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Amazon GuardDuty

  • What it is
    • Intelligent threat detection service. Continuously analyzes logs for malicious or unauthorized behavior.
    • Uses machine learning, anomaly detection, and threat intelligence feeds.
  • What it reads
    • VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail event and management logs, DNS query logs, EKS audit logs, S3 data events, RDS login activity, Lambda network activity.
    • Agentless — no software to install, enable with one click.
  • What it finds
    • Cryptocurrency mining, compromised credentials, communication with known-bad IPs, unusual API calls, data exfiltration patterns.
  • Not to be confused with
    • Amazon Inspector — scans for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in your workloads (a weakness that could be exploited). GuardDuty detects active threats (something bad happening now).
    • Amazon Detective — takes a GuardDuty finding and helps you investigate the root cause.
    • AWS Security Hub — aggregates findings from all of these into one dashboard.

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