Operational Best Practices for NCSC Cyber Assesment Framework
Conformance packs provide a general-purpose compliance framework designed to enable you to create security, operational or cost-optimization governance checks using managed or custom AWS Config rules and AWS Config remediation actions. Conformance Packs, as sample templates, are not designed to fully ensure compliance with a specific governance or compliance standard. You are responsible for making your own assessment of whether your use of the Services meets applicable legal and regulatory requirements.
The following provides a sample mapping between UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) controls and AWS managed Config rules. Each Config rule applies to a specific AWS resource, and relates to one or more UK NCSC CAF controls. A UK NCSC CAF control can be related to multiple Config rules. Refer to the table below for more detail and guidance related to these mappings.
This sample conformance pack template contains mappings to controls within the UK NCSC CAF
(National
Cyber Security Centre | NCSC CAF guidance
| Control ID | Control Description | AWS Config Rule | Guidance |
|---|---|---|---|
| A3.a Asset Management | Everything required to deliver, maintain or support networks and information systems necessary for the operation of essential functions is determined and understood. This includes data, people and systems, as well as any supporting infrastructure (such as power or cooling). | This rule ensures that Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network access control lists are in use. Monitoring for unused network access control lists can assist in accurate inventory and management of your environment. | |
| A3.a Asset Management | Everything required to deliver, maintain or support networks and information systems necessary for the operation of essential functions is determined and understood. This includes data, people and systems, as well as any supporting infrastructure (such as power or cooling). | An inventory of the software platforms and applications within the organization is possible by managing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with AWS Systems Manager. Use AWS Systems Manager to provide detailed system configurations, operating system patch levels, services name and type, software installations, application name, publisher and version, and other details about your environment. | |
| A3.a Asset Management | Everything required to deliver, maintain or support networks and information systems necessary for the operation of essential functions is determined and understood. This includes data, people and systems, as well as any supporting infrastructure (such as power or cooling). | Enable this rule to help with the baseline configuration of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances by checking whether Amazon EC2 instances have been stopped for more than the allowed number of days, according to your organization's standards. | |
| A3.a Asset Management | Everything required to deliver, maintain or support networks and information systems necessary for the operation of essential functions is determined and understood. This includes data, people and systems, as well as any supporting infrastructure (such as power or cooling). | This rule ensures that Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes that are attached to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances are marked for deletion when an instance is terminated. If an Amazon EBS volume isn't deleted when the instance that it's attached to is terminated, it may violate the concept of least functionality. | |
| A3.a Asset Management | Everything required to deliver, maintain or support networks and information systems necessary for the operation of essential functions is determined and understood. This includes data, people and systems, as well as any supporting infrastructure (such as power or cooling). | This rule ensures Elastic IPs allocated to a Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) are attached to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or in-use Elastic Network Interfaces. This rule helps monitor unused EIPs in your environment. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification, Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | The identities and the credentials are issued, managed, and verified based on an organizational IAM password policy. They meet or exceed requirements as stated by NIST SP 800-63 and the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard for password strength. This rule allows you to optionally set RequireUppercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireLowercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireSymbols (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireNumbers (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), MinimumPasswordLength (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 14), PasswordReusePrevention (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 24), and MaxPasswordAge (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 90) for your IAM Password Policy. The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties with access permissions and authorizations, by ensuring that IAM groups have at least one user. Placing users in groups based on their associated permissions or job function is one way to incorporate least privilege. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | Ensure an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user, IAM role or IAM group does not have an inline policy to control access to systems and assets. AWS recommends to use managed policies instead of inline policies. The managed policies allow reusability, versioning and rolling back, and delegating permissions management. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties with access permissions and authorizations, restricting policies from containing "Effect": "Allow" with "Action": "*" over "Resource": "*". Allowing users to have more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you restrict access permissions and authorizations, by ensuring users are members of at least one group. Allowing users more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you with access permissions and authorizations by checking for IAM passwords and access keys that are not used for a specified time period. If these unused credentials are identified, you should disable and/or remove the credentials, as this may violate the principle of least privilege. This rule requires you to set a value to the maxCredentialUsageAge (Config Default: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | Enable this rule to restrict access to resources in the AWS Cloud. This rule ensures multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled for all users. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. Reduce the incidents of compromised accounts by requiring MFA for users. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that MFA is enabled for all AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users that have a console password. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for users, you can reduce incidents of compromised accounts and keep sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring hardware MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | Access to systems and assets can be controlled by checking that the root user does not have access keys attached to their AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role. Ensure that the root access keys are deleted. Instead, create and use role-based AWS accounts to help to incorporate the principle of least functionality. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | This rule ensures AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies are attached only to groups or roles to control access to systems and assets. Assigning privileges at the group or the role level helps to reduce opportunity for an identity to receive or retain excessive privileges. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | Ensure fine-grained access control is enabled on your Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. Fine-grained access control provides enhanced authorization mechanisms to achieve least-privileged access to Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. It allows for role-based access control to the domain, as well as index, document, and field-level security, support for OpenSearch Service dashboards multi-tenancy, and HTTP basic authentication for OpenSearch Service and Kibana. | |
| B2.a Identity Verification,Authentication and Authorisation | You robustly verify, authenticate and authorise access to the networks and information systems supporting your essential function. | The access permissions and authorizations can be managed and incorporated with the principles of least privilege and separation of duties, by enabling Kerberos for Amazon EMR clusters. In Kerberos, the services and the users that need to authenticate are known as principals. The principals exist within a Kerberos realm. Within the realm, a Kerberos server is known as the key distribution center (KDC). It provides a means for the principals to authenticate. The KDC authenticates by issuing tickets for authentication. The KDC maintains a database of the principals within its realm, their passwords, and other administrative information about each principal. | |
| B2.b Device Management | You fully know and have trust in the devices that are used to access your networks, information systems and data that support your essential function. | An inventory of the software platforms and applications within the organization is possible by managing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with AWS Systems Manager. Use AWS Systems Manager to provide detailed system configurations, operating system patch levels, services name and type, software installations, application name, publisher and version, and other details about your environment. | |
