Amazon GuardDuty Enhances Detection of EC2 Instance Credential Exfiltration
Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Informed by a multitude of public and AWS-generated data feeds and powered by machine learning, GuardDuty analyzes billions of events in pursuit of trends, patterns, and anomalies that are recognizable signs that something is amiss. You can enable it with a click and see the first findings within minutes.
Today, we are adding to GuardDuty the ability to detect when your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance credentials are being used from another AWS Account. EC2 instance credentials are the temporary credentials made available through the EC2 metadata service to any applications running on an instance, when an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role is attached to it.
What Are the Risks? When your workloads deployed on EC2 instances access AWS services, they use an access key, a secret access key, and a session token. The secure mechanism to pass access key credentials to your workloads is to define the permissions required by your workload, create one or several IAM policies with the permissions, attach the policies to an IAM role and, finally, attach the role to the instance.
