Remediating a potentially compromised S3 bucket - Amazon GuardDuty
Recommendations based on specific S3 bucket access needs
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Remediating a potentially compromised S3 bucket

Follow these recommended steps to remediate a potentially compromised Amazon S3 bucket in your Amazon environment:

  1. Identify the potentially compromised S3 resource.

    A GuardDuty finding for S3 will list the associated S3 bucket, its Amazon Resource Name (ARN), and its owner in the finding details.

  2. Identify the source of the suspicious activity and the API call used.

    The API call used will be listed as API in the finding details. The source will be an IAM principal (either an IAM role, user, or account) and identifying details will be listed in the finding. Depending on the source type, Remote IP address or source domain info will be available and can help you evaluate whether the source was authorized. If the finding involved credentials from an Amazon EC2 instance the details for that resource will also be included.

  3. Determine whether the call source was authorized to access the identified resource.

    For example consider the following:

    • If an IAM user was involved, is it possible that their credentials have been potentially compromised? For more information, see Remediating potentially compromised Amazon credentials.

    • If an API was invoked from a principal that has no prior history of invoking this type of API, does this source need access permissions for this operation? Can the bucket permissions be further restricted?

    • If the access was seen from the user name ANONYMOUS_PRINCIPAL with user type of AWSAccount this indicates the bucket is public and was accessed. Should this bucket be public? If not, review the security recommendations below for alternative solutions to sharing S3 resources.

    • If the access was though a successful PreflightRequest call seen from the user name ANONYMOUS_PRINCIPAL with user type of AWSAccount this indicates the bucket has a cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) policy set. Should this bucket have a CORS policy? If not, ensure the bucket is not inadvertently public and review the security recommendations below for alternative solutions to sharing S3 resources. For more information on CORS see Using cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) in the S3 user guide.

  4. Determine whether the S3 bucket contains sensitive data.

    Use Amazon Macie to determine whether the S3 bucket contains sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, or credentials. If automated sensitive data discovery is enabled for your Macie account, review the S3 bucket's details to gain a better understanding of your S3 bucket's contents. If this feature is disabled for your Macie account, we recommend turning it on to expedite your assessment. Alternatively, you can create and run a sensitive data discovery job to inspect the S3 bucket's objects for sensitive data. For more information, see Discovering sensitive data with Macie.

If the access was authorized, you can ignore the finding. The https://console.amazonaws.cn/guardduty/ console allows you to set up rules to entirely suppress individual findings so that they no longer appear. For more information, see Suppression rules.

If you determine that your S3 data has been exposed or accessed by an unauthorized party, review the following S3 security recommendations to tighten permissions and restrict access. Appropriate remediation solutions will depend on the needs of your specific environment.

Recommendations based on specific S3 bucket access needs

The following list provides recommendations based on specific Amazon S3 bucket access needs:

  • For a centralized way to limit public access to your S3 data use, S3 block public access. Block public access settings can be enabled for access points, buckets, and Amazon Accounts through four different settings to control granularity of access. For more information see S3 Block Public Access Settings.

  • Amazon Access policies can be used to control how IAM users can access your resources or how your buckets can be accessed. For more information see Using Bucket Policies and User Policies.

    Additionally you can use Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints with S3 bucket policies to restrict access to specific VPC endpoints. For more information see Example Bucket Policies for VPC Endpoints for Amazon S3

  • To temporarily allow access to your S3 objects to trusted entities outside your account you can create a Presigned URL through S3. This access is created using your account credentials and depending on the credentials used can last 6 hours to 7 days. For more information see Generating presigned URLs with S3.

  • For use cases that require that sharing of S3 objects between different sources you can use S3 Access Points to create permission sets that restrict access to only those within your private network. For more information see Managing data access with Amazon S3 access points.

  • To securely grant access to your S3 resources to other Amazon Accounts you can use an access control list (ACL), for more information see Managing S3 Access with ACLs.

For more information about S3 security options, see S3 Security best practices.