Diferentiating Security Services

(this post if part of the material I cover in my devops course)

AWS Shield/Shield Advanced

AWS WAF

  • AWS WAF is a layer-7 firewall, monitoring HTTP and HTTPS
  • It can protect your services by inspecting the source IP addresses of users, and other parameters that are part of the HTTP requests.
  • If request is denied, WAF will respond with HTTP 403 response.

AWS Firewall Manager

  • AWS Firewall Manager is a service that can be used to centrally manage firewall rules across accounts.

Amazon GuardDuty

  • Amazon GuardDuty is a service that uses machine learning to to threat detection.
  • It looks at CloudTrail logging/VPC Flow Logs/DNS Logs, looking for unusual API calls, known malicious IP addresses, failed loggins, port scanning etc.
  • GuardDuty documentation

AWS Macie

  • Amazon Macie is an AI assisted service that scans S3 for personal information that does not comply with HIPAA/GDPR (names, credit-card IDs, social security number etc.)
  • Macie documentation

Amazon Inspector

  • Inspector is used to protect Operating Systems, by inspecting our networks and ec2 instances
  • Networking assessments: It does configuration analysis on security groups to see if there are open ports left open
  • Host assessments: You'll have to install an agent, and it will look for CVEs, and will try to find places where you can harden your system based on CIS benchmarks.
  • Amazon Inspector
  • Amazon Inspector documentation