AWS Misconfiguration
Overview
AWS misconfigurations are responsible for major data breaches. Common issues:
- Public S3 buckets: Accidental public-read or public-write ACL
- IAM wildcard policies:
Action: "*"grants all permissions - Hardcoded AWS credentials: Access keys in source code
- Unencrypted RDS/S3: Data at rest not encrypted
- Overly permissive security groups: Port 22 or 3306 open to
0.0.0.0/0 - CloudTrail disabled: No audit trail
Remediation
- Enable S3 Block Public Access at the account level
- Apply principle of least privilege to all IAM policies
- Use IAM roles instead of hardcoded credentials
- Enable encryption at rest for all services
- Use VPC security groups with minimal required access