Secure IT

9 May 2021 by Bailey Jones

    Security. The single most important aspect to anything techology related, but 9 times out of 10, the most overlooked. If you ask me everyone should have a form of MFA active on all of their online accounts, whether it be your AWS Management Console login or something as small as an Instagram account. The most common excuse I hear from people is "you mean I have to use a seperate app to authenticate every time I log in? No thanks!" and that right there is why people complain about getting 'hacked' (apart from using the same, basic 8 character password for everything but I won't even start on that). It takes roughly 60 days to form a habit, so why not be better off safe than sorry and start forming good account security habits now?

    On the AWS side, there are many things you can do as a security professional to help decrease the likelihood of your company's infrastructure getting comprimised. First, start by enabling CloudTrail and AWS Config in all of your organization accounts. And yes, you need multiple accounts for your different projects - this will mitigate the attack surface if that time does come in the future. CloudTrail used in conjunction with CloudWatch is a great solution for automating security alerts such as console logins, security group changes, etc. Config has a lot of automation abilities itself, but even if you don't want to take the time to learn about it, enabling it will save you time in the future as it allows one to go back and look at past configurations helping revert back if there is a critical failure within one of your resources. Spend the 5 minutes enabling these two services now and save the 5 hours searching for what went wrong in the future.

    Now, I know there are plenty more services that AWS has to offer from a security standpoint, but this is a blog post, not a novel. Security has always been one of my greatest passions and that has much to do with growing up with a dad who is deeply invested in the Cyber Security realm. For this reason, the AWS Security Speciality was the first speciality certification I decided to earn as I knew I would enjoy it the most. My plans for this summer are to branch out and learn some Docker and other products that I use on a daily basis for work along with studying for the AWS Advanced Networking Specaility. Until then, as always thank you for reading and please do yourself a favor and activate MFA on all of your accounts (I recommend Duo Mobile, or if supported, a YubiKey)!