Category: AWS Security Blog

Updated PCI DSS and PCI PIN compliance packages now available

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce enhancements to our Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance portfolio, further empowering AWS customers to build and manage secure, compliant payment environments with greater ease and flexibility. PCI Data Security Standard (DSS): Our…

AWS KMS: How many keys do I need?

As organizations continue their cloud journeys, effective data security in the cloud is a top priority. Whether it’s protecting customer information, intellectual property, or compliance-mandated data, encryption serves as a fundamental security control. This is where AWS Key Management Service…

Securing the future: building a culture of security

According to a 2024 Verizon report, nearly 70% of data breaches occurred because a person was manipulated by social engineering or made some type of error. This highlights the importance of human-layer defenses in an organization’s security strategy. In addition…

AWS Network Firewall Geographic IP Filtering launch

AWS Network Firewall is a managed service that provides a convenient way to deploy essential network protections for your virtual private clouds (VPCs). In this blog post, we discuss Geographic IP Filtering, a new feature of Network Firewall that you…

AWS post-quantum cryptography migration plan

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is migrating to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Like other security and compliance features in AWS, we will deliver PQC as part of our shared responsibility model. This means that some PQC features will be transparently enabled for all customers…

Federated access to Amazon Athena using AWS IAM Identity Center

Managing Amazon Athena through identity federation allows you to manage authentication and authorization procedures centrally. Athena is a serverless, interactive analytics service that provides a simplified and flexible way to analyze petabytes of data. In this blog post, we show…

Important changes to CloudTrail events for AWS IAM Identity Center

AWS IAM Identity Center is streamlining its AWS CloudTrail events by including only essential fields that are necessary for workflows like audit and incident response. This change simplifies user identification in CloudTrail, addressing customer feedback. It also enhances correlation between…

Securing the RAG ingestion pipeline: Filtering mechanisms

Retrieval-Augmented Generative (RAG) applications enhance the responses retrieved from large language models (LLMs) by integrating external data such as downloaded files, web scrapings, and user-contributed data pools. This integration improves the models’ performance by adding relevant context to the prompt. While…

Threat modeling your generative AI workload to evaluate security risk

As generative AI models become increasingly integrated into business applications, it’s crucial to evaluate the potential security risks they introduce. At AWS re:Invent 2023, we presented on this topic, helping hundreds of customers maintain high-velocity decision-making for adopting new technologies…

Amazon identified internet domains abused by APT29

APT29 aka Midnight Blizzard recently attempted to phish thousands of people. Building on work by CERT-UA, Amazon recently identified internet domains abused by APT29, a group widely attributed to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). In this instance, their targets were…

How to use interface VPC endpoints to meet your security objectives

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoints—powered by AWS PrivateLink—enable customers to establish private connectivity to supported AWS services, enterprise services, and third-party services by using private IP addresses. There are three types of VPC endpoints: interface endpoints, Gateway Load…

170 AWS services achieve HITRUST certification

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is excited to announce that 170 AWS services have achieved HITRUST certification for the 2024 assessment cycle, including the following 12 services that were certified for the first time: AWS AppFabric AWS Application Migration Service Amazon…

Using Amazon Detective for IAM investigations

Uncovering  AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles potentially involved in a security event can be a complex task, requiring security analysts to gather and analyze data from various sources, and determine the full scope of affected resources.…

Methodology for incident response on generative AI workloads

The AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) has developed a methodology that you can use to investigate security incidents involving generative AI-based applications. To respond to security events related to a generative AI workload, you should still follow the guidance…

AWS achieves HDS certification in four additional AWS Regions

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce that four additional AWS Regions—Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), and Israel (Tel Aviv)—have been granted the Health Data Hosting (Hébergeur de Données de Santé, HDS) certification, increasing the…

How to centrally manage secrets with AWS Secrets Manager

In today’s digital landscape, managing secrets, such as passwords, API keys, tokens, and other credentials, has become a critical task for organizations. For some Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers, centralized management of secrets can be a robust and efficient solution…

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management in AWS

Customers use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to securely build, deploy, and scale their applications. As your organization grows, you want to streamline permissions management towards least privilege for your identities and resources. At AWS, we see two customer personas working…

Network perimeter security protections for generative AI

Generative AI–based applications have grown in popularity in the last couple of years. Applications built with large language models (LLMs) have the potential to increase the value companies bring to their customers. In this blog post, we dive deep into…

Federated access to Amazon Athena using AWS IAM Identity Center

Managing Amazon Athena through identity federation allows you to manage authentication and authorization procedures centrally. Athena is a serverless, interactive analytics service that provides a simplified and flexible way to analyze petabytes of data. In this blog post, we show…

How to use the AWS Secrets Manager Agent

AWS Secrets Manager is a service that helps you manage, retrieve, and rotate database credentials, application credentials, OAuth tokens, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycles. You can use Secrets Manager to replace hard-coded credentials in application source code…

Top four ways to improve your Security Hub security score

AWS Security Hub is a cloud security posture management (CSPM) service that performs security best practice checks across your Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts and AWS Regions, aggregates alerts, and enables automated remediation. Security Hub is designed to simplify and…

Context window overflow: Breaking the barrier

Have you ever pondered the intricate workings of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, especially how they process and generate responses? At the heart of this fascinating process lies the context window, a critical element determining the amount of information an…