Threat Detection

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. ...

GuardDuty and Security Hub show up in almost every AWS security architecture, but they solve fundamentally different problems. GuardDuty watches what’s happening right now — threat detection. Security Hub checks whether your environment is configured correctly — posture management. They overlap in one specific area (findings), which is where the confusion starts. This post breaks down what each service actually does, where they complement each other, and how to set them up together without redundant noise or wasted spend. ...

Enable GuardDuty, filter noisy findings by severity, and wire EventBridge alerts to Slack or your SIEM — with Terraform and Console steps.