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Detecting AWS suspicious provisioning activities

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You are an Amazon Web Services (AWS) admin who manages access to AWS resources and services across your organization. You need to monitor your AWS provisioning activities for behaviors originating from unfamiliar or unusual locations. These behaviors may indicate that malicious activities are occurring somewhere within your network.

Because most enterprise AWS activities originate from familiar geographic locations, activity from unknown or unusual regions is an important security measure. This indicator can be especially useful in environments where it is impossible to create allow lists for specific IP addresses because they vary.

These searches are designed to give you flexibility in specifying legitimate geographic regions. You can be as specific as an IP address or a city, or as broad as a region or state or an entire country.

These searches allow you to detect adversaries as they begin to probe your environment. Be aware that there are legitimate reasons for activities from unfamiliar locations, so these searches are not a standalone indicator. However, these searches can still provide you with location information that you may wish to investigate further.

Data required

How to use Splunk software for this use case

To deploy this use case, make sure that you have the Splunk ES Content Updates installed on your Splunk Enterprise Security deployment. This extensive content library empowers you to deploy out-of-the-box security detections and analytic stories to enhance your investigations and improve your security posture. If you do not have Splunk Enterprise Security, these detections will still give you an idea of what you can accomplish with SPL in the Splunk platform or with the free app, Splunk Security Essentials.

Some of the detections that can help you with this use case include:

Next steps

Splunk OnDemand Services: Use these credit-based services for direct access to Splunk technical consultants with a variety of technical services from a pre-defined catalog. Most customers have OnDemand Services per their license support plan. Engage the ODS team at ondemand@splunk.com if you would like assistance.

If you are a Splunk Enterprise Security customer, you can also get help from the Security Research team's support options on GitHub.

In addition, Splunk Enterprise Security provides a number of other searches to help reinforce your cloud security posture, including: