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HIPAA Security Rule on AWS – Technical Safeguards Implementation and Readiness Guidance

31 July 2026 at 21:44

Today, we’re releasing the HIPAA Security Rule on AWS: Technical Safeguards Implementation and Readiness Guidance. This helps covered entities and business associates configure, implement, and evidence compliance with the HIPAA Security Rule Technical Safeguard requirements (45 CFR §164.312) when building healthcare workloads on AWS.

The HIPAA Security Rule’s Technical Safeguards (§164.312) define five standards and nine implementation specifications covering access control, audit controls, integrity, authentication, and transmission security.

The guidance also covers the 2025 NPRM proposed changes, including encryption at rest and in transit becoming required, multi-factor authentication (MFA) becoming mandatory for all electronic Personal Health Information (ePHI) access, and new specifications for network segmentation, configuration management, anti-malware protection, patch management, software removal, incident response and breach notification.

Key topics included

  • Shared responsibility for HIPAA on AWS – A responsibility matrix mapping each §164.312 specification to what AWS manages nd what the customer must configure and operate.
  • ePHI boundary architecture – Guidance on establishing a defined ePHI boundary
  • ePHI data flow and encryption – A reference architecture tracing ePHI with the applicable §164.312 specification
  • Foundation checklist – Prerequisite recommendation before configuring individual Technical Safeguard controls.

This guidance is written for cloud architects, security engineers, CISOs, and compliance teams at covered entities and business associates building or operating AWS healthcare workloads. It assumes familiarity with AWS services and is intended as a practical implementation reference, not a legal or regulatory interpretation. This guidance focuses exclusively on Technical Safeguards.

HHS published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in January 2025, proposing significant updates to the HIPAA Security Rule—including eliminating the Addressable designation, making encryption, MFA, and asset inventory mandatory, and introducing new technical requirements not present in the current rule. As of June 2026, the final rule has not been published. This guidance covers both the current rule and the proposed changes and recommends treating all specifications as Required for new workloads.

Download HIPAA Security Rule on AWS: Technical Safeguards Implementation and Readiness Guidance.

For questions about HIPAA readiness on AWS, including Administrative Safeguards, Physical Safeguards, risk analysis, and assessment preparation, contact the AWS Security Assurance Services team or your AWS account representative.

This guidance is provided by AWS Security Assurance Services, LLC, a HITRUST External Assessor Firm and PCI-QSAC along with contribution from AWS HCLS, AWS Compliance teams. It is for informational and guidance purposes only and does not constitute legal, regulatory, or compliance advice. Recipients are solely responsible for determining applicability to their specific environments and legal obligations.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.


Abdul Javid

Abdul Javid

Abdul is a Senior Security Assurance Consultant at AWS Security Assurance Services. He holds HITRUST certifications and has led HITRUST r2 and i1 engagements across multiple healthcare technology companies. Abdul holds multiple security and auditing certifications and supports customers building responsible AI governance programs on AWS. He has over 25 years of experience and holds certifications across AWS, CMMC, PCI DSS, PMI, ISC2, and ISACA.

Shreya Singh

Shreya Singh

Shreya is a Security Assurance Consultant at AWS with more than eight years of experience in governance, risk, compliance, and cloud security. She holds the CISA and HITRUST Certified CSF Practitioner (CCSFP) certifications and supports healthcare and technology organizations with HITRUST, HIPAA, SOC 2, risk management, and audit readiness initiatives.She holds a Master of Engineering in Cybersecurity from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Kapil Temghare

Kapil Temghare

Kapil is a Security Industry Specialist at AWS with over 10 years of experience spanning compliance, cloud security, and regulatory operations. He manages HIPAA compliance within the Regulatory Operations Center (ROC), including service eligibility assessments, controls validation, and compliance sign-off. Beyond healthcare, Kapil supports various regulatory programs such as FedRAMP and the EU Data Act and holds CISSP certification.

Hector Rodriguez

Hector Rodriguez

Hector is a Principal Industry Specialist and Executive Security Advisor, AWS Health & Life Sciences. He has over 25 years of experience enabling Health & Life Sciences business and clinical transformation and innovation and with multiple industry and academic groups. He is a board advisor for healthcare startups, a founding member of the HITRUST Business Associate Council and a health industry and cybersecurity curriculum advisor and lecturer.

Extend Amazon Inspector SBOM Generator with Plugins

30 July 2026 at 19:22

Amazon Inspector is an automated vulnerability management service that continually scans Amazon Web Services (AWS) workloads for software vulnerabilities. The vulnerability management capabilities of Amazon Inspector are powered by an asset inventory engine known as the Amazon Inspector SBOM Generator (inspector-sbomgen), a standalone command-line tool that produces a software bill of materials (SBOM) from container images, directories, archives, local systems, compiled binaries, and more. Over the past two years, we’ve expanded inspector-sbomgen’s coverage across dozens of programming language ecosystems, operating systems, and widely deployed applications.

We’re pleased to announce a new capability for builders using inspector-sbomgen: a plugin system for writing your own custom package collectors that you can use right away, without requiring source code compilation nor waiting for an official release.

You can download the latest version of inspector-sbomgen from the Amazon Inspector User Guide.

In this post, we walk you through what the inspector-sbomgen plugin system does, why we built it, and how you can write your first plugin in a few minutes. Along the way, we also cover how plugin-generated package components integrate with Amazon Inspector for vulnerability scanning, and we explore the plugin safety model, which helps ensure security-hardened and predictable plugin behavior.

Why we built a plugin system

Software ecosystems are dynamic. New language package managers, lockfile formats, and end user applications ship constantly, and many are adopted quickly, in some cases with little security scrutiny. That leaves security teams with a visibility gap: production workloads running software that their SBOM tooling doesn’t yet recognize. Customers have asked us to inventory many of these ecosystems directly, and until recently, the only path to support was to open a feature request and wait for the inspector-sbomgen team to onboard the ecosystem and deploy a new release.

The inspector-sbomgen plugin system changes that. With plugins, you can:

  • Onboard ecosystems that inspector-sbomgen doesn’t support out of the box. New open source ecosystems, niche or fast-moving package formats, and internal or proprietary tooling can all be inventoried without modifying inspector-sbomgen.
  • Prototype detection for an ecosystem quickly. We designed a plugin system that is friendly to developers and AI coding assistants alike. Plugins are written in Lua, loaded at runtime, and require no Go toolchain nor compilation. You can use the built in test harness to iterate on a plugin and see results immediately.
  • Build on a stable foundation. The plugin API abstracts away artifact-type differences, so you write your detection logic once and it works seamlessly across container images, archives, local systems, and more. And because plugins stay decoupled from the internals of sbomgen, the core tool’s regression surface stays small.

Internally, we’ve used the plugin system to ship new ecosystem coverage faster than before. In our 1.13 release, more than 20 ecosystems that were previously implemented in Go, including Apache Tomcat, NGINX, MySQL, Redis, WordPress, and the OpenSSH toolchain, are now embedded as plugins inside the sbomgen binary. The same release also added more than ten brand-new ecosystems as plugins, including Apache Cassandra, Apache Struts, Conda, Swift packages, and AI-agent collectors (Amazon Q Developer, Kiro CLI, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Ollama).

How inspector-sbomgen plugins work

Sbomgen plugins follow a two-step pipeline:

  1. Discovery – Scan the artifact’s file system to identify files that contain installed package metadata.
  2. Collection Open each discovered file, parse file contents, and publish findings into the SBOM.

Under the hood, an event bus connects discovery and collection plugins. Discovery plugins publish events listing discovered files, and one or more collection plugins subscribe to these events, triggering package collection. Developers might recognize this behavior as the observer pattern.

This decoupling lets a single discovery plugin feed multiple collectors, for example, one extracting package metadata, another scanning for secrets, and another checking policy. Each collection plugin works from the same file list without re-walking the artifact filesystem, a computationally expensive operation.

Write your first plugin in 5 minutes

Inspector-sbomgen makes it straightforward to bootstrap a plugin environment. The plugin new command tells sbomgen to create a new plugin workspace, and the —-with-example flag populates the workspace with a discovery-collection plugin pair, that you can run immediately.

inspector-sbomgen plugin new --with-example 

After invoking the preceding command, you will be prompted to provide a plugin name and a directory that will contain your plugin workspace. You can provide custom values or use the default values:

Plugin name (identifies the software ecosystem your plugin will inventory, e.g. debian-dpkg, rhel-rpm, python-pip, cmake) [my-custom-ecosystem]: <enter>
Project directory [my-sbomgen-plugins]: <enter>

Created plugin "my-custom-ecosystem" in my-sbomgen-plugins/

Note that you can skip interactive prompts by specifying the plugin name and directory using the corresponding command line interface (CLI) arguments:

inspector-sbomgen plugin new \
    --with-example \
    --name my-custom-ecosystem \
    --path my-sbomgen-plugins

After creating your plugin workspace, inspector-sbomgen will display a next steps screen, which guides developers and AI code assistants to the source files they need to change and to supporting documentation:

Next steps:

  Get started:
    1. Open plugin folder in a code editor (VS Code recommended)
    2. Add test files that your plugin will discover and parse
       (e.g., config files, lockfiles, binaries, etc.):
       my-sbomgen-plugins/discovery/cross-platform/extra-ecosystems/my-custom-ecosystem/_testdata/

  Develop:
    3. Edit discovery:    my-sbomgen-plugins/discovery/cross-platform/extra-ecosystems/my-custom-ecosystem/init.lua
    4. Edit collection:   my-sbomgen-plugins/collection/cross-platform/extra-ecosystems/my-custom-ecosystem/init.lua

  Test:
    5. Write unit tests:  my-sbomgen-plugins/discovery/cross-platform/extra-ecosystems/my-custom-ecosystem/init_test.lua
    6. Run unit tests:    inspector-sbomgen plugin test --path my-sbomgen-plugins

  Deploy:
    7. Distribute your plugin directory wherever you run inspector-sbomgen:
       inspector-sbomgen <arguments> --plugin-dir /path/to/my-sbomgen-plugins

       Example:
       inspector-sbomgen container --image alpine:latest -o /tmp/sbom.json --plugin-dir /path/to/my-sbomgen-plugins

For code completion, install the VS Code Lua language server extension:
  https://luals.github.io/#vscode-install

For more information:
  - Plugin guide:    my-sbomgen-plugins/docs/sbomgen-plugin-developer-guide.md
  - Testing guide:   my-sbomgen-plugins/docs/sbomgen-plugin-testing-guide.md
  - API reference:   my-sbomgen-plugins/docs/sbomgen-plugin-api-reference.md
  - Documentation:   https://docs.aws.amazon.com/inspector/latest/user/sbom-generator.html

Now that you have a plugin workspace, let’s explore its contents in greater detail:

tree my-sbomgen-plugins

├── AGENTS.md
├── collection
│   └── cross-platform
│       └── extra-ecosystems
│           └── my-custom-ecosystem
│               └── init.lua
├── discovery
│   └── cross-platform
│       └── extra-ecosystems
│           └── my-custom-ecosystem
│               ├── _testdata
│               │   ├── empty
│               │   └── example.lock
│               ├── init_test.lua
│               └── init.lua
├── docs
│   ├── sbomgen-plugin-api-reference.md
│   ├── sbomgen-plugin-developer-guide.md
│   └── sbomgen-plugin-testing-guide.md
├── library
│   └── sbomgen.lua
└── README.md

The scaffolded project includes a working discovery and collection plugin pair, passing unit tests with test fixtures under _testdata/, a .vscode/settings.json for integrated development environment (IDE) integration, and a local copy of the developer documentation.

The scaffolding is deliberately succinct and complete, so it reads well for both humans and AI coding assistants. Every file has clear comments that explain what each function does and what the plugin author needs to fill in.

To test a plugin, you first need something to scan, such as a package lock file or a compiled binary. The example plugin inventories a fictional example.lock with the following contents:

my-package-alpha==1.0.0 
my-package-beta==2.3.1 
my-package-gamma==0.9.5 

The provided discovery plugin knows how to look for instances of example.lock within the artifact file system:

-- my-custom-ecosystem discovery plugin
-- Discovers example.lock files in the artifact file list.

function discover()
    return sbomgen.find_files_by_name({"example.lock"})
end

And the provided collection plugin knows how to parse the contents of example.lock and publish package findings to the output SBOM.

-- my-custom-ecosystem collection plugin
-- Parses example.lock files and extracts package name and version.

function collect(file_path)
    local content = sbomgen.read_file(file_path)
    if content == nil then
        return
    end

    for line in content:gmatch("[^\n]+") do
        local name, ver = line:match("^(.+)==(.+)$")
        if name and ver then
            sbomgen.push_package({
                name = name,
                version = ver,
                purl_type = "generic",
                namespace = "my-custom-ecosystem",
                component_type = sbomgen.component_types.APPLICATION,
            })
        end
    end
end

Run the tests

Plugins ship with a built-in test framework so you can validate your logic before scanning a real artifact. Tests are written in Lua, live next to the plugin in init_test.lua, and reference fixture data in _testdata/:

function test_discovers_packages() 
    local result = testing.scan_directory("_testdata") 
    testing.assert_equals(3, #result.findings) 
    testing.assert_equals("my-package-alpha", result.findings[1].name) 
    testing.assert_equals("1.0.0", result.findings[1].version) 
end 
 
function test_no_findings_for_empty_directory() 
    local result = testing.scan_directory("_testdata/empty") 
    testing.assert_equals(0, #result.findings) 
end

Run the tests with the following command:

inspector-sbomgen plugin test --path my-sbomgen-plugins -v

=== RUN   my-custom-ecosystem/discovery/init_test/test_discovers_packages 
--- PASS: my-custom-ecosystem/discovery/init_test/test_discovers_packages (0.04s) 
=== RUN   my-custom-ecosystem/discovery/init_test/test_no_findings_for_empty_directory 
--- PASS: my-custom-ecosystem/discovery/init_test/test_no_findings_for_empty_directory (0.04s) 
ok    2 tests passed 

This is the tightest development loop we could design: no Go toolchain, no rebuild, no container spin-up. Write a test, run it, iterate.

Scan a real artifact

For plugins to produce findings, inspector-sbomgen needs an artifact that contains the files your plugin looks for. For the example plugin, any directory with an example.lock file works. The fixture we generated earlier is a good stand-in:

inspector-sbomgen directory \ 
    --plugin-dir ./my-sbomgen-plugins \ 
    --path ./my-sbomgen-plugins/discovery/cross-platform/extra-ecosystems/my-custom-ecosystem/_testdata \ 
    -o sbom.json 

The --plugin-dir flag tells inspector-sbomgen where to load your Lua plugins from. The resulting SBOM contains a CycloneDX component for each of the three packages in example.lock, for example:

{
  "bom-ref": "comp-2",
  "type": "application",
  "name": "my-package-alpha",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "scope": "optional",
  "purl": "pkg:generic/my-sbomgen-plugin/my-package-alpha@1.0.0",
  "properties": [
    {
      "name": "amazon:inspector:sbom_generator:source_path",
      "value": "./my-sbomgen-plugins/example.lock"
    }
  ]
}

Every plugin-generated component carries an amazon:inspector:sbom_generator:source_path property that records the file the component was collected from, so you can always trace a component back to the artifact that produced it.

Vulnerability scanning with Amazon Inspector

Plugin-generated findings are first-class SBOM components. They work with every downstream consumer that reads CycloneDX SBOMs, including Amazon Inspector. To send an SBOM to Amazon Inspector for vulnerability analysis, add the --scan-sbom flag (this requires an active AWS account):

inspector-sbomgen directory \ 
    --path ./my-sbomgen-plugins/discovery/cross-platform/extra-ecosystems/my-custom-ecosystem/_testdata \ 
    --plugin-dir ./my-sbomgen-plugins \ 
    --scan-sbom \ 
    --aws-profile your_profile \ 
    --aws-region your_region \ 
    -o /tmp/sbom.json 

An important caveat when you onboard a brand-new ecosystem: Plugin authors can inventory arbitrary ecosystems, but Amazon Inspector can only report vulnerabilities for components it has advisories for. When you point Amazon Inspector at a component whose ecosystem isn’t in its advisory feeds yet, Inspector will return the component with a property, Component skipped: no supported rules found. For example:

{ 
  "bom-ref": "comp-1", 
  "name": "my-package-alpha", 
  "properties": [ 
    { 
      "name": "amazon:inspector:sbom_scanner:path", 
      "value": "my-sbomgen-plugins/discovery/cross-platform/extra-ecosystems/my-custom-ecosystem/_testdata/example.lock" 
    }, 
    { 
      "name": "amazon:inspector:sbom_scanner:info", 
      "value": "Component skipped: no supported rules found." 
    } 
  ], 
  "purl": "pkg:generic/my-custom-ecosystem/my-package-alpha@1.0.0", 
  "type": "application", 
  "version": "1.0.0" 
} 

This is expected behavior, not an error. The SBOM is still generated correctly, the component is still tracked, and the source_path tells you exactly which file produced it. If and when Amazon Inspector adds advisory coverage for the ecosystem, the same SBOM will start producing vulnerability findings without any change to your plugin. For ecosystems Inspector already supports, plugin-generated components are indistinguishable from components produced by built-in scanners.

First class IDE support

We care about productivity and efficiency when writing plugins. Writing Lua without modern conveniences such as autocomplete isn’t fun, so every plugin project scaffolded with the plugin new command ships with a library/sbomgen.lua definition file and a .vscode/settings.json that automatically wires it up to the Lua Language Server extension for VS Code.

For code completion and IDE support, first install the sumneko.lua extension, open your plugin project in VS Code, and every sbomgen.* function will get:

  • Parameter hints with types.
  • Hover documentation.
  • Autocomplete for constants (sbomgen.component_types.*, sbomgen.groups.*, sbomgen.platform.*).
  • Type checking on function calls.
  • Inline warnings when required fields are missing from push_package().

The same definition file makes plugin development work well with AI coding assistants. The types and documentation are embedded in a form that tools can read, so assistants can generate correct plugin code with far less monitoring than writing against a raw language would require.

A safe foundation

Plugins run real code inside the same process as inspector-sbomgen, so we designed the execution environment to keep that code stable and security-hardened. Every Lua plugin runs in an isolated sandbox. Every Lua virtual machine (VM) has access to a restricted subset of the Lua standard library to ensure only safe operations are permitted:

  • No direct filesystem access. The Lua io library isn’t loaded. All file operations go through sbomgen.* functions, which route through sbomgen’s internals so your plugin behaves identically whether it’s scanning a directory on disk, a container image, a compressed archive, or a mounted volume.
  • No subprocess execution or environment mutation. The Lua os library is blocked, so plugins can’t spawn processes, modify environment variables, or touch files outside the artifact.
  • No VM introspection. The Lua debug library is blocked.
  • No unbounded code loading. dofile, loadfile, and loadstring are removed. require() is available but restricted to the plugin’s own directory tree, so plugins can share helper modules with themselves but cannot load code from other plugins or system paths.

If a plugin raises an unhandled Lua error, inspector-sbomgen logs a warning and continues with the next file or plugin; one faulty plugin does not prevent other plugins from running. Plugins never override inspector-sbomgen’s built-in package collectors. Every plugin must declare a unique name. If a custom plugin uses a name that’s already claimed by an official built-in plugin, the custom plugin is skipped with a warning. Built-in plugins always take precedence, so a custom plugin can never silently replace or shadow the tool’s own detection behavior.

Next steps

To start building your own plugins today:

  1. Install the latest inspector-sbomgen from the Amazon Inspector user guide.
  2. Run inspector-sbomgen plugin new --with-example and follow the prompts.
  3. Run inspector-sbomgen plugin test --path ./my-sbomgen-plugins -v to see the example tests pass.
  4. Replace the example logic with detection for your own ecosystem.

The full reference documentation covers every function, constant, and command in depth:

Conclusion

Whether you’re adding support for an internal lockfile format, prototyping detection for a new open source ecosystem, or replacing a home-grown scanner with something your whole organization can run at scale, the plugin system is designed to make the path from idea to working SBOM as short as possible. We can’t wait to see what you build with it.
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.


Michael Long

Michael Long

Michael is a Senior Security Researcher for Amazon Inspector at AWS. He leads research and development of the Amazon Inspector SBOM Generator and Amazon Inspector for GitHub Actions. Before joining AWS, he was a principal adversary emulation engineer on the MITRE ATT&CK team. He also served honorably for nearly 10 years in the U.S. Army spanning military intelligence and cyber operations.

Charlie Bacon

Charlie Bacon

Charlie is Head of Security Engineering and Research for Amazon Inspector at AWS. He leads the teams behind the vulnerability scanning and inventory collection services that power Amazon Inspector and other Amazon Security vulnerability management tools. Before joining AWS, he spent two decades in the financial and security industries where he held senior roles in both research and product development.

Anthony Verleysen

Anthony Verleysen

Anthony is a Senior Technical Product Management for Amazon Inspector. Before Amazon Inspector, Anthony worked as a Product Manager in AWS Systems Manager owning Node Management capabilities. Outside of work, Anthony is an avid tennis and soccer player.

2026 Phase 1a IRAP report is now available on AWS Artifact for Australian customers

28 July 2026 at 19:16

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is excited to announce that the latest version of Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) report (Phase 1a – full assessment) is now available through AWS Artifact. An independent Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) certified IRAP assessor completed the IRAP assessment of AWS in June 2026.

The new IRAP report includes four additional AWS services that are now assessed at the PROTECTED level under IRAP. This brings the total number of services assessed at the PROTECTED level to 167.

The four newly assessed services are:

For the full list of services, see the IRAP tab on the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page.

We have developed an IRAP documentation pack to help our Australian customers and their partners plan, architect, and assess risk for their workloads when they use AWS cloud services.

We developed this pack in accordance with the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Cloud Security Guidance and Cloud Assessment and Authorisation framework, which addresses guidance within the Australian Government’s Information Security Manual (ISM, September 2025 version), the Department of Home Affairs’ Protective Security Policy Framework (PSPF), and the Digital Transformation Agency’s Secure Cloud Strategy.

The IRAP pack on AWS Artifact also includes newly updated versions of the AWS Consumer Guide and the whitepaper Reference Architectures for ISM PROTECTED Workloads in the AWS Cloud.

Reach out to your AWS representatives to let us know which additional services you want to see in scope for upcoming IRAP assessments. We strive to bring more services into scope at the PROTECTED level under IRAP to support your requirements.


Patrick Chang

Patrick Chang

Patrick is the APJ Audit Specialist based in Sydney. He leads security audits, certifications, and compliance programs across the APJ region. Patrick is a technology risk and audit professional with around two decades of experience and is passionate about delivering assurance programs that build trust with customers and provide them assurance on cloud security.

AWS Shield Advanced is embracing the AWS WAF Anti-DDoS managed rule group: What changes and how to prepare

27 July 2026 at 21:01

July 29, 2026: We’ve updated this post to clarify the AWS Firewall Manager migration path.


Application-layer distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are difficult to detect because they closely resemble legitimate traffic. HTTP request floods are now among the most common vectors targeting web applications, using valid-looking requests that blend in with normal user activity.

In June 2025, AWS launched the AWS WAF Anti-DDoS managed rule group, built specifically for application-layer (L7) DDoS protection. AWS Shield Advanced is adopting it as the default application-layer protection, and in time as the only one. On July 27, AWS Shield Advanced begins adding the Anti-DDoS managed rule group to eligible web access control lists (ACLs) in Count mode. It will not cause any interruption to your traffic alongside your existing L7 automatic mitigation and WAF rules. In this blog post, we provide details regarding the Anti-DDoS managed rule group and when the change is expected to reach your web ACLs. You will understand the phases and steps that you need to take before the finish date, including how the monitoring and metrics will change.

Anti-DDoS managed rule group features

The Anti-DDoS managed rule group builds on what Shield Advanced automatic mitigation already provides. It profiles your traffic, learns what normal traffic looks like for your application, and establishes a baseline in minutes rather than hours. When an attack starts, it reacts within seconds and there are no health checks to configure. The rule group adds a Challenge action to the Block and Count actions you already use. Challenge decisions are driven by the AMR labels that mark the suspicion level of each inspected request. One option is a silent browser challenge, which has a background verification that runs in the visitor’s browser with no interstitial page, so legitimate users are never interrupted while automated traffic is filtered out. You can also exclude workload paths that don’t support Challenge, which fall back to Block mitigations instead. Sensitivity is configurable to Low, Medium, or High, and you set it separately for Block and Challenge. Block and Challenge are tuned independently; meaning you can run Challenge at high sensitivity to catch more suspicious traffic while keeping Block low to avoid dropping legitimate requests or reverse it for a stricter posture.

The rest is about cost and visibility:

  • It uses less capacity than before. The rule group needs 50 web ACL capacity units (WCUs), down from the 150 the previous protection required, providing you with capacity for the rest of your rules.
  • The dashboard ships in the AWS Management Console for AWS WAF. It’s there now, showing live DDoS events, match metrics, and the top URIs, geographies, and IP addresses driving traffic.
  • It labels everything it inspects. Requests get labels for event-detected, graduated suspicion levels, and specific rules. Match on those labels in your own AWS WAF rules when you need logic the rule group doesn’t cover.
  • You don’t pay for the attack traffic. During active mitigation, blocked DDoS requests drop out of your monthly count. That exclusion covers AWS WAF request fees, Anti-DDoS managed rule group request fees, and Shield Advanced request charges.

AWS Shield Advanced isn’t required to use any of these features. Shield Advanced subscribers get the rule group included with AWS WAF and any customer can turn it on independently. See AWS WAF pricing for more information on costs.

Implementation details

Shield Advanced upgrades application-layer DDoS protection in five phases. The following dates are when AWS will act automatically, not the earliest date when you can act. After the rule group is deployed in Count mode on July 27, 2026, you can begin migrating right away rather than waiting for the October auto-upgrade. There’s no window where protection lapses. Your current automatic mitigation stays active through every phase until the Anti-DDoS managed rule group takes over. That handoff happens in a single operation, with no cutover window and no gap for your traffic flows.

Phase 1: Anti-DDoS managed rule group deployed in Count mode (rolling out July 27–August 7, 2026)

AWS adds the Anti-DDoS managed rule group in Count mode to every web ACL eligible for this rollout. Eligible means any Shield Advanced web ACL with at least one resource using application-layer automatic mitigation that isn’t already running the Anti-DDoS rule group. This is a broader set than the web ACLs eligible for the October auto-upgrade (Phase 3), which applies a stricter test. The deployment rolls out gradually, starting July 27 and expected to finish by August 7, 2026, so different web ACLs might be updated on different days. There’s no impact to your traffic because the rule group watches and labels requests without acting on them while your existing automatic mitigation keeps running. Throughout the evaluation period, you receive DDoS events, metrics, and AWS WAF labels at no additional charge.

Phase 2: Free evaluation period (July 27–September 30, 2026)

The existing automatic mitigation and the Anti-DDoS managed rule group run side by side each detecting independently. Automatic mitigation continues to protect your resources while the rule group operates in Count mode. To compare their detection results, use the DDoSAttackRequests metric, AWS WAF labels, and the Anti-DDoS dashboard. All Anti-DDoS managed rule group charges are waived during this period, including the subscription fee, per-request fees, and WCU consumption costs for the eligible web ACLs from phase 1.

Phase 3: Auto-upgrade begins (October 1, 2026)

For eligible web ACLs, the auto-upgrade mirrors your existing automatic mitigation configuration. The rule group inherits your current setting, so a Block configuration comes up in Block mode and a Count configuration comes up in Count mode in a single, atomic operation. The rule group takes over in the same step that disables automatic mitigation, so protection never drops for an instant. This is a handoff rather than a cutover with no window where your resources are unprotected. If you’d rather not upgrade you can opt out by contacting AWS Support before the auto-upgrade date.

Phase 4: Guided migration (available July 27–December 31, 2026)

You don’t have to wait for the October auto-upgrade to migrate. As soon as the rule group is deployed in Count mode between July 27 and August 7, 2026, you can move to it on your own schedule. This is the path to use for web ACLs that aren’t eligible for the Phase 3 auto-upgrade, meaning mixed-mode web ACLs or ones with resources that don’t have automatic mitigation enabled. Work with your AWS account team and AWS Support at any point in this window to plan and complete the migration. Eligible web ACLs are also upgraded automatically starting October 1 (Phase 3), so guided migration is mainly for the web ACLs the auto-upgrade can’t cover.

Phase 5: Shield Advanced application-layer automatic mitigation sunset (January 1, 2027)

As of January 1, 2027, the Shield Advanced application-layer automatic mitigation feature will no longer be available. Resources that haven’t migrated to the Anti-DDoS managed rule group will lose automatic application-layer DDoS mitigation.

Capability

Shield Advanced application layer automatic mitigation

Anti-DDoS managed rule group (AWSManagedRulesAntiDDoSRuleSet)

Feature type

Shield Advanced automatic mitigation

AWS WAF managed rule group

Detection and mitigation speed

Requires a baseline period; mitigation varies per event

Enhanced detection and faster mitigation

Configuration scope

Per resource (Shield API)

Per web ACL (AWS WAF API)

Mitigation actions

Count, Block

Count, Block, and Challenge

Sensitivity controls

None

Low, Medium, and High for both Block and Challenge

Non-HTML path handling

N/A

URI regex exemptions for Challenge

WCU consumption

150 WCUs

50 WCUs

Health checks

Required (Amazon Route 53 health-based detection)

Not required, provides automatic traffic profiling

Availability

Shield Advanced only

AWS WAF and Shield Advanced (see pricing)

Observability

The existing automatic mitigation and the Anti-DDoS managed rule group use separate Amazon CloudWatch namespaces and metric structures. The rule group gives you three tiers of observability: tier 1 tells you an attack is happening, tier 2 shows which requests it flagged and why, and tier 3 shows what it did about them. You don’t need all three on day 1 because most customer teams start at tier 1 to confirm detection is working, then add the others as they tune.

Tier 1: Event detection alarms

You can detect DDoS events using two CloudWatch metrics, each with its own namespace.

DDoSDetected (Shield)

DDoSAttackRequests (Anti-DDoS managed rule group)

Namespace

AWS/DDoSProtection

AWS/WAFV2

Requires Shield Advanced

Yes

No

Scope

L3, L4, and L7 events

L7 events only

Value during event

Binary (0 or 1)

Count of requests observed

Value outside event

Reported once daily (keeps metric alive)

Absent (no data points)

Dimensions

ResourceArn

Resource, ResourceType

What this means for your existing alarms:

  • After the application-layer automatic mitigation feature is sunset, DDoSDetected still fires for infrastructure layer 3 and layer 4 events, so your existing network layer and transport layer alarms remain valid. For the full list, see AWS Shield Advanced metrics.
  • DDoSAttackRequests is the Anti-DDoS managed rule group equivalent for application-layer event detection. Alarm on Sum >= 1 to detect any event, or set a volume threshold (for example, more than 10,000 requests per minute) for severity-based alerting.
  • During the evaluation period, both metrics fire independently and you can validate detection parity before migrating your application-layer alarms.
  • Because DDoSAttackRequests is absent when there are no active DDoS events, set treat-missing-data to missing or notBreaching for alarms on this metric.

Tier 2: Detection labels for custom monitoring

Every request the Anti-DDoS managed rule group evaluates gets a label. Where tier 1 tells you an attack started, tier 2 shows which requests looked suspicious and how confident the rule group was. The labels surface as AWS WAF metrics in the AWS/WAFV2 namespace: AllowedRequests, BlockedRequests, and CountRuleMatch. Each carries the LabelName and LabelNamespace dimensions under the awswaf:managed:aws:anti-ddos: namespace.

  • event-detected – Requests observed during a detected DDoS event
  • ddos-request – Requests identified as part of the attack
  • low-suspicion-ddos-request, medium-suspicion-ddos-request, high-suspicion-ddos-request – Graduated suspicion levels
  • challengeable-request – Requests eligible for browser challenge

Chart suspicion-level trends on a CloudWatch dashboard to see how an attack builds. Match on the labels in your own AWS WAF rules or dig into them in your AWS WAF logs with CloudWatch Logs Insights or Amazon Athena when you need to understand a specific event after the fact.

Tier 3: Mitigation action metrics

Where tier 2 shows what the rule group flagged, tier 3 shows what it did about those requests during an event. You’ll find these metrics as ChallengeRequests, BlockedRequests, and CountRuleMatch, each scoped by the rule label that produced it.

  • ChallengeAllDuringEvent – Requests challenged during an active event
  • ChallengeDDoSRequests – Suspected DDoS requests challenged based on suspicion level
  • DDoSRequests – Requests blocked (or counted in Count mode)

Watch these during a live event to see whether mitigation is keeping up. If you’re challenging far more requests than you’re blocking, your configuration might be too cautious, and you can raise the sensitivity level after you trust the numbers.

Observability summary

Tier

Automatic mitigation

Anti-DDoS managed rule group

Event alarm

DDoSDetected in AWS/DDoSProtection (binary, L3/L4/L7)

DDoSAttackRequests in AWS/WAFV2 (request count, L7)

Detection labels

None

event-detected, ddos-request, suspicion levels, challengeable-request

Mitigation actions

Not visible (Shield-managed rule group metrics not exposed)

ChallengeAllDuringEvent, ChallengeDDoSRequests, DDoSRequests

Dashboard

Shield console event history

Shield console and Anti-DDoS dashboard in the AWS WAF console

Historical analysis

Shield event history only

AWS WAF logs (CloudWatch Logs, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Data Firehose)

Billing

Your Shield Advanced subscription includes the Anti-DDoS managed rule group for up to 50 billion requests per month, counted across your whole organization at the payer account level. For most customers that ceiling is well above normal traffic, so you won’t see a line item here unless you’re operating at very high volume. For the exact rates, see AWS WAF pricing and Shield Advanced pricing.

You aren’t charged for DDoS traffic while the Anti-DDoS managed rule group is actively mitigating, which means Block or Challenge mode rather than Count. This applies to AWS WAF request fees, Anti-DDoS managed rule group request fees, and Shield Advanced request charges. Leaving the rule group in Count mode past the evaluation period costs you the protection without the billing relief, so avoid staying in Count mode longer than you need to validate.

During the evaluation period (July 27 to September 30, 2026), the eligible web ACLs AWS auto-enrolled don’t incur per-request fees or WCU consumption, even when configured in Count mode.

The Anti-DDoS managed rule group works at the web ACL level, so every resource you associate with a web ACL shares that coverage. Before assuming a single resource accounts for the whole cost, look at how many resources sit behind each web ACL. A web ACL fronting 20 resources bills differently from one fronting 2, so check that count first and familiarize yourself with the workload protected by each web ACL.

Adding the Anti-DDoS managed rule group to a web ACL yourself isn’t part of the upgrade path, so standard pricing applies from the moment you enable it. The same is true for any resource that was already running the rule group before the rollout. To get the free evaluation, let the automatic rollout reach your web ACLs rather than adding the rule group ahead of it. There’s no penalty for adding it yourself; you just don’t receive the waiver on that web ACL.

Update your infrastructure as code

If you manage web ACLs with AWS CloudFormation, AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), Terraform, or other infrastructure as code (IaC), the auto-upgrade changes your infrastructure configuration outside your templates. Your code is still the source of truth, so you need to do two things. First, change where the protection is declared. Today you enable application-layer automatic mitigation through the Shield API (EnableApplicationLayerAutomaticResponse), configured per protected resource. The Anti-DDoS managed rule group is configured through the AWS WAF API instead (CreateWebACL and UpdateWebACL), as a managed rule group statement inside the web ACL, scoped per web ACL rather than per resource. In IaC terms, you remove the Shield automatic-response block (for example, Terraform’s aws_shield_application_layer_automatic_response) and add the WAF managed rule group statement shown in the following section. Second, pull the upgraded web ACL back into your tooling before your next deploy, or your pipeline will try to revert the change.

For the full statement in Terraform, CloudFormation, and the AWS CDK, plus how to sync state after the auto-upgrade (terraform plan, CloudFormation drift detection, cdk diff), see the iac-webacl-examples helper.

Update your AWS Firewall Manager policy

If you’re currently running a Shield Advanced policy in AWS Firewall Manager, check its Automatic application layer DDoS mitigation setting before you start, because that setting decides how much of this section applies to you. Where it reads Ignore or Disable, the policy isn’t managing that mitigation at all: whatever mitigation your resources have was enabled on the resources themselves, or through Shield, and that’s where you turn it off when the time comes.

If the Shield Advanced policy reads Enable, you first need to add or reuse an AWS WAF Firewall Manager policy, put the Anti-DDoS managed rule group in it and scope that policy to the same accounts and resources your Shield Advanced policy covers.

Keep the Shield Advanced policy in place throughout the process. Don’t remove accounts or resources from its scope, and don’t delete it. Firewall Manager revokes the Shield Advanced protections it created for anything that leaves scope, which ends L3 and L4 coverage, along with the application-layer mitigation you’re replacing. Instead, use a setting change to retire the older mitigation: when the new rule group is live and you’ve compared the two, set Automatic application layer DDoS mitigation to Disable on the Shield Advanced policy that currently reads Enable.

Set up the AWS WAF Firewall Manager policy

You can make this change in the console or as code. If you manage your Firewall Manager policies as code, don’t edit them in the console: add a new AWS WAF policy or update an existing one in your templates with the Anti-DDoS managed rule group included, and deploy it using the following Firewall Manager policies using IaC steps. Otherwise, use the console.

In the console, follow Creating an AWS Firewall Manager policy for AWS WAF to create the policy and reach the Edit policy rules page. Add the Anti-DDoS rule group, listed there as AWS AntiDDoS Protection for Layer 7 attacks (AWSManagedRulesAntiDDoSRuleSet), as a new rule group under First rule groups so it evaluates before your other managed groups, but below any Allow custom rules you use to fast-path known-good traffic.

If you protect CloudFront distributions, make this change in your Global policy, and repeat it in each AWS Regional policy for regional resources. Save the policy, and Firewall Manager rolls the change out to in-scope accounts, which can take a few minutes.

After being added, the rule group appears as the first rule group in the policy, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 1: AntiDDoS enabled

Figure 1: AntiDDoS enabled

Firewall Manager policies using IaC

If you manage Firewall Manager policies as code, make the change in your template instead of the console. The Anti-DDoS managed rule group goes into the AWS WAF policy’s ManagedServiceData, a WAFV2 policy definition carried as a JSON string, added to the first rule groups so it evaluates early. For the ManagedServiceData JSON with CloudFormation, Terraform, and AWS CDK examples, see the firewall-manager-examples helper.

Whichever path you take, scope the policy to the same accounts and resources your Shield Advanced policy already covers, so no resource loses application-layer protection during the move.

Getting started

Between July 27 and August 7, 2026, AWS will add the Anti-DDoS managed rule group in Count mode to Shield Advanced web ACLs that have resources using application layer automatic mitigation but not yet the Anti-DDoS rule group. After it reaches your web ACL, you can evaluate it, and migrate whenever you’re ready, without waiting for the October auto-upgrade.

  • Review the Anti-DDoS dashboard in the AWS WAF console. The dashboard shows real-time DDoS events, match metrics, and top traffic sources.
  • Compare event detection side by side. During Count mode, both systems detect independently. Check the DDoSDetected metric in AWS/DDoSProtection alongside DDoSAttackRequests in AWS/WAFV2 to validate detection parity for your resources. You can deploy the CloudWatch comparison dashboard from the AWS Samples repository to view both systems on a single dashboard.
  • Explore AWS WAF labels. Enable AWS WAF logging and query for labels in the awswaf:managed:aws:anti-ddos: namespace. Look at suspicion levels (low-suspicion-ddos-request, medium-suspicion-ddos-request, high-suspicion-ddos-request), event-detected, and challengeable-request to see per-request visibility into detected events.
  • Start with Low sensitivity for Block actions during evaluation to minimize false positive risk. Tune up as you gain confidence from the Anti-DDoS dashboard and AWS WAF label data.
  • Plan your configuration. Review sensitivity levels, URI exemptions for non-HTML paths, and web ACL priority placement. The Anti-DDoS managed rule group should run at the highest priority in your web ACL, or right below any custom rules with the Allow action.
  • Sync your IaC templates. After the auto-upgrade adds the Anti-DDoS managed rule group to your web ACL, fetch the current state into your IaC tooling (Terraform refresh, CloudFormation drift detection, AWS CDK import) before your next deployment.

Conclusion

The Anti-DDoS managed rule group profiles your traffic within minutes and mitigates within seconds, where the automatic mitigation it builds on established its baseline over hours, and it gives you granular visibility into what it’s doing. The evaluation period exists so you can watch both systems run on your own traffic before anything changes. Spend the first few weeks in Count mode confirming the new detection matches what you see today, then move your alarms over and pick a sensitivity level you’re comfortable with. If you run a web ACL across several resources, or you manage rules through AWS Firewall Manager, contact AWS Support before you start so you don’t have to unwind anything later. The Shield Advanced application-layer automatic mitigation feature retires on January 1, 2027, and anything still relying on it needs to be migrated by then.

Resources

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.


Eitav Arditti

Eitav is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS and a technology leader with over 15 years of experience in the tech industry. He specializes in edge computing, serverless, and platform engineering, and works with engineering teams to design secure, globally scalable architectures on CloudFront and AWS WAF. His current focus is on internet-scale systems—from global content delivery to edge security.

Andrew Chen

Andrew is a Senior Product Manager focused on DDoS protection at AWS. He leads the AWS Shield product line, helping safeguard both AWS infrastructure and customers from volumetric and network-layer threats. Andrew works closely with security and networking teams to strengthen internet safety.

Justin Kurpius

Justin is a Security Go-to-Market Specialist at AWS, based in Chicago, IL. He focuses on AWS edge and security services, including Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, AWS Shield, and AWS Firewall Manager, helping customers architect scalable, resilient web application defenses. Justin works across monetization strategy, ISV partnerships, and field enablement to accelerate adoption of the AWS edge security portfolio.

Announcing the Cloud Security Alliance on AWS Compliance Guide

27 July 2026 at 18:15

AWS Security Assurance Services is announcing the release of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Compliance Guide on Amazon Web Service (AWS), a new resource that maps the 17 control domains and 207 control objectives of the Cloud Controls Matrix v4.1 (CCM) to AWS services and recommended implementation practices. The guide is intended to help organizations using AWS plan, implement, and evidence the controls relevant to their CCM scope, including those pursuing or maintaining CSA STAR certification.

What is the Cloud Controls Matrix?

The Cloud Security Alliance is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices for cloud security. AWS maintains CSA STAR Level 2 certification, which couples the requirements of ISO/IEC 27001:2022 with the CCM. The CSA STAR documentation and the AWS Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ) are available to AWS customers through AWS Artifact.

The CSA Cloud Controls Matrix is a cybersecurity controls framework developed by the CSA that provides a detailed set of security controls mapped across multiple domains (such as audit and assurance, identity and access management, and encryption and key management) specifically designed to assess and manage security risks in cloud computing environments. The CCM is cloud agnostic, designed to be applicable to any cloud service provider or deployment model, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS), regardless of the underlying technology or vendor, providing universal security controls that organizations can apply across cloud platforms.

Responsibility models

CCM defines its own Shared Security Responsibility Model (SSRM) with three categories: Cloud service provider (CSP)-owned, customer-owned, and shared (independent or dependent). The guide recommends using the SSRM together with the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. For controls that AWS owns, the guide points to AWS attestations available through AWS Artifact (for example, SOC reports, ISO certificates, and the CSA STAR attestation) as inherited evidence. For controls that customers own or share, the guide describes how to implement and evidence them using AWS services. Using a CSA STAR–certified AWS service doesn’t by itself make a customer workload compliant. Customers remain responsible for configuring services, managing access, protecting data, and implementing additional controls based on their environment, risk assessments, and regulatory obligations. The guide is informational and doesn’t replace the AWS compliance documentation and certifications available through AWS Artifact.

What’s inside the guide

For each control, the guide states applicability, describes how organizations can implement the control on AWS, identifies common pitfalls, and lists examples that can be used as evidence during an assessment.

Related resources

Download available: Here

For further assistance, contact AWS Security Assurance Services. If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.


