Introduction
Not all threats come from outside. Insider risks — whether accidental or malicious — remain one of the most damaging cloud security challenges. AWS provides powerful native tools like CloudTrail and Security Hub to monitor user activity, but correlating their findings requires expertise.
Securitain automates this process, helping SMBs detect and respond faster to potential insider threats.
Understanding Insider Threats
Insider threats can take many forms:
Data Exfiltration
An engineer copying S3 data to a personal bucket or external storage.
Security Control Tampering
A contractor disabling GuardDuty alerts or modifying security configurations.
Privilege Escalation
A misconfigured IAM role giving broader access than intended, exploited by an insider.
Accidental Exposure
Well-meaning employees accidentally making resources public or sharing credentials.
These activities often appear legitimate — unless you analyze them in context.
Using AWS CloudTrail
CloudTrail logs every API call in your AWS environment. By analyzing these logs, you can detect unusual activity such as:
- Access outside business hours — Users accessing resources at unusual times
- Repeated permission failures — Multiple attempts to access unauthorized resources
- Unexpected cross-account access — Access patterns that deviate from normal behavior
Securitain parses and correlates these logs, highlighting behavioral anomalies automatically.
Integrating with Security Hub
Security Hub aggregates findings from GuardDuty, Config, and Macie. When paired with CloudTrail analytics, it forms a complete picture of insider behavior and compliance impact.
This unified view enables security teams to:
- • Correlate multiple low-severity findings into high-priority alerts
- • Track remediation status across all security findings
- • Generate compliance reports for audit purposes
How Securitain Accelerates Detection
Securitain's AI engine identifies:
Suspicious Privilege Escalations
Detect when users gain elevated permissions unexpectedly or attempt to modify their own access.
Unauthorized Data Movement
Track unusual data transfers, downloads, or copies to unauthorized locations.
Policy Tampering Events
Alert on modifications to security policies, encryption settings, or monitoring configurations.
Findings are categorized by severity and mapped to NIST 800-53 controls for compliance visibility.
Conclusion
Insider threats are inevitable — but undetected threats are preventable. By leveraging CloudTrail, Security Hub, and Securitain's AI-powered analytics, SMBs can build a robust insider threat detection program without enterprise-scale resources.
See how Securitain helps you correlate insider risks in AWS with AI-powered clarity.
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