5.2.2. Amazon Inspector (Vulnerability Management)
First Principle: Amazon Inspector provides automated vulnerability management, continuously scanning EC2 instances and container images for software vulnerabilities and deviations from security best practices.
For security specialists, proactively identifying software vulnerabilities and insecure configurations in compute resources is essential. Manually assessing many instances can be time-consuming and error-prone.
Amazon Inspector is an automated vulnerability management service that continuously scans your AWS workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure.
Key Features of Amazon Inspector:
- Automated Scanning: Continuously scans:
- EC2 instances: For known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) in operating systems and applications, and deviations from security best practices.
- Container Images in Amazon ECR: Scans for CVEs and configuration issues.
- AWS Lambda functions: Scans for code vulnerabilities and configuration issues.
- Prioritized Findings: Provides prioritized, actionable security findings, detailing the vulnerability, its severity, and remediation steps.
- Network Reachability Analysis: Identifies EC2 instances that are exposed to the internet or unintended network segments, highlighting open ports and potential ingress paths.
- Continuous Assessment: Performs ongoing scans, so new vulnerabilities in deployed resources are automatically detected.
- Integration: Findings are delivered to AWS Security Hub for centralized management and to Amazon EventBridge for automated responses.
- Managed Service: No software to deploy or manage on instances.
Scenario: You need to continuously scan your production EC2 instances and Docker container images for known software vulnerabilities (CVEs) and identify any instances with unintended network exposure (e.g., publicly accessible ports).
Reflection Question: How does Amazon Inspector, by providing automated vulnerability management that continuously scans EC2 instances and container images for software vulnerabilities and deviations from security best practices, fundamentally enable proactive detection of security flaws and reduce the attack surface?