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AWS Cloud Security & Hardening Checklist

A practical cybersecurity checklist designed to help organizations assess risks, improve compliance, and strengthen security controls.

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Securing Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure requires a shared responsibility model. This checklist provides a structured guide to auditing your AWS environment, managing identities, securing network configurations, and monitoring logs.

Key AWS Hardening Focus Areas:

Key Focus Areas

Identity & Access Management: Enforce MFA for all IAM users and restrict AWS root user usage.

Least Privilege: Utilize IAM Roles instead of long-term credentials for EC2 and ECS resources.

S3 Bucket Security: Block public access by default and enable server-side encryption.

VPC Network Isolation: Restrict Security Group access and use private subnets for backend resources.

AWS CloudTrail: Enable multi-region trail logging and store logs in an encrypted S3 bucket.

KMS Key Management: Use customer-managed keys (CMK) with automated rotation enabled.

VPC Flow Logs: Enable network traffic logging to detect anomalous inter-subnet activity.

AWS GuardDuty: Activate intelligent threat detection to analyze logs and alert on threats.

Secrets Manager: Securely store database credentials and rotate them dynamically.

IAM Credential Report: Regularly audit inactive users, unused access keys, and passwords.

AWS Config: Deploy configuration rules to continuously monitor resource compliance.

Patch Management: Set up AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Patch Manager for automated server patching.

Tailored for Cloud Architects, DevOps Engineers, and Cloud Security Consultants managing AWS workloads.

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