s a regional service, so it should be enabled in all regions, even the ones you currently don’t have any resources. You might start using new regions in the future and, perhaps more importantly, the attackers might do it on your behalf. It doesn’t cost extra in the region with no activity, so there is really no excuse to switch it on everywhere.
To streamline the management, I recommend following the AWS guidance on channelling the findings to a single account, where they can be analysed by the security operations team.
It requires establishing master-member relationship between accounts, where the master account will be the one monitored by the security operations team. You will then need to enable GuardDuty in every member account and accept the invite from the master.
You don’t have to rely on the AWS console to access GuardDuty findings, as they can be streamed using CloudWatch Events and Kinesis to centralise the analysis. You can also write custom rules specific to your environment and mute existing ones customising the implementation. These, however, require a bit more practice, so I will cover them in future blogs.
Securing GSuite: a guide for startups
Posted: February 26, 2020 Filed under: Cloud Computing Security, Cyber, Risk Management | Tags: Security, Startup Leave a comment
GSuite is an excellent choice for any startup, especially early in the process of establishing your business. Its flexible cost structure allows you to pay per user while benefiting from range of services, including email (with a custom domain name), calendar, document collaboration and storage, videoconferencing and much more.
GSuite, being a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), relieves you from the underlying infrastructure management in line with the shared responsibility model. This can be especially powerful for smaller companies trying out an idea, as it doesn’t require intensive capital expenditure to set up a datacentre or staff to maintain it. Startups, however, are still responsible for the data, permissions and overall configuration of GSuite if they want to keep their information secure.
Thankfully, Google made available a short checklist for small businesses, describing the necessary steps to safeguard company data. Similar guidance is available for larger (100+ users) organisations.
The plan you select will determine how many security features are available to you. Depending on the criticality of your data and the amount of control you require, it can be a good idea to upgrade to the Enterprise plan.
Hint: if you ask customer support to put you in touch with a sales representative and request a discount, it might just be given to you. Provided you are willing to commit to the subscription for a couple of years.
Security professionals will feel at home with the advanced features available after the upgrade. It includes encryption, data leakage prevention (DLP), granular access control and much more. Managing it is also going to become easier, as various reports and healthcheck dashboards are now at your fingertips.
Regardless of the plan you use, it won’t hurt to enable multi-factor authentication on all accounts, as it dramatically reduces the risk of account takeover. It might also be a good idea to backup your critical business data somewhere off GSuite for extra resiliency.
