Top AWS Security Scan Tools: A Comprehensive Guide for 2024

Securing your Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure is paramount in today’s cloud-first world. With the ever-evolving threat landscape, leveraging the right Aws Security Scan Tools is no longer optional—it’s a necessity. This guide provides an in-depth look at a curated list of open-source aws security scan tools that can help you fortify your cloud environment against potential threats and vulnerabilities.

These tools are categorized to help you navigate and find the solutions best suited for your specific needs, whether you’re focused on defensive measures, offensive security, incident response, or development security.

Defensive: Hardening, Security Assessment, and Inventory Tools

These tools are designed to help you proactively identify and mitigate security risks in your AWS environment. They focus on hardening your infrastructure, assessing your security posture against best practices, and providing a comprehensive inventory of your AWS resources.

Name	Description	Popularity	Metadata
Prowler	Prowler is a leading open-source aws security scan tool used for security best practices assessments, audits, incident response, compliance checks, and continuous monitoring across AWS, Azure, and GCP. It supports multiple compliance frameworks, including CIS, NIST 800, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and more, making it a versatile tool for comprehensive cloud security assessment. (Python)
CloudMapper	CloudMapper is designed to analyze your AWS environments, creating detailed network diagrams and helping to visualize security vulnerabilities. It excels at mapping out your cloud infrastructure, making it easier to understand complex setups and potential attack vectors. This aws security scan tool is written in Python.
ScoutSuite	ScoutSuite is a powerful multi-cloud security auditing tool, supporting AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. It provides a comprehensive security posture assessment, highlighting areas of risk and misconfiguration across your cloud environments. This tool is invaluable for organizations seeking a holistic view of their cloud security. (Python)
CloudCustodian	CloudCustodian is a rules engine that allows you to define policies as code for cloud security, cost optimization, and governance. Using a simple YAML DSL, you can create policies to query, filter, and act on resources, ensuring continuous compliance and efficient cloud management. It’s a powerful tool for automating aws security scans and remediation.
ICE	ICE focuses on providing cost and usage insights for your AWS environment. While not strictly a security tool, understanding cost anomalies can indirectly help detect potential security breaches or misconfigurations that lead to unexpected resource consumption. It offers detailed dashboards for usage and cost analysis.
CloudSploit Scans	CloudSploit Scans is a mature aws security scanning tool that offers a wide array of checks to identify security risks. Written in NodeJS, it’s designed for speed and efficiency, making it suitable for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
AWS Network Access Analyzer	This tool automates the Amazon VPC Network Access Analyzer, helping you identify potential internet gateway reachability issues across all your AWS accounts. It’s particularly useful for large organizations managing multiple AWS accounts and needing to ensure consistent network security policies.

| CloudTracker | CloudTracker excels at identifying over-privileged IAM users and roles. By comparing CloudTrail logs with current IAM policies, it helps you refine IAM policies to adhere to the principle of least privilege, significantly enhancing your aws security. (Python) | | |
| AWS Security Benchmarks | Officially provided by AWS Labs, this tool offers scripts and templates aligned with the AWS CIS Foundation Framework. It’s invaluable for organizations aiming to adhere to industry-standard security benchmarks and compliance. (Python) | | |
| AWS Public IPs | This script fetches all public IP addresses associated with your AWS account, spanning IPv4/IPv6, Classic/VPC networking, and all AWS services. It’s useful for inventory and for ensuring that only authorized public IPs are in use. (Ruby) | | |
| PMapper | PMapper is an advanced and automated aws iam evaluation tool. It helps security teams and auditors understand the effective permissions within their AWS environments, identify overly permissive policies, and visualize IAM relationships for improved security posture. (Python) | | |
| nccgroup AWS-Inventory | This tool from nccgroup allows you to create a comprehensive inventory of all your AWS resources across different regions. Having a detailed inventory is crucial for security auditing, compliance, and incident response. (Python) | | |
| Resource Counter | Resource Counter provides a quick way to count resources across different categories and regions in your AWS environment. This is useful for gaining a high-level overview of your cloud footprint and for resource management. | | |
| SkyArk | SkyArk specializes in discovering and assessing security risks associated with the most privileged entities in your AWS environment. It helps identify potential weaknesses related to highly sensitive accounts and roles. | | |
| findmytakeover | FindMyTakeOver helps identify dangling DNS records in multi-cloud environments, including AWS. This tool is crucial for preventing subdomain takeover attacks, a common cloud vulnerability. | | |

Offensive Security Tools

These are tools used for penetration testing and security assessments from an attacker’s perspective. They help identify vulnerabilities by simulating real-world attacks on your AWS infrastructure.

Name	Description	Popularity	Metadata
cloudfox	CloudFox is designed to find exploitable attack paths in cloud infrastructures, especially AWS. It focuses on identifying misconfigurations that could be leveraged to escalate privileges or gain unauthorized access, making it a valuable tool for penetration testers and red teams.
WeirdAAL	WeirdAAL (AWS Attack Library) is a collection of attack techniques specifically for AWS. It’s designed to help security professionals understand and simulate attacks in AWS environments, enhancing their defensive strategies.
Pacu	Pacu is a comprehensive AWS penetration testing toolkit, designed to help security professionals assess the security of AWS environments. It is modular, allowing for a wide range of attack simulations and security checks. Pacu is highly extensible, making it a favorite among penetration testers.
Cred Scanner	Cred Scanner is a straightforward file-based scanner designed to detect potential AWS access keys and secret keys within files. It’s an essential tool for preventing accidental exposure of credentials in your codebase or configuration files.

| AWS PWN | AWS PWN is a curated collection of penetration testing techniques and tools specifically for AWS. It’s designed to assist penetration testers in identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities within AWS environments. | | |
| Cloudfrunt | Cloudfrunt is specifically designed to identify misconfigured CloudFront domains. It helps pinpoint vulnerabilities in your CloudFront setups that could lead to security issues. | | |
| Cloudjack | CloudJack is a vulnerability assessment tool focused on Route53 and CloudFront. It helps identify potential vulnerabilities related to domain and DNS misconfigurations in AWS. | | |
| Nimbostratus | Nimbostratus offers a suite of tools specifically for fingerprinting and exploiting Amazon cloud infrastructures. It’s designed for advanced penetration testing scenarios and provides capabilities to uncover deep-seated vulnerabilities. | | |

Purple Teaming & Adversary Emulation Tools

These tools are crucial for purple teaming exercises, blending offensive and defensive security practices. They allow you to simulate adversary tactics and techniques in your AWS environment to test your detection and response capabilities.

Name	Description	Popularity	Metadata
Stratus Red Team	Stratus Red Team is specifically built for granular and actionable adversary emulation in the cloud. It allows security teams to easily simulate attack techniques, particularly those mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, to validate their defenses in AWS environments.
Leonidas	Leonidas is designed for automated attack simulation in the cloud, complete with detection use cases. It provides a framework to run realistic attack scenarios and evaluate the effectiveness of your cloud security monitoring and response systems.
Amazon Guardduty Tester	This script, provided by AWS Labs, is designed to generate basic detections within the GuardDuty service. It’s an excellent resource for understanding how GuardDuty works and for testing its detection capabilities in your environment.

Continuous Security Auditing Tools

These tools focus on ongoing monitoring and auditing of your AWS environment to ensure continuous compliance and quickly detect deviations from your desired security posture.

Name	Description	Popularity	Metadata
Security Monkey	Security Monkey, developed by Netflix, is an automated security monitoring and policy enforcement tool for AWS and GCP. It continuously monitors your cloud configurations, alerts on policy violations, and helps ensure your cloud environment remains secure over time.
Krampus	Krampus is designed for continuous auditing and compliance monitoring. It allows you to define security rules and continuously checks your AWS infrastructure against these rules, providing ongoing visibility into your compliance status.
Cloud Inquisitor	Cloud Inquisitor, developed by Riot Games, is designed for continuous security auditing, particularly for large-scale AWS environments. It focuses on scalability and efficiency, making it suitable for organizations with extensive cloud infrastructures.
Disable keys after X days	While primarily a security measure, automating the disabling of AWS access keys after a set period is also a form of continuous auditing. This script helps enforce key rotation policies, reducing the risk of compromised keys being used for extended periods.
Repokid Least Privilege	Also from Netflix, Repokid is designed to enforce least privilege by automatically right-sizing IAM roles. It continuously analyzes IAM role usage and automatically reduces permissions to only those actually used, enhancing your overall aws security posture.
Wazuh CloudTrail module	Wazuh, a free and open-source security monitoring platform, offers a CloudTrail module for continuous log analysis and security monitoring of your AWS infrastructure. It helps in real-time threat detection and compliance monitoring by analyzing CloudTrail logs.
Hammer	Hammer by Dow Jones offers continuous security and compliance checks, specifically designed for enterprise environments. It helps maintain a strong security posture by regularly assessing your AWS infrastructure against defined policies.
Streamalert	StreamAlert, from Airbnb, is a serverless, real-time data analysis framework. It’s used for detecting and responding to security incidents by analyzing streaming data from various AWS services, helping to automate threat detection and response in real-time.

Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) Tools

When security incidents occur, these DFIR tools are essential for investigation, containment, and recovery. They offer capabilities for log analysis, memory acquisition, and incident response automation.

Name	Description	Metadata
AWS IR	AWS IR is a specialized Incident Response and Forensics tool designed for AWS environments. It provides a suite of automated scripts to assist with incident response tasks, such as data collection, analysis, and containment within AWS.
Margaritashotgun	MargaritaShotgun is a Linux memory remote acquisition tool, valuable in incident response scenarios. It allows for the remote acquisition of memory from Linux systems, which is critical for analyzing running processes and potential malware during incident investigations.
Diffy	Diffy, another tool from Netflix, is a triage tool specifically for cloud-centric security incidents. It automates the process of comparing cloud resources before and after an incident to quickly identify changes and understand the scope of a breach.
AWS Security Automation	AWS Security Automation provides a collection of scripts and resources for DevSecOps and automated incident response. It helps automate security tasks and incident handling processes within AWS environments.
GDPatrol	GDPatrol is focused on automated incident response triggered by AWS GuardDuty findings. It allows for automatic actions to be taken in response to GuardDuty alerts, helping to streamline incident response workflows.
AWSlog	AWSlog helps you visualize the configuration history of AWS resources using AWS Config. It’s an excellent tool for understanding configuration changes over time, which is essential for forensic analysis and tracking down the root cause of incidents.	[![closed-issues](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/bfb5dfc5081a02c783354ddcf06d3532361954f8d0918f0d5cb913775ab3cde5/68747470733a2f