4.10 Ensure a log metric filter and alarm exist for security group changes - 'subscription exists'

Warning! Audit Deprecated

This audit has been deprecated and will be removed in a future update.

Information

Real-time monitoring of API calls can be achieved by directing CloudTrail Logs to CloudWatch Logs and establishing corresponding metric filters and alarms. Security Groups are a stateful packet filter that controls ingress and egress traffic within a VPC. It is recommended that a metric filter and alarm be established for detecting changes to Security Groups.

Rationale:

Monitoring changes to security group will help ensure that resources and services are not unintentionally exposed.

Solution

Perform the following to setup the metric filter, alarm, SNS topic, and subscription:

Create a metric filter based on filter pattern provided which checks for security groups changes and the <cloudtrail_log_group_name> taken from audit step 1.

aws logs put-metric-filter --log-group-name '<cloudtrail_log_group_name>' --filter-name '<security_group_changes_metric>' --metric-transformations metricName= '<security_group_changes_metric>' ,metricNamespace='CISBenchmark',metricValue=1 --filter-pattern '{ ($.eventName = AuthorizeSecurityGroupIngress) || ($.eventName = AuthorizeSecurityGroupEgress) || ($.eventName = RevokeSecurityGroupIngress) || ($.eventName = RevokeSecurityGroupEgress) || ($.eventName = CreateSecurityGroup) || ($.eventName = DeleteSecurityGroup) }'

Note: You can choose your own metricName and metricNamespace strings. Using the same metricNamespace for all Foundations Benchmark metrics will group them together.

Create an SNS topic that the alarm will notify

aws sns create-topic --name '<sns_topic_name>'

Note: you can execute this command once and then re-use the same topic for all monitoring alarms.

Create an SNS subscription to the topic created in step 2

aws sns subscribe --topic-arn '<sns_topic_arn>' --protocol <protocol_for_sns> --notification-endpoint '<sns_subscription_endpoints>'

Note: you can execute this command once and then re-use the SNS subscription for all monitoring alarms.

Create an alarm that is associated with the CloudWatch Logs Metric Filter created in step 1 and an SNS topic created in step 2

aws cloudwatch put-metric-alarm --alarm-name '<security_group_changes_alarm>' --metric-name '<security_group_changes_metric>' --statistic Sum --period 300 --threshold 1 --comparison-operator GreaterThanOrEqualToThreshold --evaluation-periods 1 --namespace 'CISBenchmark' --alarm-actions '<sns_topic_arn>'

Item Details

Audit Name: CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations L2 1.4.0

References: CSCv6|6.5, CSCv6|6.7, CSCv7|6.2, CSCv7|14.6

Plugin: amazon_aws

Control ID: 46666154ecca52dd7eaafdb9e975fb96e97c2613c24b7275112a18c01a53af92

Detections

Analytics

4.10 Ensure a log metric filter and alarm exist for security group changes - 'subscription exists'

Warning! Audit Deprecated

Information

Solution

See Also

Item Details