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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 β€” from APIs and open source to cloud and AI β€” 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.

Threat tactic spotlight: Subdomain takeover

16 June 2026 at 19:53

In this blog post you’ll learn how to detect and prevent subdomain takeover – a tactic where threat actors exploit dangling DNS records to redirect traffic to attacker-controlled resources. We’ll explain the issue, how the situation arises, and how you can use various AWS features and services to help mitigate the impact of this tactic.

Under the shared responsibility model, securing configurations in the cloud is your responsibility. AWS supports you through strong defaults, guidance in the Security Pillar of the Well-Architected Framework, and security services to help you meet that responsibility. The AWS Customer Incident Response Team (AWS CIRT) also monitors for new and trending tactics that threat actors use to exploit specific customer configurations, so that you can make informed design decisions and improve your response plans.

AWS CIRT has observed threat actors actively scanning for public DNS CNAME records that point to resources that no longer exist, looking for subdomain takeover opportunities.

Note: The subdomain takeover tactic does not leverage vulnerabilities of AWS services. It exploits a dangling DNS record to redirect traffic to an attacker-controlled resource.

Quick DNS Primer

CNAME Records: A CNAME (Canonical Name) record is a DNS entry that points one domain name to another. For example, api.example.com can be configured to point to api.example.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com. This feature of DNS enables users to configure a memorable, human-friendly domain name while the actual resource lives at a longer, machine-generated AWS hostname. A security issue emerges when the target resource is deleted but the CNAME record pointing to it remains – creating a β€œdangling” record.

Dangling Records: When a resource (like an S3 bucket) is deleted but the DNS record pointing to it is left behind, that DNS record becomes β€œdangling”, pointing to a resource that no longer exists. For resources in globally shared namespaces, threat actors can potentially reclaim the name of your deleted resource and serve malicious content through your DNS record.

What is subdomain takeover?

A subdomain is a prefix added to a domain that allows you to organize access to your resources. A subdomain takeover occurs when you delete the underlying resource and a threat actor creates a new resource with the same name to take advantage of the DNS records still pointing to it.

A subdomain takeover is possible when a CNAME record points to an AWS resource that uses a globally shared DNS namespace where the resource name can be chosen by any AWS customer. The following AWS resources meet these criteria:

Amazon S3 (global namespace): Bucket names like mybucket.s3.amazonaws.com are globally unique and can be claimed by any account if the bucket is deleted. Note: S3 buckets created with account regional namespaces (launched March 2026) are scoped to your account and are not subject to this issue.

Amazon CloudFront: Distribution domain names like d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net are assigned by AWS and cannot be chosen by an attacker. However, if you delete a distribution and another customer creates one that happens to receive the same domain name, a dangling CNAME could resolve to their content.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Environment names like myapp.elasticbeanstalk.com are globally unique and can be claimed by any account if the environment is terminated.

Resources like Amazon VPC, Amazon EC2 instances, or private hosted zones are not subject to this tactic because they do not expose globally claimable DNS namespaces.

MITRE ATT&CK classifies this technique under T1584.001: Compromise Infrastructure – Domains.

Analyzing an example scenario

Consider the following scenario:

You create a DNS CNAME record pointing to your S3 website endpoint. The subdomain subdomain.example.com now resolves to subdomain.example.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com, which serves content from the S3 bucket named subdomain.example. If your team deletes the bucket and forgets to delete the DNS record, users that navigate to the site will see an error stating that the bucket doesn’t exist. However, at this point, if a threat actor sees this error and moves in to claim the bucket name, they will be able to set up their own site that users will see when they navigate to the subdomain.example.com site.

Figure 1 shows an S3 bucket named subdomain.example (a globally unique bucket name) configured to host a static website, with the S3 website endpoint subdomain.example.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com.

Figure 1: S3 bucket configured as a static website

Figure 1: S3 bucket configured as a static website

As shown in Figure 2, we use Amazon Route 53 to create a CNAME record to resolve to our Amazon domain name; to give users a friendly name and so they do not have to remember the long S3 website name in URLs.

Figure 2: DNS Resolver configured with CNAME record pointing to origin bucket

Figure 2: DNS Resolver configured with CNAME record pointing to origin bucket

The customer’s AWS administrator decides to stop serving content from the S3 bucket and deletes it, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Resource deleted without removing the CNAME record

Figure 3: Resource deleted without removing the CNAME record

With the S3 bucket deleted and the CNAME record still in place, the DNS record is now dangling. A threat actor identifies this situation and creates a new S3 bucket with the same global name subdomain.example in an AWS account that the threat actor controls, as shown in Figure 4. The threat actor can now serve content from this new bucket, including potentially malicious content. End users remain unaware of this switch and continue to access subdomain.example.com, trusting the content because it appears to originate from a URL they recognize.

Figure 4: Subdomain takeover happens

Figure 4: Subdomain takeover happens

Potential impacts of a sub-domain takeover

Consider these potential impacts:

Reputation risk: There is a potential risk to your organization’s reputation, because you don’t control the content being served from the threat actor’s site that your DNS record points to.

