How to audit your AWS environment

Let’s build on my previous blog on inventorying your AWS assets. I described how to use CloudMapper‘s collect command to gather metadata about your AWS accounts and report on resources used and potential security issues.

This open source tool can do more than that and it’s functionality is being continuously updated. Once the data on the accounts in scope is downloaded, various operations can be performed on it locally without the need to continuously query the accounts.

One of interesting use cases is to visualise your AWS environment in the browser. An example based on the test data of such a visualisation is at the top of this blog. You can apply various filters to reduce complexity which can be especially useful for larger environments.

Another piece of CloudMapper’s functionality is the ability to display trust relationships between accounts using the weboftrust command. Below is an example from Scott’s guidance on the use of this command. It demonstrates the connections between accounts, including external vendors.

I’m not going co cover all the commands here and suggest checking the official GitHub page for the latest list. I also recommend running CloudMapper regularly, especially in environments that constantly evolve.

An approach of that conducts regular audits. saving reports and integrating with Slack for security alerts is described here.