In September 2023, more than 3.8 billion login details were exposed in company's data leak. And how did attackers find this information? One of the company's databases was left unprotected, allowing access to the confidential data inside.
In fact, a lot of data leaks are usually down to human error, such as forgetting to set up multi-factor authentication or employees leaving their passwords in a post-it note somewhere. In fact, according to Microsoft, there are over 300 million fraudulent sign-in attempts to cloud services every day - but multi-factor authentication alone can prevent 99.9% of attacks on your accounts.
This is why security has become such a big topic in cloud services, and AWS does not play around in this space too!
What are security services?
Security in the world of cloud computing is all about keeping your digital world safe and sound. Security services in AWS exist to:
- Protect your data, applications, and infrastructure from cyber threats.
- Make sure your resources are confidential and always available.
- Identify security vulnerabilities in your account.
Encryption
One of the key benefits of cloud security is encryption.
Encryption translates your data into a secret code, and only you and the people you trust have the key to translate it back into readable data. Even if someone gains access to your data, they cannot read it without the right encryption key.
AWS offers encryption services that can be applied to data at rest and data in transit. We first learnt about these two in the Amazon S3 topic - here's a little refresher:
- Encryption at rest secures data when it's sitting in storage. AWS's storage and database services, like Amazon S3, DynamoDB and RDS, offer encryption options to protect data at rest.
- Encryption in transit secures data when it's in transit over a network. The destination could be a client accessing your service or another AWS service. This functionality exists in AWS services like Redshift, SQS, S3, RDS, and many more.
Security services in AWS
Yes, AWS provides a comprehensive set of security services to help you protect your cloud resources. Here's an overview:
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps you manage access to AWS services and resources. You can control who can do what within your AWS account.
- AWS Key Management Service (KMS) helps you create and manage encryption keys used to protect your data. It's a service for data encryption at rest and in transit.
- AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects your web apps (e.g. websites) from common web attacks.
- Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service, which means it looks out for malicious activity and unauthorised behaviour in your AWS account.
- Amazon Inspector checks for security weak spots in your applications and helps you strengthen them.
- Amazon Macie uses machine learning to discover, classify, and protect sensitive data.
- Amazon Detective investigates security issues if something's wrong in your AWS setup.
