Amazon GuardDuty is a machine studying (ML)-based safety monitoring and clever risk detection service that analyzes and processes varied AWS knowledge sources, constantly screens your AWS accounts and workloads for malicious exercise, and delivers detailed safety findings for visibility and remediation.
I like the characteristic of GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring that analyzes working system (OS)-level, community, and file occasions to detect potential runtime threats for particular AWS workloads in your setting. I first launched the final availability of this characteristic for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) sources in March 2023. Seb wrote in regards to the growth of the Runtime Monitoring characteristic to supply risk detection for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Fargate in addition to the preview for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) workloads in Nov 2023.
Right now, we’re saying the final availability of Amazon GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring to broaden risk detection protection for EC2 situations at runtime and complement the anomaly detection that GuardDuty already gives by constantly monitoring VPC Stream Logs, DNS question logs, and AWS CloudTrail administration occasions. You now have visibility into on-host, OS-level actions and container-level context into detected threats.
With GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring, you’ll be able to determine and reply to potential threats that may goal the compute sources inside your EC2 workloads. Threats to EC2 workloads typically contain distant code execution that results in the obtain and execution of malware. This might embrace situations or self-managed containers in your AWS setting which are connecting to IP addresses related to cryptocurrency-related exercise or to malware command-and-control associated IP addresses.
GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring gives visibility into suspicious instructions that contain malicious file downloads and execution throughout every step, which may help you uncover threats throughout preliminary compromise and earlier than they develop into business-impacting occasions. It’s also possible to centrally allow runtime risk detection protection for accounts and workloads throughout the group utilizing AWS Organizations to simplify your safety protection.
Configure EC2 Runtime Monitoring in GuardDuty
With a number of clicks, you’ll be able to allow GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring within the GuardDuty console. On your first use, you have to allow Runtime Monitoring.
Any prospects which are new to the EC2 Runtime Monitoring characteristic can attempt it for free for 30 days and acquire entry to all options and detection findings. The GuardDuty console exhibits what number of days are left within the free trial.
Now, you’ll be able to arrange the GuardDuty safety agent for the person EC2 situations for which you wish to monitor the runtime conduct. You’ll be able to select to deploy the GuardDuty safety agent both mechanically or manually. At GA, you’ll be able to allow Automated agent configuration, which is a most well-liked choice for many prospects because it permits GuardDuty to handle the safety agent on their behalf.
The agent might be deployed on EC2 situations with AWS Methods Supervisor and makes use of an Amazon Digital Non-public Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoint to obtain the runtime occasions related along with your useful resource. If you wish to handle the GuardDuty safety agent manually, go to Managing the safety agent Amazon EC2 occasion manually within the AWS documentation. In multiple-account environments, delegated GuardDuty administrator accounts handle their member accounts utilizing AWS Organizations. For extra info, go to Managing a number of accounts within the AWS documentation.
If you allow EC2 Runtime Monitoring, you could find the lined EC2 situations listing, account ID, and protection standing, and whether or not the agent is ready to obtain runtime occasions from the corresponding useful resource within the EC2 occasion runtime protection tab.
Even when the protection standing is Unhealthy, which means it isn’t at present capable of obtain runtime findings, you continue to have protection in depth in your EC2 occasion. GuardDuty continues to supply risk detection to the EC2 occasion by monitoring CloudTrail, VPC circulate, and DNS logs related to it.
Try GuardDuty EC2 Runtime safety findings
When GuardDuty detects a possible risk and generates safety findings, you’ll be able to view the main points of the wholesome info.
Select Findings within the left pane if you wish to discover safety findings particular to Amazon EC2 sources. You should use the filter bar to filter the findings desk by particular standards, resembling a Useful resource kind of Occasion
. The severity and particulars of the findings differ primarily based on the useful resource function, which signifies whether or not the EC2 useful resource was the goal of suspicious exercise or the actor performing the exercise.
With as we speak’s launch, we help over 30 runtime safety findings for EC2 situations, resembling detecting abused domains, backdoors, cryptocurrency-related exercise, and unauthorized communications. For the total listing, go to Runtime Monitoring discovering sorts within the AWS documentation.
Resolve your EC2 safety findings
Select every EC2 safety discovering to know extra particulars. You could find all the data related to the discovering and look at the useful resource in query to find out whether it is behaving in an anticipated method.
If the exercise is allowed, you need to use suppression guidelines or trusted IP lists to stop false optimistic notifications for that useful resource. If the exercise is surprising, the safety finest observe is to imagine the occasion has been compromised and take the actions detailed in Remediating a probably compromised Amazon EC2 occasion within the AWS documentation.
You’ll be able to combine GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring with different AWS safety companies, resembling AWS Safety Hub or Amazon Detective. Or you need to use Amazon EventBridge, permitting you to make use of integrations with safety occasion administration or workflow programs, resembling Splunk, Jira, and ServiceNow, or set off automated and semi-automated responses resembling isolating a workload for investigation.
If you select Examine with Detective, you could find Detective-created visualizations for AWS sources to shortly and simply examine safety points. To study extra, go to Integration with Amazon Detective within the AWS documentation.
Issues to know
GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring help is now out there for EC2 situations operating Amazon Linux 2 or Amazon Linux 2023. You’ve gotten the choice to configure most CPU and reminiscence limits for the agent. To study extra and for future updates, go to Stipulations for Amazon EC2 occasion help within the AWS documentation.
To estimate the every day common utilization prices for GuardDuty, select Utilization within the left pane. In the course of the 30-day free trial interval, you’ll be able to estimate what your prices might be after the trial interval. On the finish of the trial interval, we cost you per vCPU hours tracked month-to-month for the monitoring brokers. To study extra, go to the Amazon GuardDuty pricing web page.
Enabling EC2 Runtime Monitoring additionally permits for a cost-saving alternative in your GuardDuty value. When the characteristic is enabled, you received’t be charged for GuardDuty foundational safety VPC Stream Logs sourced from the EC2 situations operating the safety agent. This is because of comparable, however extra contextual, community knowledge out there from the safety agent. Moreover, GuardDuty would nonetheless course of VPC Stream Logs and generate related findings so you’ll proceed to get network-level safety protection even when the agent experiences downtime.
Now out there
Amazon GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring is now out there in all AWS Areas the place GuardDuty is accessible, excluding AWS GovCloud (US) Areas and AWS China Areas. For a full listing of Areas the place EC2 Runtime Monitoring is accessible, go to Area-specific characteristic availability.
Give GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring a attempt within the GuardDuty console. For extra info, go to the Amazon GuardDuty Consumer Information and ship suggestions to AWS re:Publish for Amazon GuardDuty or by your regular AWS help contacts.
— Channy