Detect Public S3 Bucket using Splunk

In today’s post, we will learn how to detect a public S3 bucket using Splunk. Later, we will see how we can respond to such incidents and even prevent them from happening in the first place. As you will see in the following examples, there are multiple ways to create an S3 bucket and make it public. Also, for this blog, I created some subdomains of logsec.cloud in Route53. Scenario 1: Using the AWS Web Console Create an S3 bucket and go to “Permissions” - “Access Control List” - “Public Access” - “Everyone” - Access to the objects -...

June 20, 2020 · 4 min · Harwinder Sandhu

Investigating S3 Scanning Activities on AWS

During the past week, we detected some suspicious activities across multiple AWS accounts in one of our clients’ environments. These activities seemed related to S3 bucket scanning by a bad actor. Here is one of the sample logs from the S3 access logs: 84fd7086179626a759fb59a0252a26d26dc1685e30f0ab922266b5abace8f998 <AWS-ACCOUNT-ID>-config-org-bucket [01/Jun/2020:13:27:34 +0000] 10.247.13.187 arn:aws:iam::799199334739:user/starling-ladyblackhawk-iad-prod 9WDX6MBZFQ6Z6RDR REST.HEAD.BUCKET - "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 403 AccessDenied 243 - 9 - "-" "AWSConfig" - wFvPfIaSbdpcnNMdcTj+BNWn00r3OfqHV8sTt8gUXMzLA7O/MiWg+NPckix2TThK15V/p1JigVc= SigV4 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA AuthHeader <AWS-ACCOUNT-ID>-config-org-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com TLSv1.2 The first thing that caught our attention in this log was the username starling-ladyblackhawk-iad-prod....

June 4, 2020 · 5 min · Harwinder Sandhu