Accelerate Vulnerability Detection and Response for AWS with Tenable Cloud Security Agentless Assessment

Learn how to leverage our latest cloud security discovery feature, Tenable Cloud Security Agentless Assessment, to enhance the way you scan for software vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in the cloud.

Historically, vulnerability scanning in the cloud has been accomplished by way of using network-based scanners like Nessus or an agent-based approach with Nessus Agents. For years, Tenable has been the gold standard for security practitioners who want fast, comprehensive and accurate vulnerability scans backed by world class vulnerability research. Our customers have asked for easier ways to configure and manage their Nessus scans in the cloud and, in 2020, we released Tenable.io Frictionless Assessment, which was our first step into transforming Nessus to become more cloud-focused.

Tenable Cloud Security Agentless Assessment for Amazon Web Services (AWS) takes the groundbreaking work that Tenable.io Frictionless Assessment laid out and completely upgrades it for a truly seamless cloud native scanning solution.

A common problem security professionals run into within the cloud is attempting to apply traditional vulnerability management concepts to cloud workloads — especially ephemeral workloads. Auto-scaling enables cloud instances to spin up and spin down, which means traditional scan windows could miss assets needing to be assessed. Service account credentials for scanning are a pain to manage in the cloud, and it can be a challenge to get different teams to standardize and adopt endpoint agents or simply use images approved by the security team. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and, with Tenable Cloud Security Agentless Assessment, we set out to build a unique technology that overcomes these obstacles.

It's clear that removing obstacles that extend the time to discover and detect vulnerabilities, in general, has a significant impact on the amount of risk carried by an organization. Agentless Assessment aims to enhance the abilities of security teams to gain complete visibility into cloud configurations and perform comprehensive vulnerability assessment in a quick and efficient way, giving our customers a better shot at reducing that risk, faster.

Agentless Assessment for AWS

Tenable Cloud Security Agentless Assessment for AWS enables cloud security teams to use the power of Nessus for vulnerability and misconfiguration assessments without the need to install scanners or agents, configure credentials on target hosts or set up scan policies. Using a proprietary approach, it enables users to onboard their cloud accounts within minutes and scan all assets for software vulnerabilities and cloud posture misconfigurations without any impact on compute speed or costs. The speed at which we're able to collect data, coupled with our event-driven approach, dramatically improves Tenable's ability to ensure our customers are confident in the vulnerability information we're providing. In the process, we're helping cloud security teams and developers quickly identify security weaknesses and providing actionable recommendations on what should be done to fix them.

Furthermore, when a new vulnerability detection is published to our vulnerability research feed, Tenable Cloud Security allows security teams to identify potential vulnerabilities within their existing collected inventory without needing to execute a new scan. This near real-time detection and unique approach to vulnerability assessment enables users to reduce their mean time to remediate issues. As a result, it provides the crucial data security teams need to make informed decisions about how to prioritize their remediation efforts.

Additional benefits of Tenable Cloud Security Agentless Assessment include:

• Ease of deployment: Agentless Assessment is API driven, so the deployment is a breeze with a single integration point: a read-only role to check for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in one fell swoop.
• Two solutions in one: Scan for vulnerabilities and cloud infrastructure configurations with a single tool.
• Limited scan overhead: There are no agents to deploy or bake in, no scan templates, and no policies to define. Data simply flows into Tenable Cloud Security.
• Gold standard vulnerability detection: The Tenable vulnerability and threat feeds, trusted by thousands of organizations around the globe, are utilized by Agentless Assessment.
• Continuous vulnerability assurance: When new vulnerabilities are identified and detections are created, the Tenable Cloud Security immediately rescans and re-assesses all stored inventories against the most updated vulnerability feed.
• Safety: The scans are read-only, no write permissions are required.
• Flexibility: The tool allows users the ability to run continuous Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) event-driven scans, scheduled scans, or simply execute manual scans on an ad-hoc basis.

Additionally, Tenable Cloud Security Agentless Assessment makes it easy for cloud security teams to ensure AWS cloud workloads are configured correctly by providing pre-built policy templates for detecting risks in runtime, such as:

• Identity-based (e.g., overprivileged admins)
• Insecure storage configuration or access activities (e.g., wide open and/or unencrypted Amazon Simple Storage [S3] buckets in AWS, etc.)
• Insecure instance creation and deletion
• Insecure network configurations and activities
• And many more…

How to use Agentless Assessment for AWS

Step 1. Onboard all of your AWS accounts in minutes. 

Getting started is super fast and easy. All you need are read-only and IAM Audit roles, easily deployed in a few steps for multi-account AWS environments. These will automatically deploy the needed role at all sub accounts that are within scope. Tenable Cloud Security automatically creates snapshots of your virtual disks to scan, so there's no need to separately create storage snapshots. This video also shows how to create an optional auto-remediation role. All the JSON needed for these roles is provided.

Step 2. Start Agentless Assessment scans

With Agentless Assessment, there are no scan templates to configure, you've already deployed the role so you have no credentials to set up. Your workloads and AWS environment are automatically scanned as soon as you complete onboarding. Data simply flows into Tenable Cloud Security and vulnerabilities are presented within the unified findings workspace.

Step 3. Achieve up-to-date visibility of all your cloud assets that is easily searchable

As data flows into Tenable Cloud Security, users can leverage existing functionality to prioritize vulnerabilities for remediation. Users immediately have access to the contextualized threats, Toxic Combinations that show risks based on your environment and configurations, excessive permissions, and much more.

What’s next?

Existing Tenable customers can now get early access to Tenable Cloud Security Agentless Assessment for AWS. The new functionality is scheduled for general availability at the end of September. In Q4, Tenable expects to release Agentless Assessment for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), along with additional enhancements around container security.

Learn more

• Read the blog: Introducing Tenable Cloud Security with Agentless Assessment and Live Results
• Attend the webinar: What’s New with Tenable Cloud Security?
• Visit the Tenable Cloud Security product page: https://www.tenable.com/products/tenable-cloud-security