Amazon Inspector Overview

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service designed to help improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. It works by assessing applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices, including your EC2 instances, container images pushed to Amazon ECR, and Lambda functions. Here's a breakdown of its key aspects:

• Target Services:
  • EC2 Instances: Utilizes the Systems Manager agent to assess the security of EC2 instances, focusing on unintended network accessibility and known vulnerabilities in the operating system.
  • Container Images in Amazon ECR: Analyzes Docker images pushed to Amazon ECR for known vulnerabilities.
  • Lambda Functions: Assesses Lambda functions for software vulnerabilities in the function code and package dependencies during deployment.
• Continuous Security Assessment: Amazon Inspector continuously analyzes the targeted services against a database of known vulnerabilities (CVEs) and network reachability for EC2 instances. It automatically reruns assessments when the CVE database updates, ensuring continuous security monitoring.
• Integration and Reporting:
  • An Amazon Inspector assessment report can be generated for an assessment run once completed. An assessment report is a document that details what is tested in the assessment run and the assessment results. The results of your assessment are formatted into a standard report, which can be generated to share results within your team for remediation actions, to enrich compliance audit data, or to store for future reference.
  • AWS Security Hub: Inspector findings can be reported to the AWS Security Hub for a centralized view of vulnerabilities.
  • Amazon EventBridge: Findings and events can be sent to Amazon EventBridge, enabling automated responses or further analysis.
• Evaluation Criteria:
  • Inspector evaluates running only on EC2 instances, docker images, ECR containers, and Lambda functions.
  • It performs continuous scanning based on the need, focusing on package vulnerabilities (CVEs) for EC2, ECR, and Lambda, as well as network reachability on EC2.
• Risk Scoring: Each vulnerability identified by Amazon Inspector is assigned a risk score for prioritization, helping you focus on the most critical issues first.

In summary, Amazon Inspector automates the security assessment of key AWS services, ensuring they are continuously evaluated against known vulnerabilities and best practices. This service not only aids in identifying security issues but also integrates with other AWS services for comprehensive security management and automated response capabilities.