Potential exposure to phishing campaigns: Users within your organization might have the subdomain bookmarked in their browser, not knowing the resource is no longer available, then unsuspectingly navigate to the site that now hosts malware or is used to phish user credentials.

Blocking: If the subdomain is flagged by security vendors for malicious activity, it could impact your business operations.

Financial loss: Subdomain takeover incidents can result in a financial impact due to the potential disruption to service delivery as you deal with the event.

Proactive detection

AWS Config for proactive detection

For proactive detection, you can use AWS Config to continuously monitor your Route 53 CNAME records and verify that the target resources exist in your account.

Prerequisite: This approach requires AWS Config recorder to be enabled for the resource types you want to monitor (S3 buckets, CloudFront distributions, Elastic Beanstalk environments). If Config isn’t recording a resource type, it won’t appear in the inventory check. For more information, see Setting up AWS Config with the console.

Why use AWS Config inventory instead of DNS resolution checks?

A common approach is to check whether a CNAME resolves to a valid endpoint. However, this method has a critical flaw: if an attacker has already claimed the resource, DNS resolution will succeed – to their resource, not yours. You would have no indication that you don’t own what’s responding.

By querying AWS Config’s recorded configuration items, you’re checking whether the resource exists in your account inventory, not just whether something responds at that DNS name. This approach correctly identifies dangling CNAMEs even after a takeover has occurred.

Implementation approach:

Account-level vs. organization-level scope

The reference implementation queries AWS Config inventory within a single account. This means that if a CNAME record in Account A points to a resource that legitimately exists in Account B within the same AWS organization, the rule will flag it as NON_COMPLIANT.

For organizations that share resources across accounts, you can modify the solution to use an AWS Config Aggregator, which queries resource inventory across all accounts in your organization. This is similar to how IAM Access Analyzer supports both account-level and organization-level scopes. To use this approach, you need an organization-level Config Aggregator already configured, and the Lambda function’s IAM role needs the config:SelectAggregateResourceConfig permission.

We recommend starting with account-level scope for simplicity, then expanding to organization-level if your environment includes cross-account resource sharing.

The main idea is to create a custom AWS Config rule that queries your Route 53 hosted zones for CNAME records, then parses each CNAME target to determine whether it points to a known AWS resource pattern such as S3, CloudFront, or Elastic Beanstalk. For each match, the rule cross-references the target against your AWS Config inventory to verify that the resource actually exists in your account. If the resource isn’t found, the rule marks the CNAME record as NON_COMPLIANT, surfacing it for review.

The Config rule should focus on known AWS resource patterns:

  • S3: *.s3.amazonaws.com, *.s3-website-<region>.amazonaws.com
  • CloudFront: *.cloudfront.net
  • Elastic Beanstalk: *.elasticbeanstalk.com

Note: CNAME records pointing to external third-party services are outside the scope of this detection mechanism, as those resources won’t appear in your AWS Config inventory.

NON_COMPLIANT findings from your Config rule can be routed to AWS Security Hub for centralized visibility, or trigger SNS notifications to alert your security team.

Figure 5: Dangling DNS Detection Solution

Figure 5: Dangling DNS Detection Solution

Reference implementation:

We’ve published a complete implementation of this detection approach as an open-source solution. The solution deploys a Lambda function that discovers CNAME records across all your Route 53 hosted zones and uses pattern matching to identify targets pointing to S3, CloudFront, and Elastic Beanstalk. It then queries your AWS Config inventory to verify whether each target resource still exists in your account. When a dangling record is detected, the solution generates a HIGH severity finding in Security Hub and can optionally send SNS notifications to alert your security team. A CloudWatch metrics dashboard is also included for ongoing compliance tracking.

Deployment:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/sample-dangling-dns-detection
cd sample-dangling-dns-detection

# Build the Lambda deployment package
./scripts/package.sh

# Upload to S3
aws s3 cp dist/dangling-dns-detection.zip s3://YOUR_BUCKET/

# Deploy the CloudFormation stack
aws cloudformation deploy \
  --template-file infrastructure/template.yaml \
  --stack-name dangling-dns-detection \
  --parameter-overrides \
      LambdaCodeS3Bucket=YOUR_BUCKET \
      EvaluationFrequency=TwentyFour_Hours \
  --capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM

The stack creates an AWS Config custom rule that runs on your specified schedule (default: every 24 hours), evaluating all CNAME records and reporting compliance status.

Mitigating the effects

Mitigating subdomain takeover requires both preventive procedures and responsive capabilities.

Prevention: Standard operating procedure

The most effective mitigation is a standard operating procedure for resource deprovisioning that ensures DNS records are removed before the underlying resource:

  1. Within your DNS zone, delete the CNAME record that points to the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the resource that you plan to deprovision.
  2. Wait for the DNS TTL to expire before deleting the resource. DNS resolvers cache records for the duration of the TTL (for example, a TTL of 3600 means resolvers may serve the old record for up to one hour). If you delete the resource before the TTL expires, a threat actor could claim the resource name while cached CNAME entries are still directing traffic to it.
  3. Deprovision the resource that you no longer want to use.
  4. Run a DNS check of the CNAME record that you removed to verify that the resource is no longer resolving.

Key principle: Always delete DNS first, wait for the TTL to expire, then delete the resource. This order eliminates the window where a dangling record could be exploited.

Prevention: S3 account regional namespaces

As mentioned earlier, AWS introduced account regional namespaces for Amazon S3 general purpose buckets in March 2026. While this is a meaningful step toward mitigating the S3-specific takeover vector, there are important operational limitations to be aware of:

Existing buckets are unaffected. Buckets already created in the global namespace cannot be migrated to an account regional namespace. The bucket names remain globally unique and claimable by anyone if the bucket is deleted.

Global namespace is still the default. When creating a new bucket through the console, CLI, or SDK, the global namespace remains the default selection. Users who aren’t aware of the new option will continue creating globally-scoped buckets.

Existing IaC templates require updates. Existing infrastructure-as-code templates (CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform) that don’t explicitly opt in to the account regional namespace will continue provisioning buckets in the global namespace. For CloudFormation, this means setting the BucketNamespace property to account-regional. For other IaC tools, consult their documentation for the equivalent configuration. Organizations need to audit and update their templates to opt in.

For these reasons, the dangling DNS detection approach described in this post remains critical – particularly for organizations with existing S3 infrastructure, and for CloudFront, and Elastic Beanstalk resources where no equivalent namespace scoping exists.

Response: Notification and remediation

When a dangling DNS record is detected, the reference solution described in the Detection section automatically creates a HIGH severity finding in AWS Security Hub and reports the CNAME record as NON_COMPLIANT in AWS Config. If you provide an SNS topic ARN during deployment, the solution also sends notifications to alert your security or operations team via email, Slack, or other channels. For production environments, consider a human-in-the-loop workflow where these notifications are reviewed by a team member who approves the DNS record deletion before it’s executed. This prevents accidental deletion of legitimate records during transient issues.

The reference solution also includes a CloudWatch dashboard for tracking compliance status and evaluation metrics over time, giving your team ongoing visibility into DNS health across your hosted zones.

Note: Fully automated remediation (auto-deleting DNS records) carries risk – a false positive could disrupt legitimate services. We recommend starting with detection and notification, then evaluating automation based on your detection accuracy and operational maturity.

Conclusion

Subdomain takeover is a preventable misconfiguration that can have significant impact on your organization. A layered defense approach provides the best protection:

Prevention: Implement a standard operating procedure that deletes DNS records before deprovisioning the underlying resource.

Detection: Use AWS Config custom rules to proactively identify CNAME records pointing to resources that no longer exist in your account.

Response: Configure notifications through SNS or Security Hub so your team can respond quickly when dangling records are detected.

Monitoring: Maintain ongoing visibility through CloudWatch dashboards to track DNS health and compliance status.

The key insight is that good DNS hygiene – knowing when your CNAME records point to a nonexistent resource – is your first line of defense. Automated detection through AWS Config provides a safety net when operational procedures fail. And if you detect an issue, having a playbook ready to enact your response can lower the impact and your mean time to recovery.

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


Matt Gurr

Matthew Gurr

Matthew is the Senior Incident Response lead in the Asia-Pacific region for the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (AWS CIRT). He has a passion for helping customers proactively prepare for a security event. In his spare time, he enjoys cycling, music, and reading.

Luis Pastor

Luis Pastor

Luis is a Senior Security Solutions Architect at AWS leading the Infrastructure Security and Compliance Technical Field Communities. He drives security architecture for enterprise customers across financial services, healthcare, and retail, specializing in cloud security transformation and regulatory compliance frameworks. Before AWS, Luis architected security solutions in hybrid cloud environments.

Geoff Sweet

Geoff Sweet

Geoff has been in industry since the late 1990s. He began his career in electrical engineering. Starting in IT during the dot-com boom, he has held a variety of diverse roles, such as systems architect, network architect, and, for the past several years, security architect. Geoff specializes in infrastructure security.

Ariam Michael

Ariam Michael

Ariam is a Solutions Architect at AWS. She has supported various customers in the Worldwide Public Sector, specifically SLG and Federal Civilian customers. She is passionate about security, specifically Data Protection helping customers implement encryption and best practices.

Inside the Modern SOC: The 72-Minute Race

16 June 2026 at 01:00

Attackers can move from access to exfiltration in 72 minutes. Learn how modern SOC teams close the speed gap with Unit 42's AI-driven automation, threat hunting, MDR and Managed XSIAM.

The post Inside the Modern SOC: The 72-Minute Race appeared first on Unit 42.

When β€œHi, This Is IT” Comes Through Microsoft Teams

9 June 2026 at 01:00

Attackers are increasingly targeting collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams. Learn the risks and key steps to strengthen your organization's security.

The post When β€œHi, This Is IT” Comes Through Microsoft Teams appeared first on Unit 42.

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: StΓ©phane IsraΓ«l | 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, SofΓ­a 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 β€” Amazon EC2, S3, EFS, Amazon SageMaker AI, and ParallelCluster β€” 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.

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