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Common Security Gaps in AWS: How to Lock Down AWS

Is your cloud secure? Discover the most common AWS security gaps we uncover during audits, including public resources, IAM misconfigurations, and more.

AWS offers IT teams the ability to create new technology solutions quickly and easily. But with great power comes great responsibility, and unfortunately, security misconfigurations in AWS are far too common.

We perform regular AWS security audits for our clients for compliance initiatives and proactive risk management. We consistently uncover recurring issues. In this blog, we’ll walk through the most common AWS security gaps we find and how you can avoid them.

Public S3 Buckets (Yes, Still)

Publicly accessible buckets remain commonplace. It’s just so easy to create them for temporary use and forget to clean up when you are done.

The Fix: Use Service Control policies to block public access settings, and regularly scan for open permissions.

Public Resources That Should Be Private

We frequently find databases, application servers, and internal tools that are deployed in public subnets, when they have no requirement to be exposed to the internet.

The Fix: Move these workloads to private subnets and route access through LoadBalancers, VPNs, or AWS API Gateways. Lockdown networks via route tables and security groups to tightly control traffic flow, even internally.

Static Access Keys

Stale static credentials are keys to the castle for attackers.

The Fix: With IAM Access Analyzer it’s easy to identify and rotate access keys. Properly crafted control policies can enforce rotation across your organization, but ultimately static credentials should be re-engineered to use short-lived tokens (AWS STS).

Lack of Logging and Monitoring

Without logging, you can’t detect or investigate incidents.

The Fix: Enable CloudTrail, GuardDuty, VPC Flow Logs, and CloudWatch alarms. Store logs in a centralized, immutable location, ideally an S3 bucket with tight access control.

Unpatched EC2 Instances

OS-level vulnerabilities are often overlooked in cloud environments.

The Fix: There should be some system for automated OS patching, either via AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager, Ansible, Puppet, or some other means. Amazon Inspector should be enabled to scan and report unpatched systems.

Missing Encryption

All too often we find sensitive data that has been left unencrypted, particularly in RDS or EBS.

The Fix: All data can be encrypted at rest by default in AWS, but this setting has to be enabled. This is an easy win that is not always performed.

Overly Permissive IAM Policies

Many AWS environments suffer from IAM sprawl and over-privileged roles.

The Fix: IAM policy audit in AWS should be an automated, recurring task. Leverage IAM Access Analyzer to detect risky configurations, validate least privilege principles, and review inline policies.

Unrestricted Security Groups

Wide-open ports (e.g., 0.0.0.0/0 on SSH or RDP) are a red flag.

The Fix: Automate regular review of security group rules, restrict inbound access, and use AWS Firewall Manager to enforce network security policies.

Final Thoughts on Common Security Gaps in AWS

If you’re asking yourself, “How secure is my AWS environment?”, we can help. This AWS security audit checklist will help you find low hanging fruit, but there is no substitute to bringing in an experienced team to assess your environment against real-world attack scenarios.

We help organizations implement AWS security best practices tailored to their business, and in compliance with security frameworks. Learn more about what to expect from an AWS Cloud Security Assessment.