Sift Security Tools Release for AWS Monitoring - CloudHunter

We are excited to release CloudHunter, a web service similar to AWS CloudTrail that allows customers to visually explore and investigate their AWS cloud infrastructure.  At Sift, we felt this integration would be important for 2 main reasons:

1. Investigating events happening in AWS directly from Amazon is painful, unless you know exactly what event you're looking for.
2. There are not many solutions that allow customers to follow chains of events spanning across the on-premises network and AWS on a single screen.

At Netflix, we spent a lot of time creating custom tools to address security concerns in our AWS infrastructure because we needed to supplement the AWS logs, and created visualizations based on that data.  The amazing suite of open source tools from Netflix are the solutions they used to resolve their own pain points.  Hosting microservices in the cloud with continuous integration and continuous deployment can be extremely efficient and robust.  However, tracking events, especially for security use cases, becomes exceedingly complex.  With compute instances and load balancers constantly being spun-up and torn down, sometimes changing from one minute to the next, security and operations groups can often find themselves in the dark about what's happening in their own environment.

Today, CloudHunter ingests events from AWS CloudTrail and VPC Flow logs, similar to how CloudTrail helps customers to perform compliance with internal policies or regulatory standards.  We load this data into our graph database and run our anomaly detection algorithms over that data the same as any other data source.  The result is that we will allow you to explore your infrastructure visually, and will alert you about suspicious activity in the cloud.  What kinds of things do we find?  Here are a few:

1. In our own infrastructure, we already found people who were not using multi-factor authentication when making changes to AWS, and were able to resolve it quickly.
2. We can see the geographies and IP addresses being used to modify our infrastructure and easily report on the employees who are traveling the most.
3. We know exactly who has modified security groups, the interfaces involved, and the traffic allowed through.
4. We know who's making permission changes to our S3 buckets, and when.
5. We get alerts when somebody does something strange, like deleting security groups or S3 buckets.

The best part is that there is no agent to install, it works right out of the box with the AWS infrastructure you already have in place.  Since we don't have a monitoring agent deployed, there is no impact on the performance of your services. Still, CloudHunter can monitor your AWS security similar to Amazon CloudWatch, that is a monitoring service for AWS cloud infrastructure and the app running on AWS.

You may be asking what's next.  Our next step is to empower users to take actions right from the graph, using the APIs exposed from Amazon.  I, for one, would certainly like to be able to right click and run a "playbook".  It would be great, for example, to be able to get the current permissions for a S3 bucket or run a forensic procedure for an EC2 instance that seems to be compromised.  If you have any ideas, we would love to hear from you!

We have a data sheet about CloudHunter available to learn more.
For any further information, please e-mail us at contact@siftsecurity.com