AWS GuardDuty

Amazon Web Services

Managed threat-detection service for AWS accounts, workloads, and S3 data.

Identity, Cloud & Access Commercial Platform / Suite Learning saas

Cyber Kill Chain & Defender Lifecycle

Attacker — Kill Chain
1 Reconnaissance
2 Weaponization
3 Delivery
4 Exploitation
5 Installation
6 Command & Control
7 Actions on Objectives
Defender — IR Lifecycle
8 Detection / Monitoring
9 Containment & Eradication
10 Post-incident Forensics

Description

AWS GuardDuty is the AWS-native threat detection service. It continuously analyses CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, DNS logs, EKS audit logs, S3 data events, and (with the malware add-on) attached EBS volumes — emitting findings with severity, MITRE ATT&CK mappings, and remediation hints.

Finding categories every CySA+ candidate should recognise:

  • Recon (port scan, anonymising IP).
  • UnauthorizedAccess (IAM credential exfiltration, instance credential exfil).
  • CryptoCurrency (Bitcoin mining traffic).
  • Backdoor / Trojan / Behavior (Tor exit nodes, known C2 IPs).

Use cases

  • Continuous baseline detection across AWS accounts
  • Feeding findings into Security Hub / SIEM
  • Auto-remediation via EventBridge + Lambda