Juan Rodriguez

Juan is a Security Assurance Consultant at AWS, where he works with Strategic Services and customers to assess and secure cloud environments against frameworks including CMMC, FedRAMP, GovRAMP, and NIST based practices. He holds his CMMC Certified Professional and AWS Certified Security – Specialty certifications. Juan pairs technical expertise with a research-driven mindset to help organizations strengthen and architect their security posture and align with federal and industry standards.

Max Schiessl

Max Schiessl

Max is an Assurance Consultant with AWS Security Assurance Services (SAS), focusing on multiple international cybersecurity and compliance frameworks. He combines a decade of experience as an IT auditor and certified penetration tester and has contributed to the development and implementation of cybersecurity regulations at the European national level. He works closely with customers, partners, and AWS teams to help organizations achieve and maintain their compliance goals in the cloud.

Meg Winn

Meg Winn

Meg is a Sr. Security Assurance Consultant at Amazon Web Services with over a decade of experience in cybersecurity governance, risk and compliance, cloud security strategy, and compliance engineering. She holds multiple industry and AWS certifications and advises enterprise clients on achieving and sustaining audit readiness across multiple standards. Meg partners with executive stakeholders in highly regulated industries to prepare and guide clients through successful audit outcomes at scale.

Satish Uppalapati

Satish is an Associate Assurance Consultant with AWS Security Assurance Services (SAS) and has more than 8 years of experience in IT risk, governance, and regulatory assurance. He works with AWS customers to align cloud environments with multiple frameworks. Satish helps organizations build security and governance programs that meet regulatory objectives while supporting business operations. He also focuses on advancing governance for AI systems, including emerging standards.

Ted Tanner

Ted Tanner

Ted is a Principal Assurance Consultant and PCI DSS Qualified Security Assessor with AWS Security Assurance Services, and has more than 25 years of IT and security experience. He leverages this to provide AWS customers with guidance on compliance and security, and build and optimize their cloud compliance programs.

Enterprise security at machine speed: AWS Black Hat 2026 preview

23 July 2026 at 18:23

Black Hat 2026 (Aug 1-6, 2026) brings together over 22,000 security practitioners, researchers, and CISOs who build, break, and defend enterprise infrastructure. They’re security professionals who push the limits of offensive and defensive security and demand proof over promises. As frontier security models like Mythos reshape the enterprise landscape, they need security that operates at the same speed as the events they face. This August, Amazon Web Services (AWS) returns to Las Vegas to meet with our customers and partners to show how we’re delivering enterprise security at machine speed.

At Black Hat USA 2026, connect with AWS through live demos, a practitioner session on autonomous security operations, and an executive roundtable on building durable AI security architectures, plus networking receptions with customers and partners. Here’s where to find us and what you’ll take away.

Experience AWS security innovation in action

Visit us at Booth #1648 to explore five interactive demo pedestals, each aligned to a pillar of our AI-powered security story:

  • Post-Mythos enterprise security: AWS uses multiple frontier AI reasoning models to find issues, validate exploitability, and autonomously fix exposures, compressing mean-time-to-remediation from days to minutes. Learn how AWS Continuum helps you find risks before you ship, prioritize by real business impact, and remediate at machine speed while you stay in control.
  • AI-powered investigations: Amazon GuardDuty AI-powered investigations automatically analyze findings and the accounts around them to separate true threats from benign activity at scale. Drawing on log activity, resource configuration, internet reachability, and historical findings, it delivers triage reports that match expert-level accuracy, freeing your team to focus on what matters.
  • Purpose-built AI workload security: AWS extends the enterprise security controls you already trust to address the unique demands of AI workloads. Amazon Bedrock helps you build and deploy generative AI applications, with hundreds of top foundation models plus built-in safety controls, guardrails, and evaluation tools. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Identity keeps you in full control of what your AI agents can access.
  • Full-stack multicloud security: AWS Security Hub Extended delivers full-stack security by integrating AWS services with 21 curated partner solutions across nine categories, from endpoint and identity to AI, with pay-as-you-go pricing, one console, and one bill. All findings flow in OCSF format with zero integration work, and a risk correlation engine traces paths across multicloud so your team fixes root causes rather than chasing symptoms.
  • AWS Partner solutions: A dedicated partner demo pedestal runs live demonstrations from select AWS Partners, showing how their solutions integrate with AWS to address your most critical security challenges. With over 25 partners rotating throughout Business Hall hours, you get a firsthand view of how these integrations work together to strengthen your security posture.

Theater sessions: Want to go deeper on a specific topic without committing to a full session? During expo hours, our theater hosts 15-minute AWS and partner talks curated around the challenges enterprise security teams face today. Topics range from enabling AI adoption securely, to unifying visibility across clouds, to automating response. Subject matter experts from AWS and our partners lead each session and give you insights you can bring back to your team. Featured sessions include:

  • From finding to fix at machine speed with AWS Continuum
  • Securing the agentic AI stack
  • Architecting defense-in-depth for AI workloads
  • Network security strategies for the post-Mythos era
  • One console for unified full-stack security

For the latest theater session schedule, including dates and times, visit AWS at Black Hat 2026.

Engagement Zone: Take a quick break and test your detection skills in a gamified, hands-on challenge. Race the clock to resolve security issues and collect power-ups that speed your mission to secure the environment. Rack up your score, lock in your percentile rank, and see how you stack up against every other player.

Beyond the booth: Sessions and executive roundtable

AWS security experts share insights at speaking sessions and host an executive roundtable at Black Hat USA 2026.

Speaking Session | Machine-Speed Defense: Building an Autonomous Security Operations Loop for the AI Era
Wednesday, August 5, 10:15–10:35 AM PDT
Pulse Stage 2
In a post-Mythos world, organizations need to use AI-powered reasoning to discover, correlate, validate, and remediate security exposures at machine speed. This session provides a blueprint for building an autonomous security operations loop, using business-context graphs and sandbox validation, to unlock machine-speed defense as a durable competitive edge.

Executive Roundtable | Autonomous Defense at Cloud Scale: Critical Choices for Security Leaders Today
Wednesday, August 5, 11:00 AM–12:00 PM PDT
Breakers F
As agentic AI and frontier models reshape the threat landscape, foundational security remains essential, and organizations that layer autonomous workload governance on top can turn AI into a true security force multiplier. This executive roundtable explores how to build a durable, adaptive security harness that accounts for the real economics of AI-powered defense and evolves alongside rapidly advancing models and techniques.

Briefing | ThreatForest: Automated Attack Trees from Source Code
Thursday, August 6, 2:35–3:15 PM PDT
Jasmine, Level 3
Threat modeling is critical, but manual processes can’t keep pace with cloud-focused architectures. This briefing will dive into how ThreatForest uses six specialized AI agents to automatically analyze source code and produce validated attack trees mapped to MITRE ATT&CK with actionable mitigations. Attendees walk away with the open source tool and a reusable multi-agent architecture pattern.

AWS activities and events

Beyond the expo floor, AWS hosts a portfolio of ancillary events built for focused conversations and networking across the security community. Join us at:

Security LIVE! broadcast

Catch Security LIVE! on-site at Mandalay Bay on Wednesday, August 5 and Thursday, August 6. This infotainment-style broadcast brings AWS and AWS Partners together to solve real security challenges for customers across 20-minute conversational segments, covering everything from data protection and compliance to application and perimeter security. With over 30 segments, Security LIVE! showcases the breadth of the AWS security partner ecosystem. Stop by the set to watch it unfold live.

Join us in Las Vegas

Whether you’re exploring how to secure AI workloads, adopting autonomous remediation as frontier models like Mythos reshape the landscape, or unifying security across domains and clouds, the AWS team at Black Hat USA 2026 is ready to help.

Learn more about AWS Security solutions at AWS Cloud Security.

See you in Las Vegas, August 3–6, 2026.


Rahul Sahni

Rahul Sahni

Rahul is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at AWS Security. An avid Amazonian, he embodies the company’s Leadership Principle of Learn and Be Curious in both his professional and personal life, whether diving into emerging security topics or experimenting with new dishes from around the world.

2026 ISO and CSA STAR certificates are now available with two additional services

20 July 2026 at 18:40

Amazon Web Services (AWS) successfully completed an onboarding audit with no findings for ISO 9001:2015, 27001:2022, 27017:2015, 27018:2019, 27701:2019, 20000-1:2018, and 22301:2019, and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) STAR Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) v4.0. EY Certify Point auditors conducted the audit and reissued the certificates on May 31, 2026. The objective of the audit was to enable AWS to expand their ISO and CSA STAR certifications to include two additional services. The ISO standards cover areas including quality management, information security, cloud security, privacy protection, service management, and business continuity. The certifications demonstrate AWS’s commitment to maintaining robust security controls and protecting customer data across our services.

During this onboarding audit, we added two additional AWS services to the scope since the last certification issued on February 25, 2026.
Following are the two additional services:

For a full list of AWS services that are certified under ISO and CSA Star, see the AWS ISO and CSA STAR Certified page. Customers can also access the certifications in the AWS Management Console through AWS Artifact.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.


Atulsing Patil

Atulsing is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He has 29 years of consulting experience in information technology and information security management. Atulsing holds a Master of Science in Electronics degree and professional certifications such as CCSP, CISSP, CISM, ISO 42001 Lead Auditor, ISO 27001 Lead Auditor, HITRUST CSF, Archer Certified Consultant, and AWS CCP.

Shalini Mishra

Shalini Mishra

Shalini is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. She has 5+ years of experience leading end-to-end compliance programs across ISO, SOC, and cloud security frameworks, with deep expertise in third-party risk management and enterprise governance, driving measurable improvements in security posture and audit readiness. Shalini holds a Master of Science degree in Information Systems, CRISC and ISO 27001 lead auditor certification.

ICYMI: June 2026 @AWS Security

15 July 2026 at 02:37

Read all about the latest AWS security features, compliance updates, and hands-on resources in our new, monthly digest posts. You’ll find expert blog posts, new service capabilities, code samples, and workshops.

AWS Security Blog posts

This month’s AWS Security Blog posts covered identity and access management, threat intelligence, network security, AI-powered security tooling, and multi-account governance. Read on for guidance on restricting console access to expected networks, securing multi-tenant AI agents, preventing data exfiltration, and managing organization-scale migrations.

Identity

Secure multi-tenant AI agents with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore resource-based policies
Authors: Satyen Verma, Satveer Khurpa, Prajit Pabbati, Vijay Kumar Samanthapudi, Zohreh Norouzi | Published: June 2, 2026
Learn to use resource-based policies on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to grant cross-account access for one tenant while restricting another to VPC-only traffic in a shared multi-tenant AI platform.

Customize federated sign-in with new Amazon Cognito Lambda trigger
Authors: Abrom Douglas | Published: June 4, 2026
Learn to use the new inbound federation AWS Lambda trigger for Amazon Cognito to transform, filter, and enrich user attributes from external identity providers before profile creation in your user pool.

Amazon Cognito unlocks advanced capabilities with next-generation infrastructure
Authors: Howie Li, Georgi Baghdasaryan | Published: June 4, 2026
Amazon Cognito introduced high-throughput performance, customer-managed keys for data encryption at rest, and multi-Region replication for business continuity, built on a new storage infrastructure migrated with zero downtime.

Building secure B2C applications with fine-grained access control using Amazon Cognito and Amazon Verified Permissions
Authors: Sowmya Vemuri | Published: June 5, 2026
Learn to build fine-grained access controls for a Streamlit application using Amazon Cognito for authentication and Amazon Verified Permissions with Cedar policies for authorization.

Restrict AWS Management Console access to expected networks with sign-in resource-based policies and RCPs
Authors: Swara Gandhi, Rishi Tripathy | Published: June 24, 2026
Learn to use sign-in resource-based policies and resource control policies to restrict AWS Management Console sign-in to requests from expected networks, such as corporate VPNs and Amazon VPC endpoints.

Infrastructure security

Gain visibility into DDoS attacks with flow logs in AWS Shield Advanced
Authors: Ken Kitts | Published: June 4, 2026
Learn to configure AWS Shield Advanced attack flow logs to capture traffic metadata during DDoS events, pinpoint sources, verify mitigations, and feed your existing analysis pipelines.

Threat tactic spotlight: Subdomain takeover
Authors: Matt Gurr, Ariam Michael, Geoff Sweet, Luis Pastor | Published: June 16, 2026
Learn to detect and prevent subdomain takeover using AWS Config custom rules to identify dangling DNS CNAME records pointing to deleted resources in globally shared namespaces

Prevent data exfiltration: AWS egress controls for cloud workloads
Authors: Meriem Smache, Maxim Raya | Published: June 22, 2026
Learn to implement layered egress detection and protection using AWS Network Firewall, Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, and data perimeters to help reduce unauthorized data transfer risk.

Detection and incident response

Operationalizing AWS security: A maturity roadmap
Authors: Joseph Sadler | Published: June 8, 2026
A six-phase maturity roadmap for organizations that have already enabled AWS Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty, covering tuning, notifications, automated remediation, and operational cadence.

Introducing AWS Continuum: Security at machine speed
Authors: Chet Kapoor | Published: June 17, 2026
AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities is an AI-native platform that addresses the full lifecycle of a code vulnerability at machine speed—from discovery and prioritization through validation and remediation.

Accelerate security investigations with Kiro CLI
Authors: Sibasankar Behera, Marshall Jones | Published: June 18, 2026
Learn to use Kiro CLI to conduct security investigations following the AWS Security Incident Response Guide framework, from triaging Amazon GuardDuty findings through containment and evidence preservation.

What the June 2026 Threat Technique Catalog update means for your AWS environment
Authors: Shannon Brazil, Cydney Stude, Javier Teitelbaum | Published: June 29, 2026
Learn about five new entries and three updates to the Threat Technique Catalog for AWS, covering container security, organization-level trust, and compute hijacking patterns observed by AWS CIRT.

Data protection

Identify unused AWS KMS keys and prevent accidental key deletions
Authors: Andrea Rossi, Poojil Tripathi | Published: June 2, 2026
Learn to use the new AWS KMS GetKeyLastUsage API to audit key activity, identify unused keys, and apply policy controls that prevent accidental deletion of recently used keys.

Governance and compliance

From Monolith to Multi-Account: Pinterest’s AWS Organization Transformation Journey
Authors: Sid Vantair, James Fogel, Jeremy Talis | Published: June 4, 2026
Learn how Pinterest migrated from a single monolithic AWS account to a multi-account architecture, including management account separation, automated account provisioning, and centralized networking.

Build a Multi Account Patch Compliance Dashboard with Kiro Specs
Authors: Justin Thomas | Published: June 9, 2026
Learn to use Kiro’s spec-driven development approach to build a serverless multi-account patch compliance dashboard with AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager and private access via AWS Systems Manager Session Manager.

Transfer AWS accounts between AWS Organizations while preserving AWS Lake Formation permissions
Authors: Alex Torres, Aarthi Srinivasan, Ryan McNamee | Published: June 12, 2026
Learn to migrate member accounts between AWS Organizations without disrupting AWS Lake Formation cross-account permissions by using temporary bridge shares with the new AWS RAM retention parameter.

June Security Bulletins

Investigations of reported security vulnerabilities affecting Amazon and AWS services, software, and products.

AWS Samples

This month brings 10 new AWS samples spanning AI security, identity, infrastructure security, governance, and observability. From securing Amazon Bedrock AgentCore agents with AWS WAF to building graph-based CMDBs for dependency analysis, these repositories help you implement security and governance best practices across your AWS environment.

AI Security

Securing Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime with AWS WAF
Learn to place AWS WAF in front of Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime using two architecture patterns with an Application Load Balancer and VPC endpoints for defense-in-depth protection.

AI Security Posture Management (AI SPM) on AWS
Learn to discover, assess, and protect AI agents running in your environment using AWS-native services across three pillars: observe, govern, and defend, with rules mapped to OWASP LLM Top 10, NIST AI RMF, and MITRE ATLAS.

Identity

Implement On-Behalf-Of (OBO) token exchange for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore agents
Learn to implement secure identity propagation from user context through agent chains using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Identity OBO token exchange without credential sharing.

Infrastructure Security

Monetizing AI traffic with Amazon CloudFront and AWS WAF (x402)
Learn to monetize AI traffic at the edge using AWS WAF native x402 protocol support with Amazon CloudFront, settling payments in a single round-trip with no Lambda@Edge required.

Governance

Turn repeatable processes into SOPs your AI agent works through one auditable step at a time
Learn to use this MCP server to hand standard operating procedures to your AI agent one step at a time, with gated execution and auditable progress tracking.

Bedrock Ops Lens
Learn to deploy an Amazon Bedrock observability dashboard in your own account for per-account, per-model, and per-tag cost attribution, quota tracking, latency monitoring, and model lifecycle management, with an MCP server for IDE access.

AWS Agent Registry sample demo application
Learn to use AWS Agent Registry to publish, review, approve, and discover AI agents, MCP servers, and agent skills through a centralized catalog with governance workflows.

Graph CMDB — an AWS resource relationship graph
Learn to build a graph-based CMDB from AWS Config, AWS IAM, Amazon EKS, AWS CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs to visualize resource dependencies, investigate scope of impact, and surface governance findings.

OpenAI Codex through Amazon Bedrock — Usage governance with LiteLLM
Learn to centrally govern, administer, and monitor OpenAI Codex access for engineering teams using Amazon Bedrock as the inference backend with per-user budgets, rate limits, and audit trails via LiteLLM.

Agentic Data Governance — the context ladder
Learn to measure how governance context layers — data dictionaries, semantic metrics, and execution skills — improve data agent accuracy through a four-level ablation ladder on the BIRD benchmark.

Conclusion

June 2026 provides guidance and examples for operationalizing security at organizational scale; from maturity roadmaps and console access restrictions to AI agent registries and posture management platforms. The posts and samples provide patterns for DDoS visibility with flow logs, multi-tenant agent isolation with resource-based policies, egress controls for data exfiltration prevention, and governance frameworks for AI coding assistants. Each resource includes deployment steps or runnable code so you can validate in your own environment before adopting. Subscribe to the AWS Security Blog RSS feed to receive updates as they publish, and revisit this digest monthly for a consolidated view of what changed and what to act on.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.


Rodolfo Brenes

Rodolfo Brenes

Rodolfo is a Principal Solutions Architect focused on Cloud Governance and Compliance. With over 18 years of experience, he currently leads a technical field community in AWS helping customers scale and improve their security and governance frameworks. Besides work, Rodolfo enjoys video games, playing with his four cats, and won’t say no to a good outdoor adventure.

Anna Brinkmann

Anna has 18 years of experience in the technical content space and has spent the last 6 years managing the AWS Security Blog. Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her family.

New compliance guidance available: HITRUST i1 on AWS

13 July 2026 at 15:19

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new AWS compliance implementation guidance: HITRUST i1 Compliance on AWS: Customer Implementation Guidance with an Illustrative Healthcare Platform.

Healthcare organizations seeking HITRUST i1 certification increasingly rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their cloud foundation. The HITRUST i1 assessment covers 182 curated controls at the Implemented level and is the most widely required HITRUST certification tier in healthcare vendor contracts and Business Associate Agreements required by health plans, hospital systems, and business associates as a condition of working with them.

This guide is designed to close the gap between understanding what HITRUST i1 requires and knowing how to implement it on AWS. It walks cloud architects, security engineers, compliance leads, and assessment preparation teams through the full lifecycle of an i1 engagement from defining the assessment boundary to implementing controls across each technical domain.

What the guide covers

The guide addresses 11 HITRUST i1 technical control domains, with supporting AWS implementation components relative to these domains. The domains include access control, endpoint protection, configuration management, vulnerability management, network protection, transmission protection, incident management, data protection and privacy, audit logging and monitoring, password management, and business continuity and disaster recovery.

The guidance is grounded in a fictional but realistic connected healthcare platform deployed on AWS Landing Zone Accelerator. The scenario is used to make abstract HITRUST concepts concrete, not to suggest that the same architecture or control choices apply universally. HITRUST i1 scoping is inherently organization-specific. The assessment boundary, applicable controls, and evidence requirements are determined by each organization’s system scope and delivered through the HITRUST MyCSF portal. Readers should treat the guidance as a starting point and work with a HITRUST Authorized External Assessor to validate what applies to their specific environment. This guide doesn’t constitute a compliance certification advisory.

Getting started

You can download the guide here: HITRUST i1 Compliance on AWS: A Customer Implementation Guidance with an Illustrative Healthcare Platform.

AWS HITRUST assurance documentation and the Customer Responsibility Matrix are available through AWS Artifact. For assessment readiness support, visit AWS Security Assurance Services.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.


Abdul Javid

Abdul is a Senior Security Assurance Consultant at AWS Security Assurance Services. He holds HITRUST certifications and has led HITRUST r2 and i1 engagements across multiple healthcare technology companies. Abdul holds multiple security and auditing certifications and supports customers building responsible AI governance programs on AWS. He has over 25 years of experience and holds certifications across AWS, CMMC, PCI DSS, PMI, ISC2, and ISACA.

Shreya Singh

Shreya Singh

Shreya is a Security Assurance Consultant at AWS with more than eight years of experience in governance, risk, compliance, and cloud security. She holds the CISA and HITRUST Certified CSF Practitioner (CCSFP) certifications and supports healthcare and technology organizations with HITRUST, HIPAA, SOC 2, risk management, and audit readiness initiatives. She holds a Master of Engineering in Cybersecurity from the University of Maryland, College Park.

AWS designated as a critical third party to the UK financial sector

10 July 2026 at 18:15

Amazon Web Services EMEA Sarl (AWS) has been designated as a critical third party (CTP) to the UK financial sector by HM Treasury.

The CTP regime came into force on January 1, 2025, and establishes a framework through which the Bank of England, PRA, and FCA (collectively the UK regulators) can set requirements on and have direct oversight of designated CTPs.

AWS supports the objectives of the UK regulators to ensure a robust financial system.

AWS obligations under the regime

The CTP regime is an outcomes-focused framework. Under the regime, AWS will be subject to requirements in relation to its designated Systemic Third-Party Services (STPS). The first step will be a self-assessment of these STPSs against the CTP regime criteria, which AWS will now carry out in line with regulators’ expected timelines.

AWS has actively engaged with the UK authorities as they’ve developed the CTP regime, and we will continue this constructive approach as we work to meet our obligations under it.

Impact on customers

The UK regulators have clarified that the requirements under the regime don’t eliminate, reduce, or replace the accountability of firms, their boards, and senior management for remaining operationally resilient, including when they rely on services provided by third parties.

The regime doesn’t change obligations on financial services customers of designated CTPs. As we manage our obligations, we expect to publish materials that customers can use to inform their own operational resilience planning and third-party risk management.

The AWS commitment to operational resilience

We’re focused on supporting financial services customers in enhancing their operational resilience and providing a range of services and guidance—including the AWS Well-Architected Framework and resources for cloud incident management—to help organizations deliver effective resilience outcomes.

AWS has a team of regulatory and technology experts with expertise in financial services ready to support customers with questions about this regime or operational resilience more broadly. Customers can contact their AWS account team for further information.


Michael Jefferson

Michael Jefferson

Michael is Head of Financial Services Public Policy for EMEA. He leads on policy and engagement for issues relating to adoption and use of cloud and technology across the finance sector. Before joining AWS, he led on capital markets policy at the Investment Association and prior to that at UK Finance. He previously was head of Public Policy EMEA at Nomura and spent the early part of his career as a UK civil servant working on international trade and business issues.

Spring 2026 SOC 1 and 2 reports are now available in OSCAL format

18 June 2026 at 18:50

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is excited to release the Spring 2026 System and Organization Controls (SOC) 1 and 2 reports in machine-readable OSCAL format alongside the PDF version of the reports. The reports cover 188 services over the 12-month period from April 1, 2025 to March 31, 2026, giving customers a full year of assurance. These reports demonstrate our continuous commitment to adhering to the heightened expectations of cloud service providers.

AWS is the first major cloud provider to offer key compliance reports to customers in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL), as of June 2026. OSCAL is an open source, machine-readable (JSON) format for security information. The SOC 1 and SOC 2 report package in OSCAL format is now available as a distinct package in AWS Artifact, marking a milestone toward open, standards-based compliance automation. This machine-readable version of the SOC report package enables workflow automation to reduce manual processing time and modernize security and compliance processes. Your use cases for this content are innovative, and we want to hear about them through the contact information found in the OSCAL report package.

You can download the Spring 2026 SOC 1 and 2 reports in OSCAL format through AWS Artifact, a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact. The SOC 3 report can be found on the AWS SOC Compliance page and in AWS Artifact.

AWS strives to continuously bring services into the scope of its compliance programs to help customers meet their architectural and regulatory needs. You can view the current list of services in scope on our Services in Scope page. As an AWS customer, you can reach out to your AWS account team if you have any questions or feedback about SOC compliance.

To learn more about AWS compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs.

Thomas Fischer

Thomas Fischer

Thomas is a Principal at AWS, focused on scaling product delivery and applications to transform security, risk, and compliance. He has over 20 years of experience in enterprise IT transformation and worked for different consulting companies managing large teams and programs across multiple regulated industries and sectors. Thomas holds CISSP, CCSP, CGEIT, and PMP certifications.

Tushar-Jain

Tushar Jain

Tushar is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS where he leads multiple security and privacy initiatives. Tushar holds a Master of Business Administration from Indian Institute of Management Shillong, India and a Bachelor of Technology in electronics and telecommunication engineering from Marathwada University, India. He has over 14 years of experience in information security and holds CISM, CCSK and CSXF certifications.

Fritz Kunstler

Fritz is a Principal Security Engineer at AWS, currently focused on AI applications to transform security governance, risk, and compliance. Fritz has been an AWS customer since 2008 and an Amazonian since 2016.

Baj Bajwa

Baj Bajwa

Baj is a Security Assurance Manager at AWS, where he leads the Global Third-Party Assurance product portfolio within the Compliance and Security Assurance (CSA) organization. He has over 15 years of experience in information security, compliance, and risk management, and holds a master’s degree in cybersecurity. Baj maintains CISSP, CISA, PMP, CCSK, GISF, and ICAgile certifications.

Introducing AWS Continuum: Security at machine speed

17 June 2026 at 17:34

What we believe

We’ve been thinking deeply about enterprise security. The operating model that served us for the past decade (collect telemetry, store it, query it, build dashboards to watch it) is no longer keeping pace. We need to shift to the new world: telemetry, context, reasoning, and actions. An approach that produces outcomes. The latest cybersecurity frontier models further made this shift urgent. Models like Claude Mythos can now find software vulnerabilities and reason through complex attack paths at machine-speed, leading to an exponentially increasing backlog of vulnerabilities.

Introducing AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities

Today, we’re announcing AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities, now available in gated preview. Continuum for code vulnerabilities addresses the full lifecycle of a code vulnerability at machine speed: from discovery through actions. It reasons over your environment, confirms what is real, and drives toward resolution. It’s model agnostic, using multiple frontier models where each performs best, and is built to incorporate the latest and most capable models as they emerge.

Continuum is built on lessons learned from running security across AWS and Amazon.com. Securing businesses that operate in different industries required a system that understands business context rather than applying generic rules uniformly.

How it works

Continuum for code vulnerabilities reasons over your full environment. This context includes structured data already living in Amazon Web Service (AWS) (your infrastructure, permissions, network topology, code) and the unstructured data that captures how your organization operates and your risk profile (your documents, communications, business priorities).

Continuum for code vulnerabilities operates in four continuous phases.

  1. Discovery: Security teams tackle a backlog of vulnerabilities, and many are already using frontier models to find more. Continuum starts by ingesting that existing backlog and performing its own vulnerability scan of your environment. This creates a more comprehensive view of vulnerabilities and the associated attack paths.
  2. Prioritization: Continuum uses context to evaluate, enrich, and prioritize every finding. Is the affected component deployed, is it reachable, is it in a production path, and what would the business impact be if exploited? The result is an evidence-backed list of priorities, allowing Continuum and your team to focus on what’s most important.
  3. Validation: Continuum validates findings to surface false positives before they waste your team’s time. It contextualizes vulnerabilities against your environment. It then constructs working exploit examples in a sandboxed environment that provide concrete, reproducible evidence of the issue.
  4. Mitigation and remediation: Continuum assesses existing defenses around a validated issue, including blocking and compensating controls along with detection mechanisms. It then draws on its understanding of the codebase, context, and findings to recommend mitigation or remediation of the vulnerability with a network change, policy change, or code patch. The patch recommendation is validated using the same system that confirmed the vulnerability. It also provides blast radius visibility and rollback paths where feasible.

This is just the beginning. We’re starting with code (1st and 3rd party) and then expanding to other aspects of security.

Trust is graduated

Continuum starts in learn mode with a human in the loop. Every recommendation includes the reasoning behind it. As you gain confidence, you can graduate Continuum to enforce mode, enabling remediation that can be increasingly automated based on categories and risk profiles you define.

Continuum capabilities

In addition to Continuum for code vulnerabilities, Continuum includes capabilities you might already know. The AWS Security Agent penetration testing and code scanning functionality is now part of Continuum as Continuum pen testing and Continuum code scanning (Preview). We’re also launching Continuum threat modeling in preview, which automatically generates comprehensive threat models from design documents or source code and outputs results in STRIDE format. These capabilities serve as detection and analysis sources that feed into the broader Continuum loop of discovery, prioritization, validation, and remediation.

Getting started

We’re working with customers across financial services, automotive, and technology to shape AWS Continuum. Customer feedback confirms the direction: security teams want tools that earn trust and take action.

AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities is available in gated preview. Sign up to request access at AWS Continuum.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.


Chet Kapoor

Chet Kapoor

Chet is Vice President of Search, Security, and Observability at Amazon Web Services. With more than two decades in enterprise technology, he has led companies through some of the industry’s most consequential platform shifts — from APIs and open source to cloud and AI — building and scaling businesses through periods of rapid growth, transformation, acquisition, and IPO. He brings a builder’s mindset, deep operational experience, and a strong customer orientation to helping organizations adopt emerging technologies securely and at scale.

ICYMI: May 2026 @AWS Security

8 June 2026 at 23:00

Read all about the latest AWS security features, compliance updates, and hands-on resources in our new, monthly digest posts. You’ll find expert blog posts, new service capabilities, code samples, and workshops.

AWS Security Blog posts

This month’s AWS Security Blog posts covered AI security, network protection, identity management, compliance frameworks, and supply chain security. Read on for practical guidance on securing agentic AI workflows, filtering network traffic by category, defending against supply chain attacks, and more.

AI Security

Security posture improvement in the AI era
Author: Celeste Bishop | Published: May 1, 2026
Learn to use the Security Health Improvement Program (SHIP) to strengthen security fundamentals across 10 core use cases for confident AI adoption.

Enabling AI sovereignty on AWS
Author: Stéphane Israël | Published: May 12, 2026
Learn how AWS delivers control and choice across the AI stack to help customers meet digital and AI sovereignty requirements.

The AWS AI Security Framework: Securing AI with the right controls, at the right layers, at the right phases
Authors: Riggs Goodman III, Christopher Rae | May 15, 2026
A structured framework that helps security leaders align the right security controls to the right AI use case, at the right layer, at the right deployment phase.

Why Policy in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore chose Cedar for securing agentic workflows
Authors: Liana Hadarean, Jean-Baptiste Tristan | May 20, 2026
Learn how Cedar’s deterministic authorization, automated reasoning, and formal verification capabilities secure agentic AI tool invocations through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway.

Infrastructure security

Securing open proxies in your AWS environment
Author: Dodd Mitchell | Published: May 4, 2026
Learn to identify and secure open proxies in your AWS environment to prevent abuse, protect your IP reputation, and control costs.

Introducing AI traffic analysis dashboards for AWS WAF
Authors: Christopher Jen, Eitav Arditti, Kaustubh Phatak | Published: May 5, 2026
A new dashboard providing visibility into AI bot and agent activity including bot identification, intent classification, and access pattern analysis.

Simplifying policy management with URL and Domain Category filtering on AWS Network Firewall
Authors: Lawton Pittenger, Sofía Aluma-Santos, Eric Fortenbery, Mostafa Elkhouly | May 28, 2026
Learn to use AWS Network Firewall’s URL and domain category filtering to control access to website categories like AI services, manage exceptions for approved domains, and monitor traffic patterns with Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights.

    Why and how to migrate to a Transit Gateway-attached AWS Network Firewall
    Authors: Frank Phillis, Lawton Pittenger | May 28, 2026
    Learn to migrate your centralized AWS Network Firewall deployment to a AWS Transit Gateway-attached model, eliminating the inspection Amazon VPC and enabling flexible cost allocation.

    Identity

    Regional routing for AWS access portals: Implementing custom vanity domains for IAM Identity Center
    Authors: Georgi Baghdasaryan, Laura Reith, Sowjanya Rajavaram | May 14, 2026
    Learn to build a custom vanity domain with latency-based routing and automated failover for IAM Identity Center multi-Region access portals.

    Automating identity lifecycle and security with AWS Directory Service APIs
    Authors: Ali Alzand, Kevin Sookhan | May 21, 2026
    Learn to use the new AWS Directory Service Data APIs with Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Step Functions to automate identity lifecycle management and respond to security threats.

    Governance and compliance

    Announcing the ISO 31000:2018 Risk Management on AWS compliance guide
    Authors: Jesse McMahan, Akanksha Chaturvedi, Mayur Jadhav, Juan Rodriguez, Sana Rahman | Published: May 1, 2026
    A compliance guide providing practical guidance for establishing a risk management program using ISO 31000:2018 principles in AWS environments.

    New compliance guide available: ISO/IEC 42001:2023 on AWS
    Authors: Abdul Javid, Amber Welch, Muhammad Sharief, Jonathan Jenkyn, Satish Uppalapati | Published: May 6, 2026
    A compliance guide providing practical guidance for designing and operating an Artificial Intelligence Management System (AIMS) using AWS services.

    Introducing the updated AWS User Guide to Governance, Risk, and Compliance for Responsible AI Adoption
    Authors: Krish De, Stephen James Martin, Brenda Fong, Kelvin Leung | May 13, 2026
    An updated guide providing FSI customers practical considerations for responsible AI adoption across governance, risk management, compliance, data management, and AI agent management.

    Governing infrastructure as code using pattern-based policy as code
    Authors: Guptaji Teegela, Paul Keastead | May 19, 2026
    Learn to use Open Policy Agent (OPA) in CI/CD pipelines to validate AWS infrastructure changes before deployment using recurring control patterns.

    Import historical data from AWS CloudTrail Lake to Amazon CloudWatch
    Authors: Isaiah Salinas, Erik Weber|Published: May 6, 2026
    Learn to import historical data from AWS CloudTrail Lake into Amazon CloudWatch for centralized log analysis.

    Data protection

    Automating post-quantum cryptography readiness using AWS Config
    Author: Pravin Nair | May 14, 2026
    Learn to use the PQC Readiness Scanner to inventory your ALB, NLB, and Amazon API Gateway endpoints and continuously monitor their TLS configurations for post-quantum cryptography readiness.

    Threat detection and response

    Detecting and preventing crypto mining in your AWS environment
    Authors: Jason Palmer, Nadia Mahmood | May 13, 2026
    Learn to use Amazon GuardDuty to identify and mitigate cryptocurrency mining threats in your AWS environment with a multi-layered defense strategy.

    Well-architected best practices for software supply chain security
    Authors: Trevor Schiavone, Desiree Brunner | May 26, 2026
    Learn to apply AWS Well-Architected Framework security best practices to defend against software supply chain attacks like Shai-Hulud using temporary credentials, centralized dependency management, artifact signing, and continuous scanning.

    AWS Security Hub Extended: Why enterprise security products should sell themselves
    Author: Michael Fuller | May 20, 2026
    A thought leadership piece on how AWS Security Hub Extended enables frictionless, pay-as-you-go adoption of curated partner security solutions alongside AWS-native services.

    Application Security

    Five ways to use Kiro and Amazon Q to strengthen your security posture
    Author: Roger Nem | Published: May 5, 2026
    Learn to use Kiro and Amazon Q Developer for security finding triage, infrastructure remediation, security reviews, and service control policies (SCP) development.

    AWS Security Agent full repository code scanning feature now available in preview
    Authors: Ayush Singh, Daniele Bonadiman | May 12, 2026
    Learn to use AWS Security Agent’s full repository code review to perform deep, context-aware security analysis of your entire code base.

    Training and enablement

    Complimentary virtual training: Get hands-on with AWS Security services
    Author: Ashley Nelson | Published: May 11, 2026
    Security Activation Days are free 3–6 hour virtual workshops providing hands-on practice with AWS security services guided by specialists.

    May Security Bulletins

    Investigations of reported security vulnerabilities affecting Amazon and AWS services, software, and products.

    AWS Samples

    This month brings 8 new AWS samples spanning application security, data protection, infrastructure security, governance, and AI security. From AI-powered security agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to centralized AWS Config monitoring at scale, these repositories help you implement security best practices across your AWS environment.

    Application Security

    Schedule AWS Security Agent penetration test
    Learn to deploy a AWS CloudFormation template that uses Amazon EventBridge and AWS Step Functions to schedule recurring AWS Security Agent penetration tests with Amazon Simple Notification Service
    (SNS) notifications on completion.

    Security review assistant
    Learn to deploy a multi-agent system on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore that automates Deliverable Security Reviews by combining architecture analysis, IaC code review, ASH vulnerability scanning, and compliance assessment into a single pipeline.

    AWS Security Agent Recorder
    Learn to use a cross-browser extension that records the unique domains your web app contacts and auto-fills them into the AWS Security Agent penetration test configuration.

    Data Protection

    KMS access audit
    Learn to resolve and report who can use your AWS Key Management Service (KMS) keys across IAM policies, key policies, and grants, with IAM Identity Center resolution to identify the humans behind SSO roles.

    Infrastructure security

    Building a conversational AI agent for AWS WAF analysis with AgentCore
    Learn to deploy an AI-powered agent using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Strands SDK that investigates AWS WAF security incidents, detects bypasses, and generates security reports through natural language.

    Governance

    Centralized AWS Config CI monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch
    Learn to centrally monitor AWS Config Configuration Item recording across all accounts in an AWS Organization using CloudWatch Cross-Account Observability, with dashboards showing top resource types, per-account volume, and conformance pack compliance.

    CloudFormation Guard security analyzer
    Learn to deploy an AI agent powered by Amazon Bedrock AgentCore that scans CloudFormation resource documentation, identifies security-critical properties with risk levels, and generates ready-to-use cfn-guard 3.x rules for your CI/CD pipeline.

    AI Security

    Guarded user-controlled attested runtime deployment (Guardian Platform)
    Learn to deploy LLM models securely in consumer AWS accounts while protecting model weights using AWS Nitro TPM attestation, KMS envelope encryption, and Zero Operator Access with immutable AMIs.

    AWS Labs

    This month brings 1 new AWS Labs repository focused on governance, helping research institutions deploy secure, tagged infrastructure with self-service access and multi-account controls.

    ResearchStack on AWS
    Learn to deploy research computing infrastructure on AWS in minutes — Amazon EC2, S3, EFS, Amazon SageMaker AI, and ParallelCluster — with built-in security, cost tracking, and governance using CloudFormation templates and optional AWS Service Catalog.

    Conclusion

    May 2026 shows AI security maturing from model-level controls to full-stack protection of agentic workflows. The posts and samples provide patterns for policy-based authorization with Cedar, network traffic filtering by category, and cross-account compliance monitoring. The security bulletins address vulnerabilities in SDKs, drivers, and developer tooling. Each resource includes deployment steps or runnable code so you can validate in your own environment before adopting. Subscribe to the AWS Security Blog RSS feed to receive updates as they publish, and revisit this digest monthly for a consolidated view of what changed and what to act on.

    If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.


    Rodolfo Brenes

    Rodolfo is a Principal Solutions Architect focused on Cloud Governance and Compliance. With over 18 years of experience, he currently leads a technical field community in AWS helping customers scale and improve their security and governance frameworks. Besides work, Rodolfo enjoys video games, playing with his four cats, and won’t say no to a good outdoor adventure.

    Anna Brinkmann

    Anna has 18 years of experience in the technical content space and has spent the last 6 years managing the AWS Security Blog. Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her family.

    Spring 2026 SOC 1, 2, and 3 reports are now available with 188 services in scope

    1 June 2026 at 18:07

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce that the Spring 2026 System and Organization Controls (SOC) 1, 2, and 3 reports are now available. The reports cover 188 services over the 12-month period from April 1, 2025–March 31, 2026, giving customers a full year of assurance. These reports demonstrate our continuous commitment to adhering to the heightened expectations of cloud service providers.

    Customers can download the Spring 2026 SOC 1 and 2 reports through AWS Artifact, a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact. The SOC 3 report can be found on the AWS SOC Compliance Page and AWS Artifact.

    AWS strives to continuously bring services into the scope of its compliance programs to help customers meet their architectural and regulatory needs. You can view the current list of services in scope on our Services in Scope page. As an AWS customer, you can reach out to your AWS account team if you have any questions or feedback about SOC compliance.

    To learn more about AWS compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs.

    If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.


    Baj Bajwa

    Baj Bajwa

    Baj is a Security Assurance Manager at AWS, where he leads the Global Third-Party Assurance product portfolio within the Compliance and Security Assurance (CSA) organization. He has over 15 years of experience in information security, compliance, and risk management, and holds a master’s degree in cybersecurity. Baj maintains CISSP, CISA, PMP, CCSK, GISF, and ICAgile certifications.

    Tushar-Jain

    Tushar Jain

    Tushar is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS where he leads multiple security and privacy initiatives Tushar holds a Master of Business Administration from Indian Institute of Management Shillong, India and a Bachelor of Technology in electronics and telecommunication engineering from Marathwada University, India. He has over 14 years of experience in information security and holds CISM, CCSK and CSXF certifications.

    Michael Murphy

    Michael is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS where he leads multiple security and privacy initiatives. Michael has over 14 years of experience in information security and holds a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology. He also holds CISSP, CRISC, CISA, and CISM certifications.

    Atulsing Patil

    Atulsing is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS and has over 28 years of consulting experience in information technology and information security management. Atulsing holds a Master of Science in Electronics degree and professional certifications such as CCSP, CISSP, CISM, CDPSE, ISO 42001 Lead Auditor, ISO 27001 Lead Auditor, HITRUST CSF, Archer Certified Consultant, and AWS CCP.

    Jeff Cheung

    Jeff is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS where he leads multiple security and privacy initiatives across business lines. Jeff has Bachelors degrees in Information Systems, and Economics from SUNY Stony Brook, and has over 20 years of experience in information security and assurance. Jeff has held professional certifications such as CISA, CISM, and PCI-QSA.

    Noah Miller

    Noah is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS and leads multiple security and privacy initiatives. Noah has 7 years of experience in information security. He has a master’s degree in Cybersecurity Risk Management and a bachelor’s degree in Informatics from Indiana University.

    Will Black

    Will is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS where he leads multiple security and compliance initiatives. Will has 10 years of experience in compliance and security assurance and holds a degree in Management Information Systems from Temple University. Additionally, he is a PCI Internal Security Assessor (ISA) for AWS and holds the CCSK and ISO 27001 Lead Implementer certifications.

    Allen Beam

    Allen is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS supporting third-party security and privacy compliance initiatives. He has over 10 years of experience in external IT security audits, security control design and implementation, and audit readiness and control deficiency remediation. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and Finance from James Madison University.

    Ziv Wand

    Ziv is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS and leads multiple security and privacy initiatives. Ziv has over 6 years of experience in information security assurance, external IT security audits, security control design and implementation, and audit readiness. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems from Binghamton University.

    Shalini Mishra

    Shalini is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. She has over 10 years of experience leading end-to-end compliance programs across ISO, SOC, and cloud security frameworks, with deep expertise in third-party risk management and enterprise governance. Shalini holds a Master of Science degree in Information Systems and CRISC certification.

    Welcoming the AWS Customer Incident Response Team

    26 May 2026 at 21:04

    May 26, 2026: This post was originally published in July 2022. It has been updated to reflect current engagement options, new threat intelligence resources such as the Threat Technique Catalog for AWS (TTC), additional open-source tools, and the distinction between AWS CIRT support and the AWS Security Incident Response managed service.


