About the course and authors

Access the interactive diagram’s table of contents here. (It may ask you to create a free account in order to view. You do not need paid features to view this course’s content so you can ignore that!)

Hello, and welcome to our course!

About the authors

This course was developed and produced in a collaboration between myself, Christophe Limpalair, and Konstantinos Papapanagiotou, who goes by Kostas.

Kostas is a Cyber Security Consultant with over 19 years of security and IT consulting and research experience. He’s also been a volunteer for the OWASP nonprofit organization for over 17 years, and is an OWASP Chapter Leader in Greece.

For more details about his background and experience, please visit his LinkedIn profile.

I’m the founder and an author at Cybr, where I’ve published many courses on topics of ethical hacking. You may also know me from Linux Academy, where I taught multiple AWS courses including AWS certification courses. I taught for the AWS Certified Developer, AWS Certified SysOps, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional, and the AWS Cloud Practitioner certifications.

If you’re familiar with Linux Academy, we provided hands-on labs that auto-deployed resources for learners with various scenarios. I was one of the first employees there to work on the labs platform, to add new features, and to defend against frequent attacks where malicious actors tried to use our lab environments to mine for cryptocurrencies or to launch attacks from our resources.

Through that and other experiences, I learned how to properly design and secure AWS environments and resources, so I’ve been able to add to Kostas’ material based on my own experiences.

All that to say: between Kostas and me, we have years of experience working in AWS and building as well as securing production environments, and we’re going to share that experience in this course to help you get started learning how to secure AWS resources.

(For more details about my background, check out my LinkedIn profile.)

About the course

This course will cover many basic aspects of security in AWS. To do that, we will make use of interactive diagrams as well as walkthroughs of the AWS console to be able to visualize what we’re talking about and to go beyond just theory. We call this Project Phoenix (based on our logo!), and we’re super excited for you to try it and to hear your feedback!

We begin by looking at a common multi-tier AWS architecture so that we can then start to think about security concerns with that architecture. We then discuss AWS Regions and Availability Zones which are important to understand when launching resources in the cloud, because they can have an impact on business continuity.

After that, we talk about shared responsibility. Shared responsibility helps us understand what parts of the cloud are our responsibility to secure and maintain, and what parts are the cloud provider’s responsibility. Misunderstanding responsibility has been the result of many costly breaches in the cloud, so this is definitely a topic we need to cover before getting started.

After covering these topics in the introduction section of the course, we start talking about how you can secure your AWS infrastructure and the solutions that AWS provides for securing your cloud network.

In the next section, we learn about how AWS helps you deal with Identity and Access management in the cloud, which has to do with creating and managing users, policies, roles, and overall permissions, and also how to manage application end-users.

Protecting data in the cloud is one of the main worries of organizations that are moving to the cloud, especially if they’re handling sensitive data. In the following section, we analyze how AWS helps you encrypt, control access, and protect your data, according to that data’s sensitivity and your organization’s security requirements by looking at data protection concepts.

Data protection is so important, that we even created a dedicated section to protecting Amazon S3 buckets and objects. Amazon S3 is another common source of breaches due to misconfiguration, so this is an important section.

Finally, we have a section dedicated to logging, monitoring, and auditing. Once we have security controls in place, we want to make sure that we have the proper logging and monitoring in place to keep eyes on our environments. We need to be able to understand how our systems our operating at all times, and we need to know whether someone is trying to breach or has succeeded in breaching our defenses. Logs can also be crucial in maintaining regulatory compliance…so overall, logging and monitoring is another important section.

Conclusion

This was a very fun course to create, and so I hope you have just as much fun learning from it!

Thanks for joining us on this journey, and let’s get started!