Scan Your AWS Lambda with Amazon Inspector

Businesses are starting to rely more on serverless functions in cloud environments, such as AWS Lambda, as it’s easier to attain cost-efficiency, scalability, and performance without supervising its fundamental infrastructure. 

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Security visibility and vulnerability management are critical steps for your cloud environments. AWS provides several services and solutions to ensure you have everything you need to keep your cloud environments secured, attain visibility for potential vulnerabilities, and mitigate them in real time.

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What is Amazon Inspector?

Amazon Inspector is an automated vulnerability management service that continually scans an AWS cloud environment for software vulnerabilities and limitations. Amazon Inspector helps easily detect unforeseen network accessibility within Amazon EC2 instances and the potential vulnerabilities present in those EC2 instances. 

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Amazon Inspector also scans container images pushed to Amazon ECR for software vulnerabilities. The elevated scanning from Amazon Inspector will let its user scan for both OS and programming language package vulnerabilities at the registry level.

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After each assessment, Amazon Inspector provides a detailed list of security and compliance findings ranked according to severity. These findings will be instantaneously evaluated as a part of extensive assessment records accessible via API or AWS Inspector console. Amazon Inspector integration with AWS Security Hub enables you to send findings from Amazon Inspector to Security Hub. Security Hub can then include those findings in its analysis of your security posture in one place. 

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Amazon Inspector now supports AWS Lambda functions

Amazon Web Services announced that AWS Lambda functions will be supported by Amazon Inspector by automating its vulnerability management services. This augmented capacity allows Amazon Inspector to automate the detection of each appropriate Lambda function and pinpoint all software vulnerabilities in the dependencies present in application packages utilized in Lambda functions and Lambda layers.

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AWS Lambda runs code in acknowledgment of events and automatically governs the computing resources necessary for writing codes. The announcement explicitly states, “All functions are initially assessed upon deployment to Lambda service and continually monitored and reassessed, informed by updates to the function and newly published vulnerabilities. When vulnerabilities are identified in the Lambda function or layer, actionable security findings are generated, aggregated in the Amazon Inspector console, and pushed to AWS Security Hub and Amazon EventBridge to automate workflows.” Another benefit of Amazon Inspector is its capability to provide a severity score by associating vulnerability data with relevant aspects like external network accessibility.

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Check out the AWS Regional Services list to verify the locations where Amazon Inspector is currently available. You can also avail of a 15-day trial here.

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AWS Security can be challenging to master, but it will certainly enrich your skillset. AppSecEngineer aims to prepare every student of ours for what it’s going to be like once faced with real-world security threats in your workplace, that’s why we made sure that we have one of the most comprehensive AWS Security training in the industry. Our AWS Security Learning Path will fulfill all your team’s security training needs.

And with our newly launched Playground 'AWS Lambda Vulnerability Assessment' you'll learn how to enable Amazon Inspector and perform automated security assessments on your serverless Lambda functions.

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All the courses are equipped with hands-on labs and challenges that allow users to find, identify, and try to fix real-world based security issues. Not only that, we made sure to incorporate OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities, Infrastructure-as-Code Flaws, and Cloud Misconfigurations on our CTF-styled Challenges to ensure that you and your team will be ready to face the most basic to the most intricate vulnerabilities that you might face in your workplace.

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