How Defender for Cloud Apps helps protect your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment

Note

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is now part of Microsoft 365 Defender, which correlates signals from across the Microsoft Defender suite and provides incident-level detection, investigation, and powerful response capabilities. For more information, see Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps in Microsoft 365 Defender.

Amazon Web Services is an IaaS provider that enables your organization to host and manage their entire workloads in the cloud. Along with the benefits of leveraging infrastructure in the cloud, your organization's most critical assets may be exposed to threats. Exposed assets include storage instances with potentially sensitive information, compute resources that operate some of your most critical applications, ports, and virtual private networks that enable access to your organization.

Connecting AWS to Defender for Cloud Apps helps you secure your assets and detect potential threats by monitoring administrative and sign-in activities, notifying on possible brute force attacks, malicious use of a privileged user account, unusual deletions of VMs, and publicly exposed storage buckets.

Main threats

• Abuse of cloud resources
• Compromised accounts and insider threats
• Data leakage
• Resource misconfiguration and insufficient access control

How Defender for Cloud Apps helps to protect your environment

• Detect cloud threats, compromised accounts, and malicious insiders
• Limit exposure of shared data and enforce collaboration policies
• Use the audit trail of activities for forensic investigations

Control AWS with built-in policies and policy templates

You can use the following built-in policy templates to detect and notify you about potential threats:

Type	Name
Activity policy template	Admin console sign-in failures CloudTrail configuration changes EC2 instance configuration changes IAM policy changes Logon from a risky IP address Network access control list (ACL) changes Network gateway changes S3 configuration changes Security group configuration changes Virtual private network changes
Built-in anomaly detection policy	Activity from anonymous IP addresses Activity from infrequent country Activity from suspicious IP addresses Impossible travel Activity performed by terminated user (requires Azure Active Directory as IdP) Multiple failed login attempts Unusual administrative activities Unusual multiple storage deletion activities (preview) Multiple delete VM activities Unusual multiple VM creation activities (preview) Unusual region for cloud resource (preview)
File policy template	S3 bucket is publicly accessible

For more information about creating policies, see Create a policy.

Automate governance controls

In addition to monitoring for potential threats, you can apply and automate the following AWS governance actions to remediate detected threats:

Type	Action
User governance	- Notify user on alert (via Azure AD) - Require user to sign in again (via Azure AD) - Suspend user (via Azure AD)
Data governance	- Make an S3 bucket private - Remove a collaborator for an S3 bucket

For more information about remediating threats from apps, see Governing connected apps.

Protect AWS in real time

Review our best practices for blocking and protecting the download of sensitive data to unmanaged or risky devices.

Next steps

How to connect AWS to Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps