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CloudTrail Does Not Track All API Activity In All Regions

Overview​

An AWS account should contain at least one CloudTrail Trail that meets the following requirements:

  • Logging enabled
  • Multi-region enabled
  • Records all API Activity (i.e. Read and Write Management Events)

AWS CloudTrail is a critical security service that records AWS API calls for your account and delivers log files to you. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service. CloudTrail provides a history of AWS API calls for an account, including API calls made via the Management Console, SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as CloudFormation).

The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. Additionally:

  • ensuring that a multi-regions trail exists will ensure that unexpected activity occurring in otherwise unused regions is detected
  • ensuring that a multi-regions trail exists will ensure that Global Service Logging is enabled for a trail by default to capture recording of events generated on AWS global services
  • for a multi-regions trail, ensuring that management events configured for all type of Read/Writes ensures recording of management operations that are performed on all resources in an AWS account

This check is run on a daily basis.

Vendor​

AWS

Cloud Service​

CloudTrail

CIS AWS v1.5.0 3.1, CSMM v1 LOG-03.1, CloudTrail.1

References​

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awscloudtrail/latest/userguide/cloudtrail-concepts.html#cloudtrail-concepts-management-events, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awscloudtrail/latest/userguide/logging-management-and-data-events-with-cloudtrail.html?icmpid=docs_cloudtrail_console#logging-management-events, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awscloudtrail/latest/userguide/cloudtrail-supported-services.html#cloud-trail-supported-services-data-events

Severity​

4

Item Types​

Custom::AWS::Account

AWS::CloudTrail::Trail