In the ever-expanding realm of AWS, with over 200 services at your disposal, securing your cloud account configurations and mastering complex environments can feel like an overwhelming challenge. To help you prioritize and root them out, we’ve put together a guide for AWS configurations that are most commonly overlooked. Here are five of the top misconfigurations that could be lurking in your AWS environment right now.
The danger of cloud misconfigurations
As organizations build up their cloud usage and move to multi-cloud environments, security teams are overwhelmed by numerous configuration errors, all of which pose a security risk. Real-world data shows that companies on average experience around 3,500 cloud misconfigurations per month.
The reality is that even a single misconfiguration can provide attackers with an entry point that could lead to a data breach, economic loss, or the compromise of sensitive data. According to recent data published by Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), misconfigured cloud services are one of the 10 most common attack vectors exploited by malicious actors to break into organizations.
The dizzying pace of change in the cloud means that human errors are inevitable. Engineers can accidentally make mistakes, misconfigure services, and leave resources exposed. Understanding and addressing potential AWS misconfigurations in your cloud account is paramount. Failing to do so can expose your organization to severe threats such as unauthorized data access, data breaches, and regulatory non-compliance, all of which can inflict substantial financial and reputational damage.
The five riskiest AWS misconfigurations
Knowledge about common AWS misconfigurations and employing best practices for secure cloud configuration can significantly mitigate these risks, improving your organization’s overall security posture. Below, we highlight the top five most common AWS Misconfigurations you should be aware of when building your applications in the cloud.
1. Overly permissive roles and policies
Identity Access Management (IAM) permissions that are given to the IAM resources are usually overly permissive and allow for an escalation of privileges within the AWS environment. This type of misconfiguration allows the attacker to create or modify the IAM policy of the IAM user, group, or role, which might lead to gaining access to the AWS account.
Configuration details: Limit Root Account Usage
2. Amazon S3 buckets: Encryption
One of several storage options that Amazon provides, S3 buckets have become popular, with easy, out-of-the-box configurations to make data publicly accessible. This is convenient when S3 buckets are used alongside web and application servers running in EC2. However, this means more configurations need to be managed to prevent the data in the S3 buckets from being inadvertently accessible by the public.
By default, S3 does not automatically encrypt data. As a security practitioner, you have to configure S3 buckets to encrypt data automatically. This should be required unless there’s a specific reason the data can remain unencrypted. It’s critical that you actively monitor S3 configurations to ensure that encryption is activated.
Configuration details: Setting default server-side encryption behavior for Amazon S3 buckets
3. Public RDS snapshots
One of Amazon’s more popular database options, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is commonly used because of its out-of-the-box, automated options for configuration, management, maintenance, and security.
RDS snapshots are used to create backups of databases in the AWS cloud, and they can contain sensitive information such as personally identifiable information and corporate data. If an RDS snapshot isn’t properly configured, it may be publicly accessible, potentially allowing anyone to access the data contained within it. This can have significant consequences for the companies affected, including reputational damage and potential regulatory fines.
Configuration details: Setting Up AWS Config with the Console
4. AWS Lambda
Lambda is a serverless offering that allows customers to run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.
Insecure environment variables
Storing sensitive information, such as API keys or database credentials, as plaintext in Lambda function environment variables can expose them to potential attackers or unauthorized access.
5. AWS Fargate Access control: Assigning a task execution role
AWS Fargate offering allows customers to let Amazon provision, manage, and configure containers, with no need to manually launch or manage EC2 instances.
Fargate uses task execution roles to pull images from private registries – which is recommended over public registries – or to publish container logs to CloudWatch; these two tasks are critical. The goal of task execution roles is to isolate permissions for each task based on an IAM role, so that each task is prevented from seeing all the other AWS services in the account. The task execution role would be the same as the EC2 role, but the trust relationship needs to be changed such that the container networking interface is allowed to assume the IAM role.
Configuration details: Amazon ECS task execution IAM role
To learn more and get the full list of riskiest AWS misconfigurations, download the complete guide “The 15 AWS Misconfigurations to Know in 2023”.
Identify, respond and remediate misconfigurations and security risk
In a dynamic and complex cloud environment, finding and fixing all misconfigurations manually is impossible, especially at scale. Unresolved AWS misconfigurations stand as a significant and persistent security concern for organizations navigating the cloud environment.
Aqua Real-Time CSPM is a cloud security solution that helps organizations identify and remediate security risks, including cloud misconfigurations, in real time. Misconfigurations can pose a substantial security risk, with the potential to expose sensitive data, introduce vulnerabilities, and pave the way for breaches. By leveraging Aqua Real-Time CSPM, organizations can proactively manage and prevent misconfigurations, reducing the attack surface and strengthening the security posture of their cloud environments.
Conclusion
From IAM roles that are excessively permissive to S3 bucket encryption that’s less secure than you think, and even publicly accessible RDS snapshots that can jeopardize your data – our guide unveils the top 15 riskiest misconfigurations on AWS. Stay ahead of the game, fortify your defenses, and secure your cloud environment with expert insights from our latest guide.
