EC2

Standard GuardDuty analyzes VPC Flow Logs, CloudTrail events, and DNS queries — all metadata about what happened around your workloads. It sees that an EC2 instance connected to a suspicious IP, but it can’t tell you which process made that connection, what command-line arguments it used, or whether it escalated privileges first. Runtime Monitoring changes that. It deploys a lightweight security agent inside your EC2 instances, EKS pods, and ECS tasks that watches operating system events in real time. Process execution, file access, network connections, privilege changes — all visible to GuardDuty without you writing a single detection rule. ...

Full breakdown of every permission in the AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore IAM policy, plus a least-privilege custom alternative for production EC2 instances.

How to map, audit, and automate CIS Benchmark compliance for EC2 instances using AWS Config, Security Hub, SSM, and open-source scanners.

Step-by-step guide to build a hardened Amazon Linux 2 AMI with EC2 Image Builder including CIS benchmarks, IMDSv2 enforcement, auditd, and logging configuration.

Step-by-step SSM Session Manager setup — IAM role, instance profile, session logging, and removing SSH entirely. No keys, no bastions, no port 22.

This guide delves into the technical aspects of hardening EC2 instances, covering topics from instance selection to monitoring and automation, aligning with AWS’s security recommendations.