Amazon GuardDuty continuously monitors and identifies threats by analyzing several types of activity in your AWS account and any invited member accounts that you link to. GuardDuty can notify you of a wide variety of threats including unauthorized access, trojans, communication with Tor anonymizing, or cryptocurrency networks.
In this Lab, you will learn how to use Amazon GuardDuty to automatically uncover malicious EC2 activity, and configure threat lists to improve the security of an AWS Lab environment.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this lab, you will be able to:
- Enable, disable, and suspend Amazon GuardDuty for AWS accounts
- Activate threat lists and trusted IP lists, and understand when to use each
- Understand the types of security findings GuardDuty can detect
- Prioritize and interpret GuardDuty findings in a live environment
Prerequisites
You should be familiar with:
- Core AWS services, particularly EC2, VPC, and S3
The following courses can be used to fulfill the prerequisite:
Updates
July 4th, 2023 - Updated the Examining Live Threats in GuardDuty lab step to reflect current expected GuardDuty findings
December 27th, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI
June 9th, 2022 - Added validation checks throughout lab
February 14th, 2022 - Clarified that there may be three instances in the EC2 Console but on the Malicious Instance and App Server are important for the lab
June 30th, 2021 - Changed to use GuardDuty in Ohio region
May 4th, 2020 - Updated screenshots to reflect the new AWS UI
January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab
Environment before
Environment after
Logan has been involved in software development and research since 2007 and has been in the cloud since 2012. He is an AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional, AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert, MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS), Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), and Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA). He earned his Ph.D. studying design automation and enjoys all things tech.