    Welcome back, or welcome for the first time. Either way, we’re glad you’re here. We’re the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT), and we want to share who we are and how we can help when it matters most.

    The AWS CIRT is a specialized 24/7 global team within Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides support to customers during active security events on the customer side of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. Our team is made up of security engineers who respond to cloud security events and build the tools and resources we use to do it.

    Important: If you’re experiencing an active security event in your AWS environment—such as unauthorized access, data exfiltration, or ransomware—open an AWS support case and request assistance.

    To request assistance from AWS:

    1. Open a support case from the impacted AWS account through the AWS Support Center Console.
    2. Select the service most closely related to the security event (for example, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)).
    3. Mention that you have an urgent security incident in the case description.

    Opening a support case from the affected account allows AWS to confirm account ownership and gives you a case number to track the engagement. If you have an account team (TAM, Account Manager, or Solutions Architect), you can also alert them to initiate an escalation.

    If you’ve lost access to your account, you can still submit a request for assistance.

    When the AWS CIRT supports you, we focus on investigating security events as they appear in AWS service logs and the AWS control plane. For our analysis, we draw on sources such as AWS CloudTrail, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, and Amazon GuardDuty findings. We assist with triage, analysis, and containment, alongside providing recommendations and best practices to help you avoid security events in the future.

    The AWS CIRT works alongside AWS threat intelligence and security operations teams. During an engagement, we use current threat intelligence and AWS infrastructure knowledge to inform our analysis and recommendations.

    For investigations that extend into host-level or application-level analysis—such as operating system forensics, memory analysis, or application code review—we recommend complementing our support with a specialized AWS Partner for digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) capabilities.

    Figure 1 shows the two different sides of the shared responsibility model, in which AWS is responsible for security OF the cloud, while customers are responsible for security IN the cloud.

    Figure 1: The customer and AWS Shared Responsibility Model

    Figure 1: The customer and AWS Shared Responsibility Model

    Threat intelligence: The Threat Technique Catalog for AWS

    The AWS CIRT regularly encounters patterns that repeat across our engagements. The TTC started as an internal reference—a way for our team to track and share what we were seeing across engagements, so we weren’t solving the same problems in isolation. Over time, it became clear that the knowledge we were building for ourselves was exactly what customers needed to get ahead of the same threats. So, we made it public. When we see techniques repeating across customers, an effective way to help them is to document those techniques and make that knowledge available so they can act on it before they’re in the middle of an incident.

    To that end, we developed the Threat Technique Catalog for AWS (TTC)—a publicly available catalog, based on MITRE ATT&CK Cloud Matrix, that documents threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) specific to AWS as observed by the AWS CIRT. Each entry includes detection guidance and mitigations specific to AWS environments. You can filter for the AWS services in your account to focus on what’s most relevant to you.

    Findings from the TTC also inform detection logic in AWS services like Amazon GuardDuty, helping customers strengthen automated protections in their environments.

    Figure 2: The Threat Technique Catalog for AWS, based on MITRE ATT&CK Cloud Matrix

    Figure 2: The Threat Technique Catalog for AWS, based on MITRE ATT&CK Cloud Matrix

    Open source tools

    We’ve open-sourced several tools based on patterns we see in engagements. These complement rather than replace your existing security tooling. For a comprehensive framework for building your incident response program, see the AWS Security Incident Response Guide.

    The tools below started as internal solutions we built to solve problems we kept running into.

    Workshops

    We maintain five publicly available workshops, regularly updated to simulate current security events to help you learn tools and procedures that we use daily. The workshops cover unauthorized IAM credential use, ransomware on Amazon S3, cryptomining, SSRF on IMDSv1, and incident response preparedness tooling. All you need is an AWS account, an internet connection, and the desire to learn more about incident response in the AWS Cloud. These workshops are built using the same scenarios our team trains on internally—we wanted to make that accessible to everyone.

    How to contact us

    Any AWS customer can engage the AWS CIRT through an AWS support case, regardless of support plan level. For those customers who have an account team, you can start an escalation to the AWS CIRT with the account team. Customers with Enterprise Support or Unified Operations can also onboard to AWS Security Incident Response, a managed service for security event triage and response.

    Thank you for reading. This post is where we share what we’re learning—security trends, new resources, and threat intelligence—so you can stay prepared. If you’ve worked with us and have thoughts on how we can do better, reach out through your AWS account team, the comments below, or aws-cirt@amazon.com.

    Until next time: logs on, credentials rotated, and alerts reviewed.

    We also recommend subscribing to AWS Security Bulletins for notifications about security events for AWS services. You can subscribe through RSS feed to stay informed.


    Jason Hurst

    Jason Hurst

    Jason is a Security Engineer on the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT), specializing in network analysis and cloud security investigations. He is passionate about developing others, teaching part-time at a local technical college. Jason has three dogs that entertain him in his spare time.

    Shannon Brazil

    Shannon is a Security Engineer on the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT), specializing in digital forensics and cloud security investigations. Known in the community as 4n6lady, she is passionate about security education and mentoring the next generation of defenders.

    AWS KY3P report now available for third-party supplier due diligence

    21 May 2026 at 21:58

    We’re excited to announce that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completed the S&P Global Know Your Third Party (KY3P) assessment of its security posture. This assessment demonstrates our continued commitment to meet the heightened expectations of cloud service providers. Customers can now use the AWS KY3P assessment to reduce their supplier due diligence burden.

    KY3P, also known as the S&P Global Comprehensive Assessment (formerly TruSight), is a validated, evidence-based assessment designed to support regulatory compliance and efficient, standardized risk data exchange between AWS and our clients. KY3P’s globally recognized methodology provides organizations with enhanced visibility into supply chain risks by validating the actual implementation and operation of controls – not just policies or attestations.

    As cloud adoption accelerates across industries, AWS has become a critical component of customers’ third-party environments. Regulated customers, such as those in the financial services sector, are held to high standards by regulators and auditors when it comes to exercising effective due diligence on third parties.

    To better manage risks from their evolving third-party environments and drive operational efficiencies, many customers rely on third-party risk management services such as KY3P. In support of these efforts, AWS has completed its annual KY3P security posture assessment, conducted by KY3P security assessors.

    KY3P’s risk assessment methodology includes over 200 controls across 26 control categories and nine risk domains. These topics include Privacy, Network Management, Logical Access Management, and Physical and Environmental Security. The assessment criteria were developed by a consortium of leading financial institutions.

    Customers can use the KY3P results to map AWS against commonly used industry frameworks and standards, such as NIST CSF v2, PCI DSS 4.0, and ISO 27001:2022 to instantly gain visibility into controls coverage.

    For details on how to access the report, see our AWS KY3P assessment page.

    If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. To learn more about our other compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs.

    Michael Murphy

    Michael is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS where he leads multiple security and privacy initiatives. Michael has over 14 years of experience in information security and holds a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology. He also holds CISSP, CRISC, CISA, and CISM certifications.

    Introducing the updated AWS User Guide to Governance, Risk, and Compliance for Responsible AI Adoption

    13 May 2026 at 21:07

    The financial services industry (FSI) is using AI to transform how financial institutions serve their customers. AI solutions can help proactively manage portfolios, automatically refinance mortgages when rates decrease, and negotiate insurance premiums for customers.

    However, this adoption brings new governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) considerations that organizations need to address. To help FSI customers navigate these challenges, AWS is excited to announce an updated AWS User Guide to Governance, Risk, and Compliance for Responsible AI Adoption within Financial Services Industries.

    This comprehensive guide provides FSI customers practical considerations for responsible AI adoption across key dimensions including governance, risk management, compliance, data management, model management and AI agent management. It includes detailed AWS service capabilities that customers can use to address these considerations, such as Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, Amazon Bedrock Agents, Amazon SageMaker Autopilot, and Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor.

    The guide is available at the AWS Whitepaper portal and is complementary to other AWS resources such as the AWS Responsible Use of AI Guide, AWS Cloud Adoption Framework for AI, AWS Well-Architected Framework – Responsible AI Lens, AWS Well-Architected Framework – Generative AI Lens, and AWS Well-Architected Framework – Machine Learning Lens.

    As the regulatory environment and leading practices continue to evolve, we will provide further updates on the AWS Security Blog and AWS Compliance Center. You can also reach out to your AWS account team for help finding the resources you need.

    Resources

    If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.

    Krish De

    Krish De

    Krish is a Principal FSI Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) specialist. He works with AWS customers, their regulators, and AWS teams to safely accelerate customers’ AI and cloud adoption by providing prescriptive guidance on GRC. Krish has over 20 years of experience working in governance, risk, and technology across the financial services industry in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

    Brenda Fong

    Brenda Fong

    Brenda is a senior FSI risk and compliance specialist. She works with AWS customers in banking, insurance, and capital markets within the ASEAN region to help them meet regulatory, governance, risk, and compliance expectations. Brenda has over 20 years of experience working in governance, risk, and technology across the financial services industry within Asia Pacific.

    Stephen Martin

    Steve is the Head of Financial Services Compliance and Security for EMEA and APAC. Steve Joined AWS after working for over 20 years in financial service in senior leadership roles with responsibility across ASIA, the Middle East, and Europe. At AWS, he supports customers as they use the scale, security, and agility of AWS to transform the industry.

    Kelvin Leung

    Kelvin Leung

    Kelvin is the AWS FSI Security and Compliance Lead based in Hong Kong. He has 20 years of experience specializing in AI Governance, risk management and regulatory compliance within the financial services sector. Prior to joining AWS, Kelvin worked for a financial regulator where he was responsible for technology risk policy-making and IT regulatory examinations, with a particular focus on AI risk assessment and control frameworks.

    PCI PIN and P2PE compliance packages for AWS Payment Cryptography are now available

    13 May 2026 at 18:16

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce the successful completion of Payment Card Industry Personal Identification Number (PCI PIN) and PCI Point-to-Point Encryption (PCI P2PE) assessments for the AWS Payment Cryptography service. This assessment expands the AWS Payment Cryptography compliance portfolio, with AWS now validated as a component provider for Key Management (KMCP) and Key Loading (KLCP) in addition to the existing Decryption Management (DMCP) attestation, and extends PCI PIN and P2PE coverage to the South America (São Paulo) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Regions.

    With Payment Cryptography, your payment processing applications can use payment hardware security modules (HSMs) that are PCI PIN Transaction Security (PTS) HSM certified and fully managed by AWS, with PCI PIN and P2PE-compliant key management. These attestations give you the flexibility to deploy your regulated workloads with reduced compliance overhead.

    The PCI P2PE Decryption Component enables payment applications to use AWS to decrypt credit card transactions from payment terminals, and PCI PIN attestation is required for applications that process PIN-based debit transactions. The PCI P2PE Key Management and Key Loading Component attestations enable applications to use AWS for physical key exchange and to support key management use cases including key injection. To learn more about the new Physical Key Exchange feature, see the AWS What’s New announcement. With these capabilities, AWS Payment Cryptography enables customers to manage cryptographic keys in accordance with PCI standards and industry best practices, reducing the operational burden of maintaining compliant key management infrastructure.

    The PCI PIN and PCI P2PE compliance packages for AWS Payment Cryptography includes the following reports:

    • PCI PIN Attestation of Compliance (AOC) – Demonstrates that AWS Payment Cryptography was successfully validated against the PCI PIN standard with zero findings
    • PCI PIN Responsibility Summary – Provides guidance to help AWS customers understand their responsibilities in developing and operating a highly secure environment for handling PIN-based transactions
    • PCI P2PE DMCP Attestation of Validation (AOV) – Demonstrates that AWS Payment Cryptography was successfully validated against the requirements for a PCI P2PE Decryption Management System with zero findings
    • PCI P2PE KMCP Attestation of Validation (AOV) – Demonstrates that AWS Payment Cryptography was successfully validated against the requirements for a PCI P2PE Key Management Component Provider with zero findings
    • PCI P2PE KLCP Attestation of Validation (AOV) – Demonstrates that AWS Payment Cryptography was successfully validated against the requirements for a PCI P2PE Key Loading Component Provider with zero findings
    • P2PE Component User’s Guide and Annual Component Report – Describes the AWS Payment Cryptography service assessment scope as a PCI P2PE Decryption Component, Key Loading Component, and Key Management Component and illustrates PCI P2PE compliance responsibilities for both the service and customers using the service for point-to-point encryption processing

    AWS was evaluated by Coalfire, a third-party Qualified Security Assessor (QSA). Customers can access the PCI PIN Attestation of Compliance (AOC) report, the PCI PIN Shared Responsibility Summary, the PCI P2PE Attestation of Validation, and P2PE Decryption Component User’s Guide and Annual Decryption Component Report through AWS Artifact.

    To learn more about our PCI programs and other compliance and security programs, visit the AWS Compliance Programs page. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Compliance Support page.

    If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.

    Will Black

    Will is a Compliance Program Manager at Amazon Web Services where he leads multiple security and compliance initiatives. Will has 10 years of experience in compliance and security assurance and holds a degree in Management Information Systems from Temple University. Additionally, he is a PCI Internal Security Assessor (ISA) for AWS and holds the CCSK and ISO 27001 Lead Implementer certifications.

    Tushar-Jain

    Tushar Jain

    Tushar is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS where he leads multiple security and privacy initiatives Tushar holds a Master of Business Administration from Indian Institute of Management Shillong, India and a Bachelor of Technology in electronics and telecommunication engineering from Marathwada University, India. He has over 13 years of experience in information security and holds CISM, CCSK and CSXF certifications.

    Jeff Cheung

    Jeff is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS where he leads multiple security and privacy initiatives across business lines. Jeff has Bachelors degrees in Information Systems and Economics from SUNY Stony Brook, and has over 20 years of experience in information security and assurance. Jeff has held professional certifications such as CISA, CISM, and PCI-QSA.

    Balaji Palanisamy

    Balaji is the Industry Engagement Lead for AWS Payment Cryptography, helping financial institutions and payment companies modernize their cryptographic infrastructure. He combines pragmatic security strategy with hands-on solution architecture expertise, believing the best solutions balance technical and business needs. Always curious about security challenges, he stays current by reviewing emerging payment security standards.

    AWS Security Agent full repository code scanning feature now available in preview

    12 May 2026 at 23:34

    Today, we’re excited to announce the preview release of full repository code review, a new capability in AWS Security Agent that performs deep, context-aware security analysis of your entire code base. AI-driven cybersecurity capabilities are advancing rapidly. AWS Security Agent can now find vulnerabilities and build working exploits across your entire code base at a scale and speed we haven’t seen before, reasoning like a human security researcher, but operating at machine velocity. Unlike traditional static analysis tools that match code against known vulnerability patterns, full repository code review reasons about your application’s architecture, trust boundaries, and data flows the way a human security researcher would and then produces developer-ready findings with transparent evidence and concrete remediation.

