Amazon Detective: High Plain’s Quick Guide to AWS Security Investigations

Securing cloud environments is a top business priority in today's digital landscape. With increased cyber threats and sophisticated attacks, organizations need robust security solutions to detect, investigate, and respond to incidents effectively. One such service that has gained significance in the realm of AWS security is Amazon Detective. This blog delves into Amazon Detective, explaining its functionality, features, use cases, pricing, and how it can help organizations strengthen their security posture.

What is It

Amazon Detective is a managed security service provided by Amazon Web Services(AWS) that simplifies the process of investigating security issues and potential threats within AWS environments. It enables security teams to quickly analyze security findings, understand the context of suspicious activities, and visualize relationships among various data points across multiple AWS services. By streamlining investigations, Amazon Detective allows organizations to respond more effectively to security incidents while reducing the time and resources needed for thorough analysis.

How it works

Amazon Detective gathers security-related data by automatically collecting and ingesting information from various AWS services such as AWS Cloud Trail, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Security Hub. This includes logs, events, and security findings. The Service then processes and enriches this data to provide a comprehensive view of the environment, giving investigators contextual insights into the security findings.

Amazon Detective uses graph-based visualizations to allow security teams to explore relationships between entities like users, IP addresses, and AWS resources. This graphical representation helps in understanding complex interactions over time. Security analysts can use the interactive console to delve into specific security findings, analyze timelines, and access patterns, and detect anomalies to identify the root cause of a security issue. Amazon Detective continuously learns from ongoing activities and utilizes machine learning models to identify behavioral changes over time, thereby improving its detection capabilities.

What are its Major benefits?

• Centralized investigation : Provides a single platform to analyze data from multiple AWS services, streamlining the investigation process.
• Advanced Analytics: Utilizes machine learning and statistical models to point out anomalies and correlate events effectively.
• Interactive visualizations: Offers graphs and timelines that help investigators easily understand relationships and context related to suspicious activities.
• Integration with Other AWS Services: Seamlessly integrates with AWS security services like Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Security Hub for comprehensive security management.
• Multi-Region Support: Allows organizations to analyze data across multiple AWS regions, enhancing visibility and investigation capabilities.

What are its Use Cases

Here are some common use cases for Amazon Detective:

• Incident Investigation: When a security finding is reported by Amazon GuardDuty, security teams can leverage Amazon Detective to investigate the incident further, analyze user and network activity leading to the finding, and determine if a breach occurred.
• Compliance and Audit: Organizations can use Amazon Detective to analyze logs and events to ensure compliance with security standards and internal policies. This is crucial during audits or security assessments.
• Behavioral Analysis: By continuously monitoring user behavior, Amazon Detective can identify and flag anomalies that may indicate insider threats or compromised credentials, providing an early warning system for potential security issues.
• Root Cause Analysis: After a security incident, teams can use Amazon Detective to perform root cause analysis to understand how an attack occurred, what vulnerabilities were exposed, and how to prevent similar incidents in the future.

How can I quickly get started??

You need an Administrator access and you simply have to enable it. thats it. For a multi-account setup, you can add multiple AWS accounts as member accounts and review all of their findings. By designating an Administrator security account, you can enable your security team to see consolidated findings for all accounts.

Assuming you have successfully enabled it for an account, here are a few? quick investigations you can do for our sample investigation of

“Investigate how my IAM role named PowerUser has been used recently”

1. Go to the IAM console and locate the role named “Power User”, if you have consolidated authentication via AWS identity user you will see the power user role something like “arn:aws:iam::0123456789:role/aws-reserved/sso.amazonaws.com/AWSReservedSSO_AWSPowerUserAccess_some_random_letter”
2. Copy? the ARN and go to the AWS Dectective console go to the investigation section, select resources select resource type as “IAM Role”? and paste ARN
3. After a few minutes, it will display a very accurate summary of usage and potential compromise or even print? We did not observe uncommon behavior” if everything is ok for this role.?

Beyond this simple summary report, AWS Detective provides a wealth of information to understand how this role has been used by various Identities. A user can view detailed usage information over time, summary, and details about AWS API calls that invoked this role with very useful functionality to filter down to any period, grouping of all activities related to this role, and any anomaly in usage pattern. User should be able to see all associated information to primary activity like IP addresses invoking service and their GEO location, browser types, and a lot more information to do a comprehensive investigation

What Can it do for EKS users?

All major activity investigations go right at each resource of EKS and you can investigate what an identity, role, or service account did at the session, pod, node, and cluster level in case EKS service becomes linked to any investigation

What about Pricing

Amazon Detective uses a pricing model based on the amount of data processed and stored within the service. There are costs associated with data storage and the volume of ingested CloudTrail logs, which are the primary data sources for investigations. AWS charges per gigabyte (GB) ingested per account/Region per month. There is no additional charge to enable these log sources for analysis or data stored in Amazon Detective. Amazon Detective retains up to a year of aggregated data for analysis. For complete pricing information, please visit https://aws.amazon.com/detective/pricing/.

To help understand pricing here is a sample usage scenario

The customer has about 100 GB of data in various Cloudwatch log groups and another 100 GB of data in the VPC flow log. The customer just has one account and all data is in the US-EAST-1 region

Pricing for the first 1000 GB is $2 per GB per month? so the total charges for a month would be

$200 + $200 = $400 . there will be no additional storage charges for Cloudwatch logs and VPC flow logs

Conclusion

Amazon Detective is an essential tool for organizations looking to enhance their security capabilities on AWS. With its powerful data analysis, visualization features, and seamless integration with other AWS services, it enables security teams to investigate incidents with greater efficiency and accuracy. As Cyber threats continue to evolve, adopting advanced security solutions like Amazon Detective is critical for maintaining a robust security posture in the Cloud. If your organization requires any assistance regarding AWS Detective, please don't hesitate to contact HighPlains Computing.

Additional Reading Links

https://highplains.io/aws-inspector-a-quick-security-guide/

https://highplains.io/guide/aws-iam-the-cloud-security-foundation/