With evolving technology sector, it has become important to expand the security level in every organization to create a secure and safe environment. And, in order to provide the best security solution, the Amazon Inspector service comes on top. Inspector helps to improve the security and compliance of apps deployed on AWS by providing an automated security inspection service.
To learn more about this, in this blog, we will gain an understanding of the concepts, features, and how to begin with the Amazon Inspector service.
What is Amazon Inspector?
Amazon Inspector can be considered as an automated security assessment service used for enhancing the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. This service may analyze apps for exposure, vulnerabilities, and departures from recommended practices automatically. Amazon Inspector also creates a full list of security findings that are prioritized by level of severity after an evaluation is completed. These findings can then be verified on their own or as part of thorough evaluation reports available through the Amazon Inspector dashboard or API. This service is provided as pre-defined rules packages planned to common security best practices and vulnerability definitions.
Further, Amazon Inspector security assessments:
- Firstly, checks for unexpected network access to your Amazon EC2 instances as well as vulnerabilities on those instances.
- Secondly, checks the network accessibility of your Amazon EC2 instances as well as the security of the applications that run on them. Thirdly, examine apps for vulnerabilities, exposure, and departures from established practices.
- Fourthly, automate security vulnerability evaluations for static production systems or throughout your development and deployment pipelines.
- Lastly, provides preconfigured software known as an agent, which you can install in the operating system of the EC2 instances you want to evaluate if you choose. However, the agent checks the behavior of the EC2 instances, including network, file system, and process activity. And, gathers a large set of behavior and configuration data (telemetry).
What are the benefits of using Amazon Inspector?
The Amazon Inspector security assessment service comes with many benefits. Some of the top ones are:
1. Identifying Application Security Issues
Amazon Inspector helps in identifying security vulnerabilities as well as deviations from security best practices in applications, both before they are deployed, and while they are running in a production environment. This helps in enhancing the overall security posture of your applications deployed on AWS.
2. Combining Security into DevOps
Amazon Inspector is an API-driven service that examines the network configurations in your AWS account and uses an optional agent for visibility into your Amazon EC2 instances. As a result, this makes it easy for,
- Firstly, integrating Inspector assessments into your current DevOps workflow.
- Secondly, decentralizing and automating vulnerability assessments
- Lastly, enabling development and operations teams to incorporate security evaluations into the deployment process.
3. Expanding Development Agility
Amazon Inspector automates the security assessment of your applications and proactively identifying vulnerabilities for lowering the risk of introducing security issues during development and deployment. Further, this enables for developing and iterating on new applications quickly and examining compliance with best practices and policies.
4. Leveraging AWS Security Expertise
The AWS security organization is continuously examining the AWS environment and updating a knowledge base of security best practices and rules. However, Amazon Inspector makes this expertise available to you in the form of a service that simplifies the process of establishing and enforcing best practices within your AWS environment.
5. Streamlining Security Compliance
Amazon Inspector provides visibility into the security testing that occurs when applications are developed on AWS to security teams and auditors. Further, this allows validating and demonstrating that security and compliance standards. And, the best practices are followed throughout the development process much easier.
6. Enforcing Security Standards
Amazon Inspector allows you to define your application’s standards and best practices, as well as verify that they are followed. This makes it easier for your organization’s security standards and best practices to enforce. Moreover, it helps in the proactive management of security concerns before they impact your production application.
7. Configuration scanning and activity monitoring engine
Amazon Inspector provides an agent for analyzing the system and the resource configuration. It also examines the activity for determining the appearance, behavior, and dependent components of an assessment goal. Further, this data, when combined, provides a complete view of the target, including any potential security or compliance issues.
8. Built-in content library
A built-in library of rules and reports comes included with Amazon Inspector. Checks against best practices, common compliance requirements, and vulnerabilities are among them. Further, the checks give step-by-step instructions for correcting any potential security vulnerabilities.
9. Automation through an API
Use API for completely automating Amazon Inspector. Moreover, this enables you to integrate security testing into the development and design process, including the selection, execution, and reporting of those tests’ results.
Beggining with Amazon Inspector
In this section, we will learn about configuring Amazon Inspector and begin with creating and running assessments.
1. Prerequisites for using Amazon Inspector
While launching the Amazon Inspector console for the first time, select Get Started and complete the prerequisite tasks. However, you must complete these tasks before performing an Amazon Inspector assessment run:
- Firstly, you need to have at least one Amazon EC2 instance running in your AWS environment to run an Amazon Inspector assessment.
- Secondly, there can be chances that the Amazon Inspector agent must be running on each EC2 instance in your assessment target. Alternatively, you can use Systems Manager Run Command for installing the agent on your Amazon EC2 instances.
2. One-click setup
The approach shows how to create and conduct an automatic evaluation on all accessible EC2 instances in the current AWS account and region using a pre-built template and pre-defined scheduling parameters (once a week or once only).
- Firstly, open the Amazon Inspector console by logging into the AWS Management Console and.
- Secondly, select the type of assessment that you would like to run on the Welcome page.
- However, without the use of an Amazon Inspector agent, Network Assessments scans your AWS environment’s network configurations for vulnerabilities.
- And, Host Assessments examines the on-host software and configurations of your EC2 instances for vulnerabilities with a requirement for an agent to be installed on the EC2 instances.
- Thirdly, select either Run weekly (recommended) or Run once. After making this choice, the service automatically creates the assessment for you. Especially, the service:
- Firstly, creates a service-linked role.
- Secondly, installs the Amazon Inspector agent on all available Amazon EC2 instances in your AWS account and region, if appropriate.
- Thirdly, adds those instances to an assessment target.
- Then, using a defined set of rules packages, put that target in an assessment template.
- After that, runs the assessment weekly or only once based on whether you select Run weekly (recommended) or Run once.
- Lastly, select OK in the Confirmation dialog box. Then, Amazon Inspector automatically runs your assessment.
3. Advanced setup
The method guides you through the process of choosing which Amazon EC2 instances, rules packages, and scheduling parameters to employ in an evaluation target and template.
- Firstly, On the Welcome page, choose Advanced setup.
- Secondly, enter the name of your assessment target on the Define an assessment target page.
- Thirdly, you can keep the check box selected for including all EC2 instances in your AWS account and Region in the assessment target. However, if you want to select which EC2 instances to include, clear the All Instances check box. After that, enter the Key and Value tags that are linked with the target EC2 instances.
- Fourthly, you can keep the check box selected by default if your instances allow System Manager Run Command. The service installs an Amazon Inspector agent on all EC2 instances in the assessment target that allows System Manager Run Command.
- Then, select Next.
- After that, enter the name of your assessment template on the Define an assessment template page.
- Next, select the rules packages for including in the assessment template.
- Now, select the duration of your assessment run.
- Then, you can set a schedule for recurring assessment runs. And, select Next.
- After that, check your choices for the assessment target and template. However, if the configuration satifies, select Create. And, if you set an assessment schedule for your assessment template, the assessment automatically runs after select Create.
- Further, if you didn’t set up an assessment schedule, navigate to your assessment template through the console. Then, select Run.
- Lastly, for tracking the progress of the assessment run, in the navigation pane of the console, select Assessment runs, and then choose Findings.
Amazon Inspector pricing
Amazon Inspector is a service that assesses the security of your Amazon EC2 instances and the applications that run on them. However, the pricing is dependent on two dimensions,
- Firstly, the total number of EC2 instances used in each evaluation.
- Secondly, the type(s) of rules package you select.
However, any combination of two rule package types can be used in an Inspector evaluation: host assessment rules packages and/or network reachability rules packages. Here, the host assessment rules packages include,
- Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)
- Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks
- Security Best Practices
- Runtime Behavior Analysis.
And, you will be billed for both separately if your assessments include both host rules packages and the network reachability rules package.
Further, there are no upfront costs, no further software licenses or maintenance fees, and no need to buy expensive hardware with Amazon Inspector. This enables pricing to be customized based on the type of assessment and the number of instances included in each assessment, which is ideal for cloud-based applications. That is to say, you only pay for what you use with complete support of popular dynamic use cases like continuous deployment or auto-scaling. This is where per-host or per-IP licensing models can be difficult for managing due to dynamic changes in your cloud environment.
Final Words
Abobe we have gone through the overview of Amazon Inspector by learning about its benefits, uses, and steps to start with this service. This service is providing security solutions for many top companies taking an example,
- At Betterment Amazon Inspector is a cloud-based, API-driven security service that can be easily integrated into the software development and deployment lifecycle.
- Secondly, Coinbase is using this service as a security tool for running in line with their software development and deployment pipeline.
So, go through the blog, get some information, and if you think this service matches your requirement then begin with using AWS documentation as a reference.
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