What's New With AWS Security? | April Edition

Introduction

Let's get ready for another installment of the series where we look at the latest and greatest updates to AWS security services.

Feel free to check out the previous articles within this series to get yourself updated on what AWS has been up to in terms of security.

Series: What's New With AWS Security?

Let's dive into the latest announcements from the month of April.

What's New With AWS Security Now?

Let's take a look at the latest additions to the AWS security services.

Announcement Date: 04/04/2024

1. AWS IAM Identity Center is now available in the Europe (Spain) and Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) AWS Regions

Announcement Date: 04/05/2024

1. Amazon Cognito is now available in Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region

Announcement Date: 04/10/2024

1. Amazon Verified Permissions is available in four additional regions

Announcement Date: 04/11/2024

1. AWS IAM Identity Center now offers a streamlined AWS access portal and shortcut links

Announcement Date: 04/12/2024

1. Amazon Detective supports investigations for GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring
2. AWS KMS announces more flexible automatic key rotation

Announcement Date: 04/15/2024

1. Amazon QuickSight now supports account instances of IAM Identity Center

Announcement Date: 04/16/2024

1. Amazon Cognito is now available in Europe (Spain) Region
2. Amazon Cognito is now available in Asia Pacific (Hyderabad)

Announcement Date: 04/17/2024

1. AWS Config advanced queries support 35 new resource types

Announcement Date: 04/19/2024

1. IAM Roles Anywhere now supports modifying the mapping of certificate attributes

Announcement Date: 04/22/2024

1. Amazon Inspector agentless vulnerability assessments for Amazon EC2 are now Generally Available (GA)

Announcement Date: 04/29/2024

1. AWS Firewall Manager now supports central deployment and management of VPC NACLs with common NACL policies

Announcement Date: 04/30/2024

1. AWS WAF is now available in the Canada West (Calgary) Region
2. AWS Security Hub announces the AWS Resource Tagging Standard
3. AWS Config simplifies usage analysis with Amazon CloudWatch metrics

 

Noteworthy Updates To Services

I must say that AWS has brought out some really interesting features and announcements in April. Let's take a look at some of the announcements that made my top pick.

1. AWS Config
AWS Config has added support for 35 new resource types within its advanced queries. This brings in the versatility of being able to search the current configuration state of AWS resources either in a single account, region, or even AWS Config aggregator.

Here are some of the newly supported resource types, But take a look at the AWS release notes for the complete list.

• AWS::Cognito::UserPoolClient
• AWS::Cognito::UserPoolGroup
• AWS::Connect::Instance
• AWS::Connect::QuickConnect
• AWS::EC2::CarrierGateway
• AWS::EC2::IPAMPool
• AWS::EC2::NetworkInsightsAccessScope
• AWS::EC2::NetworkInsightsPath
• AWS::EC2::TransitGatewayConnect
• AWS::EC2::TransitGatewayMulticastDomain
• AWS::ECS::CapacityProvider

2. Amazon Inspector
AWS now lets customers run vulnerability assessments on EC2 instances that do not have the Amazon Inspector agent installed. With the introduction of the agentless vulnerability assessments for Amazon EC2, Amazon Inspector takes a snapshot of the EBS volumes to collect the software inventory where Amazon Inspector will start looking for any known software vulnerabilities.

If you already have the SSM agent installed on your EC2 instances, then Amazon Inspector uses the agent for scanning.

3. AWS Firewall Manager
AWS Firewall Manager enabled customers to manage various policies such as WAF, Shield, and security groups. With this latest update, AWS Firewall Manager now allows customers to manage VPC NACLs with common NACL policies.

This brings an exciting opportunity for customers to implement baselines for protecting their resources such as pre-defined block rules that block certain traffic across multiple accounts. It also enables customers to centrally manage and apply these policies across multiple accounts.

Now customers can also enforce NACLs by configuring automatic remediation to revert unintended or unwanted changes and maintain compliance with the security posture baselines set by the organization.

Wrapping Up

It's truly intriguing to see the innovations and updates set in motion by the team at AWS.

Within this article, I've highlighted some of the major service announcements and feature introductions that were noteworthy. There may have been some announcements that I didn't cover in this month's announcement, therefore feel free to mention what you think was important in the comment section.

Stay Tuned for the next edition of "What's New With AWS Security"!

Thank you for reading. I hope you found this useful.