AWS on Tuesday announced the general availability of Amazon Detective, a service that makes it easier for customers to investigate security issues.
Unveiled in December 2019, Amazon Detective is designed to automatically collect data from the customer’s AWS environment and uses that data to create interactive visualizations that can be highly useful for analyzing potential security issues or suspicious activity.
Amazon Detective collects data from AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) flow logs, and Amazon GuardDuty. Customers who use Amazon Detective will have to pay for the data ingested from these services, but there are no additional charges.
The new service leverages machine learning, statistical analysis and graph theory to generate a visualization of resource behaviors and interactions, which can help customers determine if certain activities are suspicious and identify the root cause of security issues.
“Amazon Detective’s visualizations provide the details, context, and guidance to help analysts quickly determine the nature and extent of issues identified by AWS security services like Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Security Hub,” AWS explained.
The company added, “Amazon Detective’s graph model and analytics are continuously updated as new telemetry becomes available from a customer’s AWS resources, allowing security teams to spend less time tending to constantly changing data sources. By letting the Amazon Detective service perform the necessary data sifting, security teams can more quickly move on to remediation.”
AWS users can enable Amazon Detective in the management console. The service is currently available in the US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Stockholm and Paris), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), and South America (São Paulo) regions. It will soon become available in other regions as well.
Related: AWS Launches Mirroring Feature for Inspecting Network Traffic

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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