| B2.b Device Management | You fully know and have trust in the devices that are used to access your networks, information systems and data that support your essential function. | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you with access permissions and authorizations by checking for IAM passwords and access keys that are not used for a specified time period. If these unused credentials are identified, you should disable and/or remove the credentials, as this may violate the principle of least privilege. This rule requires you to set a value to the maxCredentialUsageAge (Config Default: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | To assist with implementing the principle of least privilege, ensure your Amazon CodeBuild project environment does not have privileged mode enabled. This setting should be disabled to prevent unintended access to Docker APIs as well as the container’s underlying hardware. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | EC2 instance profiles pass an IAM role to an EC2 instance. Attaching an instance profile to your instances can assist with least privilege and permissions management. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | To assist with implementing the principle of least privilege, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task definitions should not have elevated privilege enabled. When this parameter is true, the container is given elevated privileges on the host container instance (similar to the root user). | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Enabling read only access to Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) containers can assist in adhering to the principal of least privilege. This option can reduces attack vectors as the container instance’s filesystem cannot be modified unless it has explicit read-write permissions. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | To assist with implementing the principle of least privilege, ensure that a non-root user is designated for access to your Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task definitions. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | To assist with implementing the principle of least privilege, ensure user enforcement is enabled for your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) .When enabled, Amazon EFS replaces the NFS client's user and group IDs with the identity configured on the access point for all file system operations and only grants access to this enforced user identity. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | The access permissions and authorizations can be managed and incorporated with the principles of least privilege and separation of duties, by enabling Kerberos for Amazon EMR clusters. In Kerberos, the services and the users that need to authenticate are known as principals. The principals exist within a Kerberos realm. Within the realm, a Kerberos server is known as the key distribution center (KDC). It provides a means for the principals to authenticate. The KDC authenticates by issuing tickets for authentication. The KDC maintains a database of the principals within its realm, their passwords, and other administrative information about each principal. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties with access permissions and authorizations, restricting policies from containing blocked actions on all AWS Key Management Service keys. Having more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. This rule allows you to set the blockedActionsPatterns parameter. (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: kms:Decrypt, kms:ReEncryptFrom). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties with access permissions and authorizations, by ensuring that IAM groups have at least one user. Placing users in groups based on their associated permissions or job function is one way to incorporate least privilege. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties with access permissions and authorizations, restricting policies from containing "Effect": "Allow" with "Action": "*" over "Resource": "*". Allowing users to have more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Ensure IAM Actions are restricted to only those actions that are needed. Allowing users to have more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you restrict access permissions and authorizations, by ensuring users are members of at least one group. Allowing users more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | If unused credentials exist in AWS Secrets Manager, you should disable and/or remove the credentials, as this may violate the principle of least privilege. This rule allows you to set a value to the unusedForDays (Config Default: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Enable this rule to restrict access to resources in the AWS Cloud. This rule ensures multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled for all users. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. Reduce the incidents of compromised accounts by requiring MFA for users. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that MFA is enabled for all AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users that have a console password. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for users, you can reduce incidents of compromised accounts and keep sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring hardware MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Access to systems and assets can be controlled by checking that the root user does not have access keys attached to their AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role. Ensure that the root access keys are deleted. Instead, create and use role-based AWS accounts to help to incorporate the principle of least functionality. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Amazon GuardDuty helps you understand the impact of an incident by classifying findings by severity: low, medium, and high. You can use these classifications for determining remediation strategies and priorities. This rule allows you to optionally set the daysLowSev (Config Default: 30), daysMediumSev (Config Default: 7), and daysHighSev (Config Default: 1) for non-archived findings, as required by your organization's policies. | |
| B2.c Privileged User Management | You closely manage privileged user access to networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Ensure an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user, IAM role or IAM group does not have an inline policy to control access to systems and assets. AWS recommends to use managed policies instead of inline policies. The managed policies allow reusability, versioning and rolling back, and delegating permissions management. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties with access permissions and authorizations, by ensuring that IAM groups have at least one user. Placing users in groups based on their associated permissions or job function is one way to incorporate least privilege. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Ensure an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user, IAM role or IAM group does not have an inline policy to control access to systems and assets. AWS recommends to use managed policies instead of inline policies. The managed policies allow reusability, versioning and rolling back, and delegating permissions management. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties with access permissions and authorizations, restricting policies from containing "Effect": "Allow" with "Action": "*" over "Resource": "*". Allowing users to have more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you restrict access permissions and authorizations, by ensuring users are members of at least one group. Allowing users more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you with access permissions and authorizations by checking for IAM passwords and access keys that are not used for a specified time period. If these unused credentials are identified, you should disable and/or remove the credentials, as this may violate the principle of least privilege. This rule requires you to set a value to the maxCredentialUsageAge (Config Default: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | The collection of Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data events helps in detecting any anomalous activity. The details include AWS account information that accessed an Amazon S3 bucket, IP address, and time of event. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | To protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Redshift clusters. You must also ensure that required configurations are deployed on Amazon Redshift clusters. The audit logging should be enabled to provide information about connections and user activities in the database. This rule requires that a value is set for clusterDbEncrypted (Config Default : TRUE), and loggingEnabled (Config Default: TRUE). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Amazon GuardDuty helps you understand the impact of an incident by classifying findings by severity: low, medium, and high. You can use these classifications for determining remediation strategies and priorities. This rule allows you to optionally set the daysLowSev (Config Default: 30), daysMediumSev (Config Default: 7), and daysHighSev (Config Default: 1) for non-archived findings, as required by your organization's policies. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Use Amazon CloudWatch to centrally collect and manage log event activity. Inclusion of AWS CloudTrail data provides details of API call activity within your AWS account. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | The identities and the credentials are issued, managed, and verified based on an organizational IAM password policy. They meet or exceed requirements as stated by NIST SP 800-63 and the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard for password strength. This rule allows you to optionally set RequireUppercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireLowercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireSymbols (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireNumbers (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), MinimumPasswordLength (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 14), PasswordReusePrevention (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 24), and MaxPasswordAge (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 90) for your IAM Password Policy. The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | Amazon CloudWatch alarms alert when a metric breaches the threshold for a specified number of evaluation periods. The alarm performs one or more actions based on the value of the metric or expression relative to a threshold over a number of time periods. This rule requires a value for alarmActionRequired (Config Default: True), insufficientDataActionRequired (Config Default: True), okActionRequired (Config Default: False). The actual value should reflect the alarm actions for your environment. | |
| B2.d Identity and Access Management (IdAM) | You assure good management and maintenance of identity and access control for your networks and information systems supporting the essential function. | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| B3.a Understanding Data | You have a good understanding of data important to the operation of the essential function, where it is stored, where it travels and how unavailability or unauthorised access, modification or deletion would adversely impact the essential function. This also applies to third parties storing or accessing data important to the operation of essential functions. | This rule ensures that Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes that are attached to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances are marked for deletion when an instance is terminated. If an Amazon EBS volume isn't deleted when the instance that it's attached to is terminated, it may violate the concept of least functionality. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Ensure network integrity is protected by ensuring X509 certificates are issued by AWS ACM. These certificates must be valid and unexpired. This rule requires a value for daysToExpiration (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Ensure that your Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) are configured to drop http headers. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | To help protect data in transit, ensure that your Application Load Balancer automatically redirects unencrypted HTTP requests to HTTPS. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Ensure node-to-node encryption for Amazon OpenSearch Service is enabled. Node-to-node encryption enables TLS 1.2 encryption for all communications within the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at transit, ensure encryption is enabled for your Elastic Load Balancing. Use AWS Certificate Manager to manage, provision and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates with AWS services and internal resources. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Ensure that your Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) are configured with SSL or HTTPS listeners. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Ensure that your Amazon Redshift clusters require TLS/SSL encryption to connect to SQL clients. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | To help protect data in transit, ensure that your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets require requests to use Secure Socket Layer (SSL). Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Ensure AWS WAF is enabled on Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) to help protect web applications. A WAF helps to protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits. These web exploits may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources within your environment. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring DMS replication instances cannot be publicly accessed. DMS replication instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EC2 instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon OpenSearch Service (OpenSearch Service) Domains are within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). An OpenSearch Service domain within an Amazon VPC enables secure communication between OpenSearch Service and other services within the Amazon VPC without the need for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon EMR cluster master nodes cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EMR cluster master nodes can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups can help manage network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Not allowing ingress (or remote) traffic from 0.0.0.0/0 to port 22 on your resources help you restricting remote access. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Deploy Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to enable secure communication between an instance and other services within the amazon VPC, without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. All traffic remains securely within the AWS Cloud. Because of their logical isolation, domains that reside within an Amazon VPC have an extra layer of security when compared to domains that use public endpoints. Assign Amazon EC2 instances to an Amazon VPC to properly manage access. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that internet gateways are only attached to authorized Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Internet gateways allow bi-directional internet access to and from the Amazon VPC that can potentially lead to unauthorized access to Amazon VPC resources. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Deploy AWS Lambda functions within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for a secure communication between a function and other services within the Amazon VPC. With this configuration, there is no requirement for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. All the traffic remains securely within the AWS Cloud. Because of their logical isolation, domains that reside within an Amazon VPC have an extra layer of security when compared to domains that use public endpoints. To properly manage access, AWS Lambda functions should be assigned to a VPC. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information, and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Redshift clusters are not public. Amazon Redshift clusters can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups. Not restricting access to ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. This rule allows you to optionally set blockedPort1 - blockedPort5 parameters (Config Defaults: 20,21,3389,3306,4333). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon SageMaker notebooks do not allow direct internet access. By preventing direct internet access, you can keep sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups can help in the management of network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Restricting all the traffic on the default security group helps in restricting remote access to your AWS resources. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups. Not restricting access on ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. By restricting access to resources within a security group from the internet (0.0.0.0/0) remote access can be controlled to internal systems. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | The Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) health checks for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling groups support maintenance of adequate capacity and availability. The load balancer periodically sends pings, attempts connections, or sends requests to test Amazon EC2 instances health in an auto-scaling group. If an instance is not reporting back, traffic is sent to a new Amazon EC2 instance. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Enable cross-zone load balancing for your Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) to help maintain adequate capacity and availability. The cross-zone load balancing reduces the need to maintain equivalent numbers of instances in each enabled availability zone. It also improves your application's ability to handle the loss of one or more instances. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | This rule ensures that Elastic Load Balancing has deletion protection enabled. Use this feature to prevent your load balancer from being accidentally or maliciously deleted, which can lead to loss of availability for your applications. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Redundant Site-to-Site VPN tunnels can be implemented to achieve resilience requirements. It uses two tunnels to help ensure connectivity in case one of the Site-to-Site VPN connections becomes unavailable. To protect against a loss of connectivity, in case your customer gateway becomes unavailable, you can set up a second Site-to-Site VPN connection to your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and virtual private gateway by using a second customer gateway. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your API Gateway stage's cache. Because sensitive data can be captured for the API method, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Ensure node-to-node encryption for Amazon OpenSearch Service is enabled. Node-to-node encryption enables TLS 1.2 encryption for all communications within the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| B3.b Data in Transit | You have protected the transit of data important to the operation of the essential function. This includes the transfer of data to third parties. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon OpenSearch Service domains are within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). An Amazon OpenSearch Service domain within an Amazon VPC enables secure communication between Amazon OpenSearch Service and other services within the Amazon VPC without the need for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Because sensitive data may exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your AWS CloudTrail trails. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To help protect sensitive data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon CloudWatch Log Groups. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon DynamoDB tables. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in these tables, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. By default, DynamoDB tables are encrypted with an AWS owned customer master key (CMK). | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To help protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in these volumes, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon OpenSearch Service (OpenSearch Service) domains. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) snapshots. Because sensitive data can exist at rest, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To help protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in Amazon RDS instances, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Redshift clusters. You must also ensure that required configurations are deployed on Amazon Redshift clusters. The audit logging should be enabled to provide information about connections and user activities in the database. This rule requires that a value is set for clusterDbEncrypted (Config Default : TRUE), and loggingEnabled (Config Default: TRUE). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in Amazon S3 buckets, enable encryption to help protect that data. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is enabled for your SageMaker endpoint. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in SageMaker endpoint, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is enabled for your SageMaker notebook. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in SageMaker notebook, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To help protect data at rest, ensure that your Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics require encryption using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Because sensitive data can exist at rest in published messages, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Enable key rotation to ensure that keys are rotated once they have reached the end of their crypto period. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To help protect data at rest, ensure necessary customer master keys (CMKs) are not scheduled for deletion in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Because key deletion is necessary at times, this rule can assist in checking for all keys scheduled for deletion, in case a key was scheduled unintentionally. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | The backup feature of Amazon RDS creates backups of your databases and transaction logs. Amazon RDS automatically creates a storage volume snapshot of your DB instance, backing up the entire DB instance. The system allows you to set specific retention periods to meet your resilience requirements. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon DynamoDB tables are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Enable this rule to check that information has been backed up. It also maintains the backups by ensuring that point-in-time recovery is enabled in Amazon DynamoDB. The recovery maintains continuous backups of your table for the last 35 days. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | An optimized instance in Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides additional, dedicated capacity for Amazon EBS I/O operations. This optimization provides the most efficient performance for your EBS volumes by minimizing contention between Amazon EBS I/O operations and other traffic from your instance. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | When automatic backups are enabled, Amazon ElastiCache creates a backup of the cluster on a daily basis. The backup can be retained for a number of days as specified by your organization. Automatic backups can help guard against data loss. If a failure occurs, you can create a new cluster, which restores your data from the most recent backup. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Cross-Region Replication (CRR) supports maintaining adequate capacity and availability. CRR enables automatic, asynchronous copying of objects across Amazon S3 buckets to help ensure that data availability is maintained. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket versioning helps keep multiple variants of an object in the same Amazon S3 bucket. Use versioning to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in your Amazon S3 bucket. Versioning helps you to easily recover from unintended user actions and application failures. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Ensure Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances have deletion protection enabled. Use deletion protection to prevent your Amazon RDS instances from being accidentally or maliciously deleted, which can lead to loss of availability for your applications. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Ensure that your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket has lock enabled, by default. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in S3 buckets, enforce object locks at rest to help protect that data. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Multi-AZ support in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) provides enhanced availability and durability for database instances. When you provision a Multi-AZ database instance, Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary database instance, and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone. Each Availability Zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. In case of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby so that you can resume database operations as soon as the failover is complete. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Ensure network integrity is protected by ensuring X509 certificates are issued by AWS ACM. These certificates must be valid and unexpired. This rule requires a value for daysToExpiration (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B3.c Stored Data | You have protected stored data important to the operation of the essential function. | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Ensure that your Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) are configured to drop http headers. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | To help protect data in transit, ensure that your Application Load Balancer automatically redirects unencrypted HTTP requests to HTTPS. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Ensure AWS WAF is enabled on Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) to help protect web applications. A WAF helps to protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits. These web exploits may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources within your environment. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring DMS replication instances cannot be publicly accessed. DMS replication instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring EBS snapshots are not publicly restorable. EBS volume snapshots can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EC2 instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon OpenSearch Service (OpenSearch Service) Domains are within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). An OpenSearch Service domain within an Amazon VPC enables secure communication between OpenSearch Service and other services within the Amazon VPC without the need for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at transit, ensure encryption is enabled for your Elastic Load Balancing. Use AWS Certificate Manager to manage, provision and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates with AWS services and internal resources. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Ensure that your Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) are configured with SSL or HTTPS listeners. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon EMR cluster master nodes cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EMR cluster master nodes can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups can help manage network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Not allowing ingress (or remote) traffic from 0.0.0.0/0 to port 22 on your resources help you restricting remote access. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Deploy Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to enable secure communication between an instance and other services within the amazon VPC, without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. All traffic remains securely within the AWS Cloud. Because of their logical isolation, domains that reside within an Amazon VPC have an extra layer of security when compared to domains that use public endpoints. Assign Amazon EC2 instances to an Amazon VPC to properly manage access. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that internet gateways are only attached to authorized Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Internet gateways allow bi-directional internet access to and from the Amazon VPC that can potentially lead to unauthorized access to Amazon VPC resources. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring AWS Lambda functions cannot be publicly accessed. Public access can potentially lead to degradation of availability of resources. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Deploy AWS Lambda functions within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for a secure communication between a function and other services within the Amazon VPC. With this configuration, there is no requirement for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. All the traffic remains securely within the AWS Cloud. Because of their logical isolation, domains that reside within an Amazon VPC have an extra layer of security when compared to domains that use public endpoints. To properly manage access, AWS Lambda functions should be assigned to a VPC. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information, and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Redshift clusters are not public. Amazon Redshift clusters can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups. Not restricting access to ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. This rule allows you to optionally set blockedPort1 - blockedPort5 parameters (Config Defaults: 20,21,3389,3306,4333). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets cannot be publicly accessed. This rule helps keeping sensitive data safe from unauthorized remote users by preventing public access. This rule allows you to optionally set the ignorePublicAcls (Config Default: True), blockPublicPolicy (Config Default: True), blockPublicAcls (Config Default: True), and restrictPublicBuckets parameters (Config Default: True). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by only allowing authorized users, processes, and devices access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. The management of access should be consistent with the classification of the data. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by only allowing authorized users, processes, and devices access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. The management of access should be consistent with the classification of the data. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon SageMaker notebooks do not allow direct internet access. By preventing direct internet access, you can keep sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups can help in the management of network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Restricting all the traffic on the default security group helps in restricting remote access to your AWS resources. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups. Not restricting access on ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. By restricting access to resources within a security group from the internet (0.0.0.0/0) remote access can be controlled to internal systems. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | The Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) health checks for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling groups support maintenance of adequate capacity and availability. The load balancer periodically sends pings, attempts connections, or sends requests to test Amazon EC2 instances health in an auto-scaling group. If an instance is not reporting back, traffic is sent to a new Amazon EC2 instance. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Amazon DynamoDB auto scaling uses the AWS Application Auto Scaling service to adjust provisioned throughput capacity that automatically responds to actual traffic patterns. This enables a table or a global secondary index to increase its provisioned read/write capacity to handle sudden increases in traffic, without throttling. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Enable this rule to ensure that provisioned throughput capacity is checked on your Amazon DynamoDB tables. This is the amount of read/write activity that each table can support. DynamoDB uses this information to reserve sufficient system resources to meet your throughput requirements. This rule generates an alert when the throughput approaches the maximum limit for a customer's account. This rule allows you to optionally set accountRCUThresholdPercentage (Config Default: 80) and accountWCUThresholdPercentage (Config Default: 80) parameters. The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Enable cross-zone load balancing for your Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) to help maintain adequate capacity and availability. The cross-zone load balancing reduces the need to maintain equivalent numbers of instances in each enabled availability zone. It also improves your application's ability to handle the loss of one or more instances. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | This rule ensures that Elastic Load Balancing has deletion protection enabled. Use this feature to prevent your load balancer from being accidentally or maliciously deleted, which can lead to loss of availability for your applications. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | This rule ensures that a Lambda function's concurrency high and low limits are established. This can assist in baselining the number of requests that your function is serving at any given time. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Ensure Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances have deletion protection enabled. Use deletion protection to prevent your Amazon RDS instances from being accidentally or maliciously deleted, which can lead to loss of availability for your applications. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Multi-AZ support in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) provides enhanced availability and durability for database instances. When you provision a Multi-AZ database instance, Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary database instance, and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone. Each Availability Zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. In case of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby so that you can resume database operations as soon as the failover is complete. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Ensure that your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket has lock enabled, by default. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in S3 buckets, enforce object locks at rest to help protect that data. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Redundant Site-to-Site VPN tunnels can be implemented to achieve resilience requirements. It uses two tunnels to help ensure connectivity in case one of the Site-to-Site VPN connections becomes unavailable. To protect against a loss of connectivity, in case your customer gateway becomes unavailable, you can set up a second Site-to-Site VPN connection to your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and virtual private gateway by using a second customer gateway. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | An inventory of the software platforms and applications within the organization is possible by managing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with AWS Systems Manager. Use AWS Systems Manager to provide detailed system configurations, operating system patch levels, services name and type, software installations, application name, publisher and version, and other details about your environment. | |
| B4.a Secure by Design | You design security into the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. You minimise their attack surface and ensure that the operation of the essential function should not be impacted by the exploitation of any single vulnerability. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon OpenSearch Service domains are within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). An Amazon OpenSearch Service domain within an Amazon VPC enables secure communication between Amazon OpenSearch Service and other services within the Amazon VPC without the need for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. | |
| B4.b Secure Configuration | You securely configure the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. | Use AWS Systems Manager Associations to help with inventory of software platforms and applications within an organization. AWS Systems Manager assigns a configuration state to your managed instances and allows you to set baselines of operating system patch levels, software installations, application configurations, and other details about your environment. | |
| B4.b Secure Configuration | You securely configure the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. | Enable this rule to help with identification and documentation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) vulnerabilities. The rule checks if Amazon EC2 instance patch compliance in AWS Systems Manager as required by your organization's policies and procedures. | |
| B4.b Secure Configuration | You securely configure the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. | Ensure the Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) method is enabled to help protect access and control of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance metadata. The IMDSv2 method uses session-based controls. With IMDSv2, controls can be implemented to restrict changes to instance metadata. | |
| B4.b Secure Configuration | You securely configure the network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions. | This rule ensures that Amazon Redshift clusters have the preferred settings for your organization. Specifically, that they have preferred maintenance windows and automated snapshot retention periods for the database. This rule requires you to set the allowVersionUpgrade. The default is true. It also lets you optionally set the preferredMaintenanceWindow (the default is sat:16:00-sat:16:30), and the automatedSnapshotRetentionPeriod (the default is 1). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B4.c Secure Management | You manage your organisation's network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions to enable and maintain security. | Enable this rule to help with identification and documentation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) vulnerabilities. The rule checks if Amazon EC2 instance patch compliance in AWS Systems Manager as required by your organization's policies and procedures. | |
| B4.c Secure Management | You manage your organisation's network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions to enable and maintain security. | Ensure the Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) method is enabled to help protect access and control of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance metadata. The IMDSv2 method uses session-based controls. With IMDSv2, controls can be implemented to restrict changes to instance metadata. | |
| B4.c Secure Management | You manage your organisation's network and information systems that support the operation of essential functions to enable and maintain security. | An inventory of the software platforms and applications within the organization is possible by managing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with AWS Systems Manager. Use AWS Systems Manager to provide detailed system configurations, operating system patch levels, services name and type, software installations, application name, publisher and version, and other details about your environment. | |
| B4.d. Vulnerability Management | You manage known vulnerabilities in your network and information systems to prevent adverse impact on the essential function. | Use AWS Systems Manager Associations to help with inventory of software platforms and applications within an organization. AWS Systems Manager assigns a configuration state to your managed instances and allows you to set baselines of operating system patch levels, software installations, application configurations, and other details about your environment. | |
| B4.d. Vulnerability Management | You manage known vulnerabilities in your network and information systems to prevent adverse impact on the essential function. | Enable this rule to help with identification and documentation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) vulnerabilities. The rule checks if Amazon EC2 instance patch compliance in AWS Systems Manager as required by your organization's policies and procedures. | |
| B4.d. Vulnerability Management | You manage known vulnerabilities in your network and information systems to prevent adverse impact on the essential function. | Ensure the Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) method is enabled to help protect access and control of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance metadata. The IMDSv2 method uses session-based controls. With IMDSv2, controls can be implemented to restrict changes to instance metadata. | |
| B4.d. Vulnerability Management | You manage known vulnerabilities in your network and information systems to prevent adverse impact on the essential function. | This rule ensures that Amazon Redshift clusters have the preferred settings for your organization. Specifically, that they have preferred maintenance windows and automated snapshot retention periods for the database. This rule requires you to set the allowVersionUpgrade. The default is true. It also lets you optionally set the preferredMaintenanceWindow (the default is sat:16:00-sat:16:30), and the automatedSnapshotRetentionPeriod (the default is 1). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| B4.d. Vulnerability Management | You manage known vulnerabilities in your network and information systems to prevent adverse impact on the essential function. | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| B4.d. Vulnerability Management | You manage known vulnerabilities in your network and information systems to prevent adverse impact on the essential function. | Redundant Site-to-Site VPN tunnels can be implemented to achieve resilience requirements. It uses two tunnels to help ensure connectivity in case one of the Site-to-Site VPN connections becomes unavailable. To protect against a loss of connectivity, in case your customer gateway becomes unavailable, you can set up a second Site-to-Site VPN connection to your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and virtual private gateway by using a second customer gateway. | |
| B5.b Design for Resilience | You design the network and information systems supporting your essential function to be resilient to cyber security incidents. Systems are appropriately segregated and resource limitations are mitigated. | Enable cross-zone load balancing for your Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) to help maintain adequate capacity and availability. The cross-zone load balancing reduces the need to maintain equivalent numbers of instances in each enabled availability zone. It also improves your application's ability to handle the loss of one or more instances. | |
| B5.b Design for Resilience | You design the network and information systems supporting your essential function to be resilient to cyber security incidents. Systems are appropriately segregated and resource limitations are mitigated. | Multi-AZ support in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) provides enhanced availability and durability for database instances. When you provision a Multi-AZ database instance, Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary database instance, and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone. Each Availability Zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. In case of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby so that you can resume database operations as soon as the failover is complete. | |
| B5.b Design for Resilience | You design the network and information systems supporting your essential function to be resilient to cyber security incidents. Systems are appropriately segregated and resource limitations are mitigated. | The backup feature of Amazon RDS creates backups of your databases and transaction logs. Amazon RDS automatically creates a storage volume snapshot of your DB instance, backing up the entire DB instance. The system allows you to set specific retention periods to meet your resilience requirements. | |
| B5.c Backups | You hold accessible and secured current backups of data and information needed to recover operation of your essential function | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon DynamoDB tables are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| B5.c Backups | You hold accessible and secured current backups of data and information needed to recover operation of your essential function | Enable this rule to check that information has been backed up. It also maintains the backups by ensuring that point-in-time recovery is enabled in Amazon DynamoDB. The recovery maintains continuous backups of your table for the last 35 days. | |
| B5.c Backups | You hold accessible and secured current backups of data and information needed to recover operation of your essential function | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| B5.c Backups | You hold accessible and secured current backups of data and information needed to recover operation of your essential function | An optimized instance in Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides additional, dedicated capacity for Amazon EBS I/O operations. This optimization provides the most efficient performance for your EBS volumes by minimizing contention between Amazon EBS I/O operations and other traffic from your instance. | |
| B5.c Backups | You hold accessible and secured current backups of data and information needed to recover operation of your essential function | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| B5.c Backups | You hold accessible and secured current backups of data and information needed to recover operation of your essential function | When automatic backups are enabled, Amazon ElastiCache creates a backup of the cluster on a daily basis. The backup can be retained for a number of days as specified by your organization. Automatic backups can help guard against data loss. If a failure occurs, you can create a new cluster, which restores your data from the most recent backup. | |
| B5.c Backups | You hold accessible and secured current backups of data and information needed to recover operation of your essential function | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| B5.c Backups | You hold accessible and secured current backups of data and information needed to recover operation of your essential function | Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Cross-Region Replication (CRR) supports maintaining adequate capacity and availability. CRR enables automatic, asynchronous copying of objects across Amazon S3 buckets to help ensure that data availability is maintained. | |
| B5.c Backups | You hold accessible and secured current backups of data and information needed to recover operation of your essential function | Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket versioning helps keep multiple variants of an object in the same Amazon S3 bucket. Use versioning to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in your Amazon S3 bucket. Versioning helps you to easily recover from unintended user actions and application failures. | |
| B5.c Backups | You hold accessible and secured current backups of data and information needed to recover operation of your essential function | The Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) health checks for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling groups support maintenance of adequate capacity and availability. The load balancer periodically sends pings, attempts connections, or sends requests to test Amazon EC2 instances health in an auto-scaling group. If an instance is not reporting back, traffic is sent to a new Amazon EC2 instance. | |
