Amazon GuardDuty

• Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors the AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation.
• is a continuous security monitoring service that analyzes and processes the following data sources:
  • CloudTrail S3 data events and management event logs,
  • DNS logs,
  • EKS audit logs, and
  • VPC flow logs.
• uses threat intelligence feeds, such as lists of malicious IP addresses and domains, and machine learning to identify unexpected and potentially unauthorized and malicious activity within the AWS environment.
• combines machine learning, anomaly detection, network monitoring, and malicious file discovery, utilizing both AWS-developed and industry-leading third-party sources to help protect workloads and data on AWS
• is a Regional service and is recommended to be enabled in all supported AWS Regions. This helps generate findings of unauthorized or unusual activity even in Regions not actively used.
• does not look at historical data, it monitors only the activity that starts after it is enabled.
• operates completely independent of the AWS resources and therefore has no impact on the performance or availability of the accounts or workloads.
• GuardDuty supports
  • Suppression rules, allow the creation of very specific combinations of attributes to suppress findings.
  • Trusted IP List for highly secure communication with the AWS environment. Findings are not generated based on trusted IP lists.
  • Threat List for known malicious IP addresses. Findings are generated based on threat lists.
• Security findings are retained and made available through the GuardDuty console and APIs for 90 days, after which they are discarded.
• Findings are assigned a severity, and actions can be automated by integrating with Security Hub, EventBridge, Lambda, and Step Functions.
• Amazon Detective is also tightly integrated with GuardDuty which helps perform deeper forensic and root cause investigations.
• GuardDuty Malware Protection feature helps to detect malicious files on EBS volumes attached to an EC2 instance and container workloads.

GuardDuty with Multiple Accounts

• GuardDuty has multi-account management through AWS Organizations integration, which allows delegating an administrator account for the organization.
• The delegated administrator (DA) account is a centralized account that consolidates all findings and can configure all member accounts.
• The administrator account helps to associate and manage multiple AWS accounts.
• All security findings are aggregated to the administrator account for review and remediation.
• CloudWatch Events are also aggregated to the administrator account when using this configuration.

GuardDuty Automated Remediation

• GuardDuty security findings can be remediated automatically using EventBridge and AWS Lambda
• For example, a Lambda function can be created to modify the AWS security group rules based on security findings. For a GuardDuty finding indicating one of your EC2 instances is being probed by a known malicious IP, the address can be added through an EventBridge rule, initiating a Lambda function to automatically modify the security group rules and restrict access on that port.

GuardDuty Malware Protection

• GuardDuty Malware Protection helps scan EBS volume data for possible malware and identifies suspicious behavior indicative of malicious software in EC2 instances or container workloads.
• is optimized to consume large data volumes for near real-time processing of security detections.
• scans a replica EBS volume that GuardDuty generates based on the snapshot of the EBS volume for trojans, worms, crypto miners, rootkits, bots, and more.

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

• Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
• AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
• AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
• Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.

1. Which AWS service makes detecting and reporting unexpected and potentially malicious activity in your AWS environment easy?
   1. AWS Shield
   2. AWS Inspector
   3. AWS GuardDuty
   4. AWS WAF

References

Amazon_GuardDuty