03 - CloudWatch Root Account Usage

Ensure CloudWatch has an Alarm for Root Account Login

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that can give real time insight into all actions and metrics going on with-in your infrastructure. CloudWatch allows for the creation of alarms that can allow for actionable responses to events. Understanding when the root account is being used can alert you to a potential security incident and is why this is considered a security best practice. This can help with ensuring you are compliant with the CIS benchmark. If you need to create additional alarms for other services, you can leverage our CloudTrail Event Generator tool to help you create the event pattern.

Audit & Remediation

Login into your AWS account
Navigate to the CloudWatch service at: https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch
Navigate to Logs --> Log groups in the left hand panel. Then in the main panel, in the filter look for your CloudTrail log group.

Select the tab Metric filters and in the text boxFind metric filters look for:

{ $.userIdentity.type = Root && $.userIdentity.invokedBy NOT EXISTS && $.eventType != AwsServiceEvent }

If nothing is returned, select the button Create metric filter

In the Filter pattern and the following filter:

{ $.userIdentity.type = Root && $.userIdentity.invokedBy NOT EXISTS && $.eventType != AwsServiceEvent }

select the Next button.

Fill in the following information into this form:

Filter name: Root Account Usage
Metric namespace: CloudTrail
Metric name: Root Account Usage.
Metric value: 1.

Select next to save the alarm.
Continue this for each AWS account you have to ensure compliancy.

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