GuardDuty vs. Detective
In the realm of cybersecurity, organizations are constantly searching for effective threat detection and analysis solutions to safeguard their digital assets. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides two prominent services to address this need: Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Detective. Both services offer unique features and capabilities that aid in identifying and responding to potential security threats. This comparison will explore the key differences and strengths of GuardDuty and Detective, helping organizations make informed decisions when choosing the most suitable solution for their security needs.
Table of Contents
What is AWS GuardDuty?
Key features of AWS GuardDuty
What is AWS Detective?
Key features of AWS Detective
GuardDuty vs. Detective
What is AWS GuardDuty?
AWS GuardDuty is a threat intelligence service that uses machine learning to analyze your AWS logs and events to identify potential threats. It can detect various threats, including compromised accounts, unauthorized access, and data exfiltration. GuardDuty also provides detailed information about each finding so that you can rapidly comprehend the nature of the threat and take remedial action.
Key features of AWS GuardDuty
Following are the key features of Amazon GuardDuty
- Continuous monitoring: GuardDuty continuously monitors your AWS accounts, instances, serverless and container workloads, users, databases, and storage for potential threats.
- Anomaly detection: GuardDuty uses machine learning and anomaly detection to identify previously difficult-to-find threats, such as unusual API call patterns or malicious AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user behavior.
- Threat intelligence: GuardDuty has integrated threat intelligence, which includes lists of malicious domains or IP addresses from AWS Security and industry-leading third-party security partners, such as Proofpoint and CrowdStrike.
- Automated response: GuardDuty can automatically respond to threats by taking actions such as blocking IP addresses, disabling IAM users, or sending notifications to you with the help of services like Lambda, Eventbridge, etc.
- Scalability: GuardDuty is designed to scale to meet the needs of any AWS environment, from a small startup to a large enterprise.
- Malware scanning: GuardDuty scans Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) for files that may contain malware exhibiting suspicious behavior on the instance and container workloads executing on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC).
What is AWS Detective?
Detective is one key tool for an incident’s root cause analysis, which helps provide a more comprehensive investigation experience. It automatically creates a graph model of your AWS environment, which shows the relationships between your resources, users, and accounts. This graph model can quickly identify the root cause of a security incident. The detective also provides tools to help you collect additional data and evidence and to collaborate with other security team members.
Amazon Detective automatically collects and analyzes data from various sources like AWS CloudTrail logs, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, Amazon EKS audit logs, Amazon GuardDuty findings, AWS Security Hub findings, and other integrated AWS security services. You don’t need to configure or enable any data sources yourself. It maintains up to a year of aggregated data for analysis, helping you easily understand and investigate security events.
Key features of AWS Detective
Here are some of the key features of AWS Detective:
- Centralized view: Detective provides you with a centralized view of your AWS environment, including all of your AWS accounts, resources, and events. This facilitates the identification and investigation of prospective threats and security incidents.
- Machine learning: The detective uses machine learning to identify anomalous activity and potential threats. This can help you to identify threats that may not be obvious to human analysts.
- Event correlation: Detective can correlate events across multiple accounts and regions, which can help you to identify and investigate large-scale attacks. This is important because many attacks involve multiple accounts and regions.
- Investigation tools: The detective provides you with various tools to investigate security incidents. These tools can assist you in swiftly and easily identifying the root cause of an incident and mitigating its impact.
- Integration with other AWS services: Detective is integrated with other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon S3, and Amazon Athena. This integration allows you to use Detective to investigate security incidents that are not limited to AWS resources.
Detective is an excellent option if you are looking for a potent tool to investigate security incidents in your AWS environment.
GuardDuty vs. Detective
GuardDuty and Detective are both powerful tools that can help you protect your AWS environment from threats. However, they have different strengths and weaknesses. GuardDuty is an excellent starting point for securing your AWS environment, but Detective is useful if you need to investigate a security incident more thoroughly.
| Parameters | GuardDuty | Detective |
| Threat detection | Uses machine learning to analyze AWS logs and events for threat Intelligence | Extends GuardDuty by automatically creating a graph model of your AWS environment for root cause analysis |
| Investigation capabilities | Provides detailed information about each finding | Provides tools to help you collect additional data and evidence and to collaborate with other members of your security team |
| Price | Free for the first 100 findings per month | $3 per hour per account |
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