SEC10-BP06: Pre-deploy tools

Overview

Verify that security personnel have the right tools pre-deployed to reduce the time for investigation through to recovery.

Implementation Guidance

To automate security response and operations functions, you can use a comprehensive set of APIs and tools from AWS. You can fully automate identity management, network security, data protection, and monitoring capabilities and deliver them using popular software development methods that you already have in place.

When you build security automation, your system can monitor, review, and initiate a response, rather than having people monitor your security position and manually react to events. If your incident response teams continue to respond to alerts in the same way, they risk alert fatigue. Over time, the team can become desensitized to alerts and can either make mistakes handling ordinary situations or miss unusual alerts.

Automation helps avoid alert fatigue by using functions that process the repetitive and ordinary alerts, leaving humans to handle the sensitive and unique incidents. Integrating anomaly detection systems, such as Amazon GuardDuty, AWS CloudTrail Insights, and Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection, can reduce the burden of common threshold-based alerts.

You can improve manual processes by programmatically automating steps in the process. After you define the remediation pattern to an event, you can decompose that pattern into actionable logic, and write the code to perform that logic. Responders can then run that code to remediate the issue. Over time, you can automate more and more steps, and ultimately automatically handle whole classes of common incidents.

During a security investigation, you need to be able to review relevant logs to record and understand the full scope and timeline of the incident. Logs are also required for alert generation, indicating certain actions of interest have happened. It is critical to select, enable, store, and set up querying and retrieval mechanisms, and set up alerting. Additionally, an effective way to provide tools to search log data is Amazon Detective.

AWS offers over 200 cloud services and thousands of features. We recommend that you review the services that can support and simplify your incident response strategy. In addition to logging, you should develop and implement a tagging strategy. Tagging can help provide context around the purpose of an AWS resource. Tagging can also be used for automation.

Implementation Steps

Select and set up logs for analysis and alerting

See the following documentation on configuring logging for incident response:

Enable security services to support detection and response

AWS provides native detective, preventative, and responsive capabilities, and other services can be used to architect custom security solutions. For a list of the most relevant services for security incident response, see Cloud capability definitions.

Develop and implement a tagging strategy

Obtaining contextual information on the business use case and relevant internal stakeholders surrounding an AWS resource can be difficult. One way to do this is in the form of tags, which assign metadata to your AWS resources and consist of a user-defined key and value. You can create tags to categorize resources by purpose, owner, environment, type of data processed, and other criteria of your choice.

Having a consistent tagging strategy can speed up response times and minimize time spent on organizational context by allowing you to quickly identify and discern contextual information about an AWS resource. Tags can also serve as a mechanism to initiate response automations.

For more detail on what to tag, see Tagging your AWS resources. You’ll want to first define the tags you want to implement across your organization. After that, you’ll implement and enforce this tagging strategy. For more detail on implementation and enforcement, see Implement AWS resource tagging strategy using AWS Tag Policies and Service Control Policies (SCPs).

Implementation Examples

Example 1: Comprehensive Security Tools Deployment Framework

Example 2: Automated Incident Response Toolkit with Tagging Strategy

Resources

AWS Security Services for Pre-deployment

Detection Services:

Logging and Monitoring:

Automation and Orchestration:

Management and Governance:

Security Tool Deployment Checklist

Pre-deployment Planning:

  • Define security tool requirements based on threat model
  • Identify target accounts and regions for deployment
  • Plan integration points between security services
  • Design automation workflows and response procedures
  • Establish logging and monitoring requirements

Core Security Services:

  • Deploy Amazon GuardDuty in all active regions
  • Enable AWS Security Hub with appropriate standards
  • Configure Amazon Detective for investigation capabilities
  • Set up AWS Config for compliance monitoring
  • Implement comprehensive CloudTrail logging
  • Deploy Amazon Inspector for vulnerability scanning

Logging Infrastructure:

  • Configure CloudTrail for API activity logging
  • Enable VPC Flow Logs for network monitoring
  • Set up DNS query logging with Route 53 Resolver
  • Configure application logging with CloudWatch Logs
  • Enable load balancer access logging
  • Implement S3 access logging for sensitive buckets

Automation Framework:

  • Deploy Lambda functions for automated response
  • Create Step Functions workflows for complex procedures
  • Configure EventBridge rules for event-driven automation
  • Set up SNS topics for notification and alerting
  • Implement Systems Manager automation documents

Tagging Strategy:

  • Define mandatory and optional tags
  • Create tag policies for enforcement
  • Deploy tag compliance monitoring
  • Implement automated tag application
  • Set up tag audit and reporting

Tagging Strategy Best Practices

Mandatory Tags:

  • Environment: Production, Staging, Development, Test
  • Owner: Team or individual responsible for the resource
  • CostCenter: For cost allocation and chargeback
  • DataClassification: Public, Internal, Confidential, Restricted

Incident Response Tags:

  • IncidentResponseRole: Critical, Important, Supporting, NonCritical
  • BackupRequired: Yes, No
  • MonitoringLevel: High, Medium, Low
  • ComplianceFramework: SOC2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR

Automation Tags:

  • AutomatedResponse: Enabled, Disabled
  • IsolationGroup: WebTier, AppTier, DataTier, Management
  • RecoveryPriority: P1, P2, P3, P4

Automation Patterns

Threat Detection Automation:

  • GuardDuty finding → EventBridge → Lambda → Automated response
  • Security Hub finding → Step Functions → Investigation workflow
  • CloudWatch alarm → SNS → Incident notification

Compliance Automation:

  • Config rule violation → Lambda → Automatic remediation
  • Tag policy violation → EventBridge → Tag enforcement
  • Security standard failure → Systems Manager → Remediation runbook

Incident Response Automation:

  • Manual incident declaration → Step Functions → Response orchestration
  • Automated threat detection → Lambda → Containment actions
  • Forensic evidence collection → Systems Manager → Evidence preservation

Cost Optimization for Security Tools

GuardDuty Cost Factors:

  • CloudTrail events processed
  • VPC Flow Logs analyzed
  • DNS logs processed
  • S3 data events monitored

Security Hub Cost Factors:

  • Security checks performed
  • Findings ingested from integrated services
  • Compliance scans executed

Detective Cost Factors:

  • Data ingested from sources
  • Behavior graph storage
  • Investigation queries performed

Config Cost Factors:

  • Configuration items recorded
  • Rule evaluations performed
  • S3 storage for configuration history

Monitoring and Alerting Setup

Critical Alerts:

  • High-severity GuardDuty findings
  • Security Hub compliance failures
  • Config rule violations
  • Unauthorized API activity

Operational Alerts:

  • Service deployment failures
  • Log ingestion issues
  • Automation execution failures
  • Tag compliance violations

Performance Monitoring:

  • Lambda function execution metrics
  • Step Functions workflow success rates
  • EventBridge rule processing times
  • API throttling and error rates

Testing and Validation

Functional Testing:

  • Verify security service deployment across all regions
  • Test automation workflows with simulated events
  • Validate logging and monitoring configurations
  • Confirm alert delivery and escalation procedures

Security Testing:

  • Conduct red team exercises to test detection capabilities
  • Simulate security incidents to validate response procedures
  • Test forensic evidence collection and preservation
  • Verify compliance monitoring and reporting accuracy

Performance Testing:

  • Load test automation functions with high event volumes
  • Validate scaling behavior under stress conditions
  • Test failover and recovery procedures
  • Monitor resource utilization and cost impact

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