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What is Amazon GuardDuty and how does it detect potential security threats within an AWS account?

Beginner

Answer

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously analyzes data sources such as VPC flow logs, DNS logs, and CloudTrail events using machine learning and threat intelligence, automatically identifying suspicious activity like unusual API calls, communication with known malicious IP addresses, or signs of compromised credentials, without requiring you to deploy or manage any additional security software yourself.
aws guardduty create-detector --enable
Real-world example A company enables GuardDuty across its AWS account and receives an automatic alert when it detects an EC2 instance communicating with a known cryptocurrency mining server, prompting immediate investigation before any further damage occurs.

Common follow-ups: What data sources does GuardDuty analyze to detect threats?;Does enabling GuardDuty require installing any agents on EC2 instances?