A hard look at AWS GuardDuty shortcomings
AWS GuardDuty has limitations in coverage, cost, and efficacy, leading to missed threats and high noise levels. Canary Infrastructure is suggested as a complementary, cost-effective solution for enhanced threat detection.
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The article discusses the shortcomings of AWS GuardDuty in threat detection and the potential benefits of using Canary Infrastructure as a complementary control. GuardDuty, while a cornerstone in AWS security, has limitations in coverage, cost, and efficacy. The coverage is limited to fewer services compared to AWS's extensive offerings, leading to optional add-ons with additional costs and patchy regional coverage. The cost of GuardDuty can escalate unexpectedly due to factors like data volume and new SKUs. In terms of efficacy, GuardDuty can miss contextual information, generate high noise levels, and struggle with certain types of attacks. The article presents experiments showing GuardDuty's latency in detecting threats, highlighting its limitations in scenarios like S3 ransomware attacks. Canary Infrastructure is proposed as a solution to enhance threat detection beyond GuardDuty's capabilities, offering flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and faster alerting. The article emphasizes the importance of considering additional security measures like Canary Infrastructure to bolster overall threat detection capabilities in AWS environments.
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9 commentsIt just needs to plausibly allow you to state to your auditor that "all hosts have anti-malware protection". Auditors almost always look at this closely. It's like TLS settings (who ever got hacked coz they were on TLS 1.1 and not 1.2???) - one of the brown M&Ms clauses of audits.
The alternatives are generally worse for reasons such as a) they interfere with your kernel b) have a console you have to deploy somewhere and requires babysitting c) they introduce their own attack surface on hosts d) they are not particularly effective in any case, etc etc (I have a long litany of complaints about this class of security product which probably doesn't need to be repeated here).
The control plane monitoring is "just OK" (as usual for an AWS add-on service), you can't customise it, you can't define your own rules, you just plumb it to monitoring and that's it.
Which is optimal if you barely care but have to do something. There is generally no hard requirement for effective control plane monitoring because it's too nuanced for auditors to verify.
GuardDuty does what AWS says it will do. This article moves the goal posts in order to judge it as inadequate.
This isn't true and the link to the source is a 404 page. It was already too much content marketing, no need to read beyond that line.
Took a while to figure that one out, not least of which because ECS has absurdly shitty UX, with little to no observability.
1. yes, ALL AWS security products have hilariously bad performance and shortcomings, and aren't fit for purpose.
2. this article is too short and doesn't do it justice, and 1/8th of it is dedicated to pitching their alternative (canary infra)
3. Tracebit, the company, doesn't do a good job for pitching canary infra.
conclusion: yeah, seems on brand for Tracebit. This is what I'll remember about your company. half built, accusing AWS of being half built.
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