Infrastructure Security Hardening & Compliance Automation
Led security hardening initiative for AWS infrastructure to achieve SOC2 compliance. Implemented automated security scanning, least-privilege IAM policies, encryption at rest and in transit, and continuous compliance monitoring. Reduced security findings from 450+ to under 10 critical issues while automating 90% of compliance checks.
DevOps Security Cloud Engineer
AWS Security Hub GuardDuty Config Inspector Macie Python Lambda Terraform Systems Manager IAM Access Analyzer CloudTrail AWS SSO
The Problem
Our infrastructure security posture was reactive rather than proactive. A security audit revealed 147 high-severity vulnerabilities across our AWS environment: S3 buckets with public read access, EC2 instances with SSH exposed to the internet, IAM users with overly broad permissions, no MFA enforcement, unencrypted EBS volumes, and missing CloudTrail logging in several regions. Our team manually checked for security issues quarterly, which was too infrequent and error-prone. We had no automated compliance scanning, no remediation playbooks, and incident response was chaotic. Patch management was manual, with average patch lag time of 45 days. The organization faced potential fines for SOC 2 non-compliance and customer trust was at risk.
The Solution
**Automated Security Scanning**: Implemented AWS Security Hub as the central security dashboard aggregating findings from GuardDuty (threat detection), Inspector (vulnerability scanning), Macie (data security), and Config (compliance). Configured custom insights and automated suppression rules for accepted risks. Integrated findings with Jira for ticketing and tracking remediation.
**CIS Benchmark Automation**: Developed Python scripts and Terraform configurations enforcing all 116 CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark controls. Automated remediation for 80% of findings: removed public S3 access, restricted security groups, enforced MFA, enabled encryption, configured CloudTrail in all regions. Created AWS Lambda functions for continuous remediation triggered by Config rule violations.
**IAM Security Hardening**: Implemented principle of least privilege across 200+ IAM roles using Access Analyzer to identify unused permissions. Configured service control policies (SCPs) in AWS Organizations preventing dangerous actions. Enforced MFA for all human users and rotated access keys automatically every 90 days. Eliminated all IAM users in favor of AWS SSO with SAML federation.
**Vulnerability Management**: Set up Systems Manager Patch Manager for automated patching with maintenance windows. Configured vulnerability scanning for container images in ECR with automated blocking of HIGH/CRITICAL CVEs. Implemented weekly security reports sent to leadership showing trends and metrics.
**CIS Benchmark Automation**: Developed Python scripts and Terraform configurations enforcing all 116 CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark controls. Automated remediation for 80% of findings: removed public S3 access, restricted security groups, enforced MFA, enabled encryption, configured CloudTrail in all regions. Created AWS Lambda functions for continuous remediation triggered by Config rule violations.
**IAM Security Hardening**: Implemented principle of least privilege across 200+ IAM roles using Access Analyzer to identify unused permissions. Configured service control policies (SCPs) in AWS Organizations preventing dangerous actions. Enforced MFA for all human users and rotated access keys automatically every 90 days. Eliminated all IAM users in favor of AWS SSO with SAML federation.
**Vulnerability Management**: Set up Systems Manager Patch Manager for automated patching with maintenance windows. Configured vulnerability scanning for container images in ECR with automated blocking of HIGH/CRITICAL CVEs. Implemented weekly security reports sent to leadership showing trends and metrics.
Key Highlights
- Reduced critical vulnerabilities from 147 to 3 (98% improvement)
- Achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance certification
- Automated remediation of 80% of security findings within 15 minutes
- Reduced mean time to remediate (MTTR) from 45 days to 4 hours
- Eliminated all public S3 buckets (23 buckets secured)
- Enforced MFA across 100% of privileged accounts
- Reduced IAM policy overpermissions by 70% using Access Analyzer
- Implemented encryption at rest for 100% of data stores
- Configured automated patch management reducing patch lag to 7 days
- Created incident response runbooks integrated with PagerDuty
- Blocked 45+ container deployments with known vulnerabilities
- Passed penetration test with zero exploitable vulnerabilities
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