    AWS is prioritizing free early access for customers, giving defenders the opportunity to strengthen their code bases and share what they learn so the whole industry can benefit.

    The challenge: Security analysis that scales with your code

    Development teams today face persistent tension. Traditional static application security testing (SAST) tools are fast and reliable at catching known patterns such as a SQL injection sink, an unescaped output, or a hard-coded credential. But modern applications are complex systems of services, APIs, trust boundaries, and authorization logic. The most dangerous vulnerabilities often aren’t single-line pattern violations, rather they’re systemic gaps where a validation function covers four of five cases, one endpoint is missing the authorization annotation its neighbors have, or encoding is applied in one context but not another.

    Manual security reviews catch these issues, but they’re expensive, slow, and don’t scale to the pace of modern development. As code bases grow, teams are forced to choose between breadth and depth.

    Full repository code review is built to close this gap. It gives your team an automated security researcher that reads and reasons about your entire repository, not just individual lines or file, and surfaces findings that pattern-matching tools miss.

    How it works: Profile, search, triage, validate

    Full repository code review operates in four stages that mirror how an experienced security engineer conducts an engagement.

    1. Profile the application: The scanner begins by reading the entire repository and building a security model of the application including entry points, trust boundaries, data flows, authorization invariants, and the defenses already in place. This profiling step accounts for every source file, so coverage decisions are explicit rather than implicit. The result is a structured understanding of what the application does and where its attack surface lies.

    2. Search for vulnerabilities: An orchestrator reads the security profile, reasons about the attack surface, and dispatches specialized agents to the highest-risk components. Each agent receives a scoped assignment with specific modules, threat context, and adversarial questions. Agents are free to follow imports and callers beyond their starting scope when a lead takes them there.

    3. Triage and deduplicate: Candidate findings are deduplicated (same sink, same root cause) and low-confidence noise is filtered out before the validation phase.

    4. Validate independently: For every candidate, an independent validator re-reads the source code and traces the full attack chain. The validator argues both sides: it looks for reasons the finding might not be a vulnerability (compensating controls, intentional design), and it looks for reasons it is one (alternative attack paths, edge cases). A finding is only rejected when the evidence against it is as strong as the evidence that promoted it. This process produces findings with structured Verified and Could not verify sections, so your team knows exactly what the scanner confirmed in the code and what depends on your deployment environment.

    What makes this different

    Full repository code review differs from traditional static analysis in two fundamental ways. It reasons about your application’s actual behavior rather than matching against known vulnerability patterns, and it presents findings with structured evidence that makes uncertainty explicit rather than hidden.

    Context-aware reasoning, not pattern matching

    Because the scanner builds a security model before searching for vulnerabilities, it reasons about the application’s actual behavior, not only surface-level code patterns.

    Consider a real example: A stored procedure had a SQL injection vulnerability. A traditional SAST tool would flag the specific EXECUTE IMMEDIATE call. The scanner went deeper and it identified that the central validation function doesn’t block single quotes in any of its five regex profiles, listed all five profiles by name, explained why single quotes matter for the specific database engine, and noted that another stored procedure skips the validation function entirely. Instead of a point fix on one call site, the finding led to a comprehensive remediation of the systemic gap.

    In another case, the scanner found an XSS vulnerability where a value was added to a field without HTML encoding. The same value was properly encoded with Encode.forHtml() in a different context within the same file. Pattern-matching tools miss this because the encoding function is present, but the vulnerability is the inconsistency, which requires understanding the application’s behavior across code paths.

    Validated findings with transparent uncertainty

    Every finding is structured for efficient developer triage:

    • Problem: What the code does wrong, with specific file and line references.
    • Impact: What an attacker gains, with details about deployment context.
    • Verified and could not verify: What the scanner confirmed directly in code versus what depends on your environment (network segmentation, runtime behavior).
    • Remediation: Concrete fix suggestions with specific code changes, not generic guidance.
    • Severity and confidence: Calibrated independently. Severity reflects the impact if the vulnerability is exploitable; confidence reflects how much of the attack chain was verified in code.

    How full repository code review fits into your workflow

    Full repository code review is designed to complement, not replace, your existing security tooling. Here’s how it fits into a modern development workflow:

    • Before security reviews: Run a full repository code review before scheduling a penetration test or security review. The review surfaces the obvious and semi-obvious issues so your security team can focus their limited time on the subtle, design-level questions that require human judgment.
    • When onboarding acquired or open source code: Full repository code review is especially valuable when your team inherits code through acquisitions or vendor dependencies, or from open source components you’re integrating. The scanner builds a security model from scratch, so it doesn’t need institutional knowledge of the codebase.
    • During architecture reviews: Because the scanner reasons about trust boundaries, data flows, and authorization invariants, its findings often surface architectural issues, not only implementation bugs. Review the scan results alongside your threat models to validate assumptions about how components interact.

    Follow our Quickstart guide to set up and execute a full repo code review with AWS Security Agent.

    Preview availability and pricing

    Full repository code review is available today in preview at no additional charge for AWS Security Agent customers. During the preview, we welcome your feedback as we refine the experience. Use the built-in feedback mechanism in the Security Agent web application or reach out to your AWS account team.

    Get started today

    Visit the AWS Security Agent console to enable full repository code review and run your first scan. For more information, see the AWS Security Agent documentation.

    Ayush Singh

    Ayush Singh

    Ayush is a Senior Product Manager at AWS, where he leads the development of AWS Security Agent. Ayush has a proven record of scaling enterprise-grade, open source, and agentic AI products. He is dedicated to building tools that empower organizations to effectively scale their security practices. Ayush holds an MBA from the University of Rochester and a B.Tech in Computer Science from KIIT University.

    Daniele Bonadiman

    Daniele is a Senior Applied Scientist at AWS, where he works on AWS Security Agent. Daniele holds a PhD in Applied Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing from the University of Trento. During his time at AWS, Daniele has contributed to several AI initiatives focusing on conversational AI, multi-agent systems orchestration and code interpretation for AI agents.

    Enabling AI sovereignty on AWS

    12 May 2026 at 17:18

    Cloud and AI are transforming industries and societies at unprecedented speed, from accelerating research and enhancing customer experiences to optimizing business processes and enriching public services. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we believe that for the cloud and AI to reach their full potential, customers need control over their data and choices for how and where they run their workloads. In 2022, we formalized our commitment to control and choice—offering all AWS customers the most advanced set of sovereignty controls and features available in the cloud with the AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge. As AI adoption accelerated, we’ve been working with customers to help them embrace AI innovation while meeting sovereignty requirements. We’re committed to ensuring customers can continue to harness AI’s transformative capabilities without compromising on the capabilities, performance, innovation, security, and scale of the AWS Cloud to meet their sovereignty needs, including AI sovereignty. Our approach to AI sovereignty is grounded in a deep understanding of these needs and the real-world implementation challenges that come with them.

    Through discussions with customers, partners, analysts, and regulators, we’ve learned that digital sovereignty—and AI sovereignty—means different things to different stakeholders. Each country and region has unique, evolving sovereignty requirements, with no uniform guidance on which workloads or sectors must comply. Despite this variation, we’ve identified consistent themes: data sovereignty (including data residency and operator access restrictions) and operational sovereignty (including resilience, survivability, and independence). AI sovereignty builds on these foundations, adding emerging considerations such as preserving cultural norms, values, and local languages in AI outputs. Ultimately, meeting digital and AI sovereignty requirements comes down to providing customers with more control and choice.

    Enabling customer control and choice across the AI stack

    AI sovereignty requires control and choice across the AI stack—comprehensive cloud infrastructure that combines compute, networking, data management, security controls, specialized application services, and talent. This includes the ability to make deliberate choices across the stack such as location, dependencies, services, and partners that align with customers’ unique needs, regulatory requirements, and innovation objectives. With AWS, customers can develop AI on a trusted foundation where their data remains secure and under their control. Customers have the freedom to choose from a comprehensive range of AI optimized chips—including purpose-built AWS silicon and chips from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel—so they can select the right chip for the right workload. AWS applies two decades of learned expertise to our comprehensive AI stack, enabling organizations to maintain complete control over their data and operations while accessing cutting-edge capabilities to solve local challenges.

    AWS provides customers with the infrastructure and tools to embed AI across the full value chain—not just in isolated use cases, but as a foundational capability enabling them to train and deploy models and build sophisticated AI and generative AI applications with exceptional performance. This enables customers to focus on innovation instead of their infrastructure, bringing the cloud to where they need it most with a range of options including AWS AI Factories, AWS Outposts, AWS Local Zones, AWS Dedicated Local Zones, and AWS Regions including the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. For example, customers who require dedicated deployments to meet their sovereignty requirements for their mission-critical AI workloads can use AWS AI Factories. These physically isolated, dedicated deployments built exclusively for the customer combine the latest AI infrastructure, including AWS Trainium accelerators, NVIDIA GPUs, dedicated networking, and storage. AWS AI Factories address AI sovereignty needs by delivering on-premises AI capabilities to securely perform training, fine tuning and real-time inference.

    The AWS AI portfolio offers a comprehensive range of services—from foundation models (FMs) through Amazon Bedrock, to machine learning offerings like Amazon SageMaker, application services like Amazon Q, and developer tools like Kiro—designed to give customers control over their data and choice in how they deploy AI. With Amazon Bedrock, customers can choose from hundreds of models from leading providers like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Amazon, Cohere, Mistral AI, and OpenAI. Customers can evaluate and select the most suitable FMs for their specific needs and choose where they deploy them, and fine-tune models privately with their own data. Customers are always in control of their data. Critically, no customer inputs to or outputs from Amazon Bedrock are used to train Amazon Nova or any third-party models.

    Supporting national AI strategies

    Successful AI strategies require building a holistic environment nurturing local talent, supporting startups, developing industry-specific applications, and fostering public-private partnerships. The cloud has transformed AI from an exclusive technology requiring massive investment into an accessible tool for innovation across all sectors and organization sizes. While technical infrastructure gets much of the attention when considering AI sovereignty, the cultural and strategic dimensions of national FMs are equally critical. These FMs aren’t merely computational tools, they can encode elements of cultural knowledge, linguistic nuance, and societal context, making local relevance a design consideration rather than an afterthought. These FMs serve purposes that extend beyond technical capabilities. Locally trained FMs can reflect national educational curricula and cultural values while understanding local legal systems, business practices, and regulatory frameworks. Models trained on local languages, dialects, and cultural contexts support linguistic diversity and help underrepresented languages gain representation in AI products and services.

    AWS supports vital national priorities and customers’ missions, such as the preservation of culture norms, values, and local languages development of regional and local language model capabilities. To customize models, customers can use Amazon SageMaker AI for voice, domain specialization, and to evaluate models for accuracy. For example, the first Greek LLM made available in March 2024 was Meltemi—built on top of Mistral-7B, running on AWS infrastructure, and continually pretrained to extend its proficiency in the Greek language using a dataset of 28.5 billion Greek tokens. Meltemi is available on HuggingFace. SEA-LION—a family of open source, multilingual LLMs for Southeast Asia—was trained entirely on AWS with managed GPU clusters. Their team completed a 3B-parameter model in only 3 months—a 60% faster timeline than comparable on-premises projects.

    Verifiable control over data access

    Sovereignty isn’t only about where data resides—it’s about who can access it and under what conditions. In the AI context, access restriction extends beyond infrastructure to cover model inputs, outputs, training processes, and the operational environments in which AI runs. Unlike traditional infrastructure, AI workloads introduce new access surfaces: the model itself, the data used to train it, and the inference pipeline through which sensitive inputs flow. This furthers the need for verifiable governance and identity propagation in IT systems.

    To help ensure the confidentiality and integrity of customer data, all modern Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances including those that offer AI accelerators, such as AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium, are backed by the industry-leading security capabilities of the AWS Nitro System. By design, there is no mechanism for anyone at AWS to access customer data on Nitro EC2 instances that customers use to run their workloads. AWS services—including those with AI capabilities built on Amazon EC2—inherit these same protections. These protections apply to AI data running in the AWS Nitro System so that they’re protected at every stage—from model training to inference. The NCC Group, an independent cybersecurity firm, has validated the design of the Nitro System. We believe providing this level of transparency is critical in building and sustaining trust.

    As AI agents increasingly take actions across systems on behalf of users, controlling who and what can access resources—and ensuring appropriate human oversight—becomes critical. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps ensure that only authorized users and applications can access AI resources through fine-grained permissions and comprehensive audit trails. For AI agents and automated workloads, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Identity provides identity and credential management, so agents operate with the right permissions and nothing more.

    Transparency and assurance

    Transparency is at the core of our digital sovereignty commitment. We provide comprehensive industry-leading technical measures, operational controls, and contract protections that give customers control over where they locate their data, who can access it, and how it’s used. To give greater assurance on how AWS services are designed and operated, we continue to seek out and secure third-party attestations, accreditations, and certifications that help our customers meet their compliance needs.

    We continue to deepen our assurances and transparency to customers—such as updating our AWS Service Terms to reflect our technical protections commitments (e.g. AWS Nitro System), providing detailed commitments as to our handling of third-party requests for customer data in our agreements, and providing supplemental explanations and resources (e.g. CLOUD Act blog) to empower customers to make informed choices on sovereignty matters. These efforts extend into our commitment to responsible AI, providing customers the confidence to build and operate AI applications responsibly using AWS Services. ISO/IEC 42001 is an international management system standard that outlines requirements and controls for organizations to promote the responsible development and use of AI systems. AWS is the first major cloud service provider to achieve ISO/IEC 42001 accredited certification for AI services, covering Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q Business, Amazon Textract, and Amazon Transcribe. In November 2025, AWS successfully completed its first surveillance audit for ISO 42001:2023 with no findings, reiterating the continual commitment of AWS to responsible AI practices.

    Innovative technology requires a secure and trustworthy foundation. AWS supports more than 140 security standards and compliance certifications that our customers and partners can inherit to help comply with local laws and regulations. For two decades, we’ve deeply engaged with regulators and cybersecurity authorities to align our offerings with national priorities and ensure our solutions support both innovation and control. We actively contribute to frameworks that respond to new developments without stifling progress.

    Sustained commitment to helping customers achieve their sovereignty goals

    AWS is committed to giving customers the same control and choice over their AI systems as they have over their data. We help customers harness AI’s transformative power while maintaining the capabilities, performance, innovation, security, and scale of AWS Cloud. As cloud and AI evolve, AWS will continue offering the most advanced sovereignty controls and features available.

    If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.

    Stephane Israel

    Stéphane Israël

    Stéphane is the leader and Managing Director of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. He is responsible for the management and operations of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, including infrastructure, technology, and services, in addition to broader digital sovereignty efforts at AWS. Prior to AWS, he was the CEO of Arianespace, where he oversaw numerous successful space missions, including the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.

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