How to Setup Intelligent Threat Detection with AWS GuardDuty

AWS GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS accounts and workloads.

GuardDuty analyzes billions of events across multiple AWS data sources, such as AWS CloudTrail event logs, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs.

Getting Started

1. Navigate to the GuardDuty console
2. Click "Get Started"
3. Review the service role and permissions
4. Click "Enable GuardDuty"

That's it! GuardDuty will immediately begin analyzing your AWS environment for threats.

Types of Findings

GuardDuty generates findings for various threat categories:

• Reconnaissance: Activity suggesting reconnaissance by an attacker
• Instance Compromise: Activity indicating an EC2 instance might be compromised
• Account Compromise: Patterns indicating AWS account credentials may be compromised
• Bucket Compromise: Suspicious activity related to S3 buckets

Severity Levels

• High (7.0-8.9): Indicates a resource is compromised and being actively used for unauthorized purposes
• Medium (4.0-6.9): Suspicious activity that deviates from normally observed behavior
• Low (1.0-3.9): Suspicious or malicious activity that was blocked before it could compromise your resource

Responding to Findings

When GuardDuty detects a threat:

1. Review the finding details in the console
2. Investigate the affected resources
3. Take remediation actions (isolate instances, rotate credentials, etc.)
4. Archive the finding once resolved

Integration with Other Services

GuardDuty integrates with:

• AWS Security Hub for centralized security view
• Amazon EventBridge for automated responses
• AWS Lambda for custom remediation actions