| C1.a Monitoring Coverage | The data sources that you include in your monitoring allow for timely identification of security events which might affect the operation of your essential function. | Use Amazon CloudWatch to centrally collect and manage log event activity. Inclusion of AWS CloudTrail data provides details of API call activity within your AWS account. | |
| C1.a Monitoring Coverage | The data sources that you include in your monitoring allow for timely identification of security events which might affect the operation of your essential function. | Amazon CloudWatch alarms alert when a metric breaches the threshold for a specified number of evaluation periods. The alarm performs one or more actions based on the value of the metric or expression relative to a threshold over a number of time periods. This rule requires a value for alarmActionRequired (Config Default: True), insufficientDataActionRequired (Config Default: True), okActionRequired (Config Default: False). The actual value should reflect the alarm actions for your environment. | |
| C1.a Monitoring Coverage | The data sources that you include in your monitoring allow for timely identification of security events which might affect the operation of your essential function. | Enable this rule to ensure that provisioned throughput capacity is checked on your Amazon DynamoDB tables. This is the amount of read/write activity that each table can support. DynamoDB uses this information to reserve sufficient system resources to meet your throughput requirements. This rule generates an alert when the throughput approaches the maximum limit for a customer's account. This rule allows you to optionally set accountRCUThresholdPercentage (Config Default: 80) and accountWCUThresholdPercentage (Config Default: 80) parameters. The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| C1.a Monitoring Coverage | The data sources that you include in your monitoring allow for timely identification of security events which might affect the operation of your essential function. | Enable this rule to help improve Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance monitoring on the Amazon EC2 console, which displays monitoring graphs with a 1-minute period for the instance. | |
| C1.a Monitoring Coverage | The data sources that you include in your monitoring allow for timely identification of security events which might affect the operation of your essential function. | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| C1.a Monitoring Coverage | The data sources that you include in your monitoring allow for timely identification of security events which might affect the operation of your essential function. | Amazon GuardDuty helps you understand the impact of an incident by classifying findings by severity: low, medium, and high. You can use these classifications for determining remediation strategies and priorities. This rule allows you to optionally set the daysLowSev (Config Default: 30), daysMediumSev (Config Default: 7), and daysHighSev (Config Default: 1) for non-archived findings, as required by your organization's policies. | |
| C1.a Monitoring Coverage | The data sources that you include in your monitoring allow for timely identification of security events which might affect the operation of your essential function. | This rule ensures that a Lambda function's concurrency high and low limits are established. This can assist in baselining the number of requests that your function is serving at any given time. | |
| C1.a Monitoring Coverage | The data sources that you include in your monitoring allow for timely identification of security events which might affect the operation of your essential function. | Enable this rule to help notify the appropriate personnel through Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) or Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) when a function has failed. | |
| C1.a Monitoring Coverage | The data sources that you include in your monitoring allow for timely identification of security events which might affect the operation of your essential function. | Enable Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to help monitor Amazon RDS availability. This provides detailed visibility into the health of your Amazon RDS database instances. When the Amazon RDS storage is using more than one underlying physical device, Enhanced Monitoring collects the data for each device. Also, when the Amazon RDS database instance is running in a Multi-AZ deployment, the data for each device on the secondary host is collected, and the secondary host metrics. | |
| C1.a Monitoring Coverage | The data sources that you include in your monitoring allow for timely identification of security events which might affect the operation of your essential function. | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| C1.a Monitoring Coverage | The data sources that you include in your monitoring allow for timely identification of security events which might affect the operation of your essential function. | Ensure that your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket has lock enabled, by default. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in S3 buckets, enforce object locks at rest to help protect that data. | |
| C1.b Securing Logs | You hold logging data securely and grant read access only to accounts with business need. No employee should ever need to modify or delete logging data within an agreed retention period, after which it should be deleted. | Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) server access logging provides a method to monitor the network for potential cybersecurity events. The events are monitored by capturing detailed records for the requests that are made to an Amazon S3 bucket. Each access log record provides details about a single access request. The details include the requester, bucket name, request time, request action, response status, and an error code, if relevant. | |
| C1.b Securing Logs | You hold logging data securely and grant read access only to accounts with business need. No employee should ever need to modify or delete logging data within an agreed retention period, after which it should be deleted. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by enabling s3_ bucket_policy_grantee_check. This rule checks that the access granted by the Amazon S3 bucket is restricted by any of the AWS principals, federated users, service principals, IP addresses, or Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) IDs that you provide. | |
| C1.b Securing Logs | You hold logging data securely and grant read access only to accounts with business need. No employee should ever need to modify or delete logging data within an agreed retention period, after which it should be deleted. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by only allowing authorized users, processes, and devices access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. The management of access should be consistent with the classification of the data. | |
| C1.b Securing Logs | You hold logging data securely and grant read access only to accounts with business need. No employee should ever need to modify or delete logging data within an agreed retention period, after which it should be deleted. | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by only allowing authorized users, processes, and devices access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. The management of access should be consistent with the classification of the data. | |
| C1.b Securing Logs | You hold logging data securely and grant read access only to accounts with business need. No employee should ever need to modify or delete logging data within an agreed retention period, after which it should be deleted. | Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Cross-Region Replication (CRR) supports maintaining adequate capacity and availability. CRR enables automatic, asynchronous copying of objects across Amazon S3 buckets to help ensure that data availability is maintained. | |
| C1.b Securing Logs | You hold logging data securely and grant read access only to accounts with business need. No employee should ever need to modify or delete logging data within an agreed retention period, after which it should be deleted. | Ensure an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user, IAM role or IAM group does not have an inline policy to control access to systems and assets. AWS recommends to use managed policies instead of inline policies. The managed policies allow reusability, versioning and rolling back, and delegating permissions management. | |
| C1.b Securing Logs | You hold logging data securely and grant read access only to accounts with business need. No employee should ever need to modify or delete logging data within an agreed retention period, after which it should be deleted. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties with access permissions and authorizations, restricting policies from containing "Effect": "Allow" with "Action": "*" over "Resource": "*". Allowing users to have more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| C1.b Securing Logs | You hold logging data securely and grant read access only to accounts with business need. No employee should ever need to modify or delete logging data within an agreed retention period, after which it should be deleted. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you restrict access permissions and authorizations, by ensuring users are members of at least one group. Allowing users more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| C1.b Securing Logs | You hold logging data securely and grant read access only to accounts with business need. No employee should ever need to modify or delete logging data within an agreed retention period, after which it should be deleted. | This rule ensures AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies are attached only to groups or roles to control access to systems and assets. Assigning privileges at the group or the role level helps to reduce opportunity for an identity to receive or retain excessive privileges. | |
| C1.b Securing Logs | You hold logging data securely and grant read access only to accounts with business need. No employee should ever need to modify or delete logging data within an agreed retention period, after which it should be deleted. | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you with access permissions and authorizations by checking for IAM passwords and access keys that are not used for a specified time period. If these unused credentials are identified, you should disable and/or remove the credentials, as this may violate the principle of least privilege. This rule requires you to set a value to the maxCredentialUsageAge (Config Default: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| C1.b Securing Logs | You hold logging data securely and grant read access only to accounts with business need. No employee should ever need to modify or delete logging data within an agreed retention period, after which it should be deleted. | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | Amazon GuardDuty helps you understand the impact of an incident by classifying findings by severity: low, medium, and high. You can use these classifications for determining remediation strategies and priorities. This rule allows you to optionally set the daysLowSev (Config Default: 30), daysMediumSev (Config Default: 7), and daysHighSev (Config Default: 1) for non-archived findings, as required by your organization's policies. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | Amazon CloudWatch alarms alert when a metric breaches the threshold for a specified number of evaluation periods. The alarm performs one or more actions based on the value of the metric or expression relative to a threshold over a number of time periods. This rule requires a value for alarmActionRequired (Config Default: True), insufficientDataActionRequired (Config Default: True), okActionRequired (Config Default: False). The actual value should reflect the alarm actions for your environment. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | Amazon S3 event notifications can alert relevant personnel of any accidental or intentional modifications on your bucket objects. Example alerts include: new object is creation, object removal, object restoration, lost and replicated objects. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | API Gateway logging displays detailed views of users who accessed the API and the way they accessed the API. This insight enables visibility of user activities. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | Use Amazon CloudWatch to centrally collect and manage log event activity. Inclusion of AWS CloudTrail data provides details of API call activity within your AWS account. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | The collection of Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data events helps in detecting any anomalous activity. The details include AWS account information that accessed an Amazon S3 bucket, IP address, and time of event. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | This rule helps ensure the use of AWS recommended security best practices for AWS CloudTrail, by checking for the enablement of multiple settings. These include the use of log encryption, log validation, and enabling AWS CloudTrail in multiple regions. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | Ensure a minimum duration of event log data is retained for your log groups to help with troubleshooting and forensics investigations. The lack of available past event log data makes it difficult to reconstruct and identify potentially malicious events. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | Elastic Load Balancing activity is a central point of communication within an environment. Ensure ELB logging is enabled. The collected data provides detailed information about requests sent to the ELB. Each log contains information such as the time the request was received, the client's IP address, latencies, request paths, and server responses. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | To help with logging and monitoring within your environment, ensure Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) logging is enabled. With Amazon RDS logging, you can capture events such as connections, disconnections, queries, or tables queried. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | To protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Redshift clusters. You must also ensure that required configurations are deployed on Amazon Redshift clusters. The audit logging should be enabled to provide information about connections and user activities in the database. This rule requires that a value is set for clusterDbEncrypted (Config Default : TRUE), and loggingEnabled (Config Default: TRUE). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) server access logging provides a method to monitor the network for potential cybersecurity events. The events are monitored by capturing detailed records for the requests that are made to an Amazon S3 bucket. Each access log record provides details about a single access request. The details include the requester, bucket name, request time, request action, response status, and an error code, if relevant. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | The VPC flow logs provide detailed records for information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). By default, the flow log record includes values for the different components of the IP flow, including the source, destination, and protocol. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | To help with logging and monitoring within your environment, enable AWS WAF (V2) logging on regional and global web ACLs. AWS WAF logging provides detailed information about the traffic that is analyzed by your web ACL. The logs record the time that AWS WAF received the request from your AWS resource, information about the request, and an action for the rule that each request matched. | |
| C1.c Generating Alerts | Evidence of potential security incidents contained in your monitoring data is reliably identified and triggers alerts. | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| C1.d Identifying Security Incidents | You contextualise alerts with knowledge of the threat and your systems, to identify those security incidents that require some form of response. | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| C1.d Identifying Security Incidents | You contextualise alerts with knowledge of the threat and your systems, to identify those security incidents that require some form of response. | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| C1.e Monitoring Tools and Skills | Monitoring staff skills, tools and roles, including any that are outsourced, should reflect governance and reporting requirements, expected threats and the complexities of the network or system data they need to use. Monitoring staff have knowledge of the essential functions they need to protect. | Amazon GuardDuty helps you understand the impact of an incident by classifying findings by severity: low, medium, and high. You can use these classifications for determining remediation strategies and priorities. This rule allows you to optionally set the daysLowSev (Config Default: 30), daysMediumSev (Config Default: 7), and daysHighSev (Config Default: 1) for non-archived findings, as required by your organization's policies. | |
| C1.e Monitoring Tools and Skills | Monitoring staff skills, tools and roles, including any that are outsourced, should reflect governance and reporting requirements, expected threats and the complexities of the network or system data they need to use. Monitoring staff have knowledge of the essential functions they need to protect. | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| C1.e Monitoring Tools and Skills | Monitoring staff skills, tools and roles, including any that are outsourced, should reflect governance and reporting requirements, expected threats and the complexities of the network or system data they need to use. Monitoring staff have knowledge of the essential functions they need to protect. | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| C2.a System Abnormalities for Attack Detection | You define examples of abnormalities in system behaviour that provide practical ways of detecting malicious activity that is otherwise hard to identify. | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| C2.a System Abnormalities for Attack Detection | You define examples of abnormalities in system behaviour that provide practical ways of detecting malicious activity that is otherwise hard to identify. | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| D1.c Testing and Exercising | Your organization carries out exercises to test response plans, using past incidents that affected your (and other) organization, and scenarios that draw on threat intelligence and your risk assessment. | response-plan-exists-maintained (Process Check) | Ensure incident response plans are established, maintained, and distributed to responsible personnel. Having updated and formally documented response plans can assist in making sure response personnel understand roles, responsibilities and processes to be followed during an incident. |
| D1.c Testing and Exercising | Your organization carries out exercises to test response plans, using past incidents that affected your (and other) organization, and scenarios that draw on threat intelligence and your risk assessment. | response-plan-tested (Process Check) | Ensure Incident response and recovery plans are tested. This can assist in understanding if your plan will be effective during an incident and if any gaps or updates need to be addressed. |
Template
The template is available on GitHub: Operational Best Practices for NCSC Cyber Assesment Framework
