Partner Content Organizations are increasingly shifting their deployments to the cloud due to its many benefits over traditional on-premises solutions.

Cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency that make managing infrastructure and applications more convenient. Cloud platforms can provision resources quickly, respond to changing demands, and reduce upfront capital expenses. These solutions allow businesses to focus more on innovation and less on managing hardware. However, this shift to the cloud introduces new challenges, particularly in securing workloads and services running on these platforms.

While cloud platforms like AWS offer built-in security features such as identity and access management (IAM), encryption, and network firewalls, ensuring comprehensive protection requires additional security measures. Organizations often rely on third-party tools and platforms to enhance visibility, automate threat detection, and maintain compliance across their cloud environments. These tools complement the AWS native capabilities by addressing the shared responsibility model, where AWS secures the underlying infrastructure, and customers are responsible for securing their workloads. They provide advanced monitoring, incident response, and vulnerability management solutions, ensuring that workloads remain secure even as environments scale.

Among these third-party solutions, Wazuh is an open-source security platform with several capabilities for securing AWS workloads. It helps organizations address cloud security challenges through real-time monitoring, threat detection, and incident response capabilities.

The shared responsibility model

The AWS shared responsibility model defines how the security responsibilities are shared between AWS and its customers. AWS secures the cloud infrastructure, including computing, storage, networking, and data centers. However, customers are responsible for securing the workloads they run in AWS, which includes:

– Configuring access controls, identity management, and encryption.

– Monitoring and protecting applications, databases, and data.

– Implementing security policies and managing compliance with regulations.

Wazuh complements the AWS built-in security by providing comprehensive monitoring and alerting capabilities for everything running in the cloud, from EC2 instances to databases and storage. It integrates with AWS services, offering a unified approach to securing cloud workloads.

Organizations face a variety of security challenges when running workloads in AWS, including:

– Visibility: Ensuring continuous visibility into cloud resources and detecting suspicious activity in real-time.

– Compliance: Meeting industry-specific compliance standards such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR.

– Threat detection: Identifying and mitigating security threats targeting cloud workloads, including misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and malicious activities.

– Security monitoring: Monitoring for insider threats, improper access controls, and unauthorized changes to configurations or data.

How Wazuh secures AWS workloads

Wazuh offers a variety of features specifically designed to secure cloud environments, including AWS. It provides real-time visibility into infrastructure by collecting logs and security events from various AWS services, helping customers detect potential threats early. The following are AWS integrations that are out-of-the-box available for customers:

– AWS CloudTrail integration: Wazuh integrates with AWS CloudTrail, a service that provides governance, compliance, and operational auditing by logging AWS API calls. It collects and analyzes CloudTrail logs to detect any suspicious activity, such as unauthorized access, unusual API calls, or changes to security configurations.

– AWS CloudWatch integration: Wazuh integrates with AWS CloudWatch to monitor performance and operational data. This integration allows it to detect abnormal spikes in usage or performance that may indicate a security incident, such as a DDoS attack or resource misconfiguration.

– EC2 and S3 monitoring: Wazuh monitors EC2 instances for signs of compromise, such as abnormal network traffic or the installation of unauthorized software. It also monitors S3 buckets for improper permissions that could expose sensitive data.

– AWS Security Hub integration: Wazuh integrates with AWS Security Hub to centralize and streamline security findings across multiple AWS services, such as GuardDuty, Inspector, and Macie. AWS Security Hub collects, aggregates, and prioritizes security alerts from these sources, providing a consolidated view of potential threats. Wazuh then ingests these findings and enriches them with its analysis, making it easier to prioritize incidents and take immediate action.

– Amazon Security Lake integration: Wazuh integrates with Amazon Security Lake to pull relevant security data, enabling it to monitor, correlate, and analyze logs across various environments, all from a single source of truth.

Threat detection, incident response and vulnerability management

Wazuh threat detection capabilities extend to AWS workloads, allowing organizations to quickly identify and respond to security incidents. It uses both signature-based and behavior-based anomaly detection to identify potential threats.

– File Integrity Monitoring (FIM): The Wazuh FIM helps to protect sensitive data stored in AWS EC2 instances by continuously monitoring critical files and directories for unauthorized changes. FIM is useful for detecting malware attacks or insider threats that involve altering or deleting critical files.

– Log analysis: Wazuh collects and analyzes logs from AWS services and applications running in cloud environments, detecting patterns that may indicate a security breach or misconfiguration. Alerts are generated in real-time, allowing security teams to take immediate action.

Identifying and remediating vulnerabilities is an important aspect of securing AWS workloads. Wazuh continuously scans cloud infrastructure for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that attackers could exploit.

– Vulnerability detection: Wazuh integrates with various vulnerability databases and security advisories, ensuring it stays updated on the latest vulnerabilities. It scans AWS resources, such as EC2 instances, containers, and applications, for known vulnerabilities.

– Patch management: Wazuh provides actionable insights to help security teams prioritize patching and remediation efforts after detecting a vulnerability. This ensures that AWS workloads remain secure and compliant.

Compliance management and auditing

Meeting regulatory requirements is essential for organizations running workloads in AWS, especially in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, and e-commerce. Wazuh helps organizations meet compliance standards by providing auditing and reporting features that make it easier to demonstrate adherence to industry regulations.

– PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance: Wazuh includes built-in policies and templates for common compliance frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR. These policies help ensure that AWS workloads are configured following industry best practices.

– Security Configuration Assessment: The Wazuh Security Configuration Assessment (SCA) continuously evaluates AWS environments against best security practices. It ensures that critical settings such as access controls, encryption configurations, and network security groups align with compliance standards. This proactive assessment helps detect potential configuration risks and guides organizations in maintaining a compliant cloud posture.

Securing workloads in AWS is a complex task; however, organizations can ensure continuous monitoring, threat detection, and compliance across their cloud environments using Wazuh. It offers various capabilities that provide the visibility and control needed to identify and respond to security threats in real-time, making it a useful platform for organizations running workloads on AWS.

Contact Wazuh today to learn how it can help protect your AWS environment from cyber threats and ensure compliance with industry regulations.

Contributed by Wazuh.