All posts by Amy Herzog

Building AI defenses at scale: Before the threats emerge

Post Syndicated from Amy Herzog original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/building-ai-defenses-at-scale-before-the-threats-emerge/

At AWS, we’ve spent decades developing processes and tools that enable us to defend millions of customers simultaneously, wherever they operate around the world. Every day, our security and threat intelligence teams are doing work with AI and automation that most people never see. Our AI-powered log analysis system has reduced the time SecOps engineers spend analyzing security logs from an average of six hours to just seven minutes, a 50x productivity increase that lets us detect and respond to threats faster than ever. Across AWS, we analyze over 400 trillion network flows per day to detect patterns that signal emerging threats. In 2025 alone, we blocked over 300 million attempts to maliciously encrypt customer files hosted on Amazon S3.

What we learn protecting one customer helps protect all customers. At this scale, every threat we see makes our defenses stronger for everyone, and AI is already central to how we do it.

A new class of AI for cybersecurity

Today, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative designed to secure the world’s most critical software and advance the cybersecurity practices the industry will need as AI grows more capable. Organizations that build or maintain critical digital infrastructure are getting early access to Claude Mythos Preview, a new class of AI model, to find and patch vulnerabilities in the systems the world depends on. Given our role in securing some of the world’s most essential infrastructure, AWS is playing an integral part in advancing this work.

Powering the project is Claude Mythos Preview, Anthropic’s most advanced AI model to date and a step-change in reasoning and AI capabilities for cybersecurity. Claude Mythos Preview represents a fundamentally new model class: more intelligent and capable than Anthropic’s previous frontier models, with higher performance on cybersecurity, software coding, and complex reasoning tasks.

As part of Project Glasswing, we’ve already applied Claude Mythos Preview to critical AWS codebases that undergo continuous AI-powered security reviews, and even in those well-tested environments, it’s helped us identify additional opportunities to strengthen our code. In our internal testing, Claude Mythos Preview has proven more productive than previous models at surfacing security findings, requiring less manual guidance from our engineers to deliver actionable results. We’ve also given early access to a select group of AWS customers, who are deploying Claude Mythos Preview in their own security workflows and helping shape how the model evolves. For us, Claude Mythos Preview is a natural extension of the AI tools we already use, and as the technology grows more powerful, so must our defenses.

This is exactly the kind of innovation that drives our work, and we’ve been working closely with Anthropic to help ensure Claude Mythos Preview is ready for enterprise use. AWS is Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, safety research, and foundation model development. More broadly, AWS provides the foundational infrastructure that the world’s leading AI companies rely on to build, train, and deploy their most advanced models. We’re bringing decades of security experience to this partnership, helping to ensure Claude Mythos Preview is ready for even more organizations to build upon and operate securely at scale.

Claude Mythos Preview signals an upcoming wave of models that can find vulnerabilities and build working exploits at a scale and speed we haven’t seen before. Anthropic and AWS are taking a deliberately cautious approach to release. Access begins with a small number of organizations, prioritizing internet-critical companies and open-source maintainers whose software and digital services impact hundreds of millions of users. The goal: find and fix vulnerabilities in the world’s most critical software. Claude Mythos Preview is available in gated research preview through Amazon Bedrock with enterprise-grade security controls, including customer-managed encryption, VPC isolation, and detailed logging, so your team can explore Claude Mythos Preview’s capabilities without exposing production assets to unnecessary risk.

AWS architects services with security at the core

Our work with Project Glasswing is grounded in a philosophy we’ve developed over two decades of securing mission-critical workloads: you can’t wait for threats to materialize before building your defenses. You have to look around corners, adopt new technologies, build protections first, deploy them in your own operations at scale, and refine them based on what you learn.

That’s exactly what we’ve done at AWS with AI and security. Our approach spans the full spectrum: proactive defense through threat hunting and vulnerability research, dynamic response to active campaigns, and third-party certifications that verify our security practices meet the highest industry standards. This operational experience has taught us where AI accelerates security work and where human judgment remains essential. And it’s reinforced that security innovation must be pragmatic: proven in production before we ask you to rely on it.

That’s also why we help define what secure AI looks like. We became the first major cloud provider to achieve ISO 42001 certification for AI services. We’re active participants in OWASP, the Coalition for Secure AI, and the Frontier Model Safety Framework. And we co-founded the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) to enable better threat intelligence sharing across the ecosystem. The AWS Nitro System provides mathematical isolation for workloads. Our zero-operator access architecture means AWS personnel can’t access your data. These aren’t aspirational goals. They’re how we operate today, at scale, every day.

Amazon Bedrock is where these principles come to life for AI. It provides policy-enforced access controls, built-in evaluation tools to measure how effectively models identify and validate vulnerabilities, and the ability to run workloads inside your own virtual private cloud. AWS is also the first cloud provider to achieve FedRAMP High and Department of Defense Security Requirements Guide Impact Level 4 and 5 authorizations for generally available Claude foundation models, reinforcing that Amazon Bedrock is where the most security-sensitive organizations already trust Anthropic’s technology.

How to get started today

The same principles that guide our work at AWS scale apply regardless of which AI tools you’re using: comprehensive observability, defense in depth, automation where it adds value, and human judgment where it’s essential. Here’s how to put them into practice.

Prepare for the next generation of AI security. Claude Mythos Preview signals an upcoming wave of AI models that will transform cybersecurity. Start strengthening your security posture now so your organization is ready as these capabilities become more broadly available. Claude Mythos Preview is available in gated preview through Amazon Bedrock, and access is limited to an initial allow-list of organizations. If your organization has been allow-listed, your AWS account team will reach out directly.

Run on-demand penetration testing with AWS Security Agent. Now generally available, AWS Security Agent delivers autonomous penetration testing that operates 24/7 at a fraction of the cost of manual penetration tests. It transforms penetration testing from a periodic bottleneck into an on-demand capability that scales with your development velocity across AWS, Azure, GCP, other cloud providers, and on-premises. AWS Security Agent represents a new class of frontier agents: autonomous systems that work independently to achieve goals, scale to tackle concurrent tasks, and run persistently without constant human oversight. It deploys specialized AI agents to discover, validate, and report security vulnerabilities through sophisticated multi-step attack scenarios. Unlike traditional scanners that generate findings without validation, AWS Security Agent identifies potential vulnerabilities, then attempts to exploit them with targeted payloads and attack chains to confirm they are legitimate security risks. Each finding includes CVSS risk scores, application-specific severity ratings, detailed reproduction steps, and remediation suggestions. The result: penetration testing that once took weeks now completes in hours, and security coverage that scales across your entire application portfolio, not just your most critical systems. New customers can explore AWS Security Agent with a 2-month free trial.

Build AI applications you can trust with Amazon Bedrock. For teams building with generative AI, the challenge isn’t just making AI work, it’s making AI work safely. Amazon Bedrock provides the security and safety controls you need to deploy AI responsibly. Its Automated Reasoning capability is the first and only AI safeguard to use formal logic to help prevent factual errors from hallucinations, providing verifiable explanations with 99% accuracy, a capability we’ve refined over more than a decade of applying formal methods across AWS storage, identity, and networking. Amazon Bedrock also provides customizable guardrails that block harmful content and enforce your content policies, along with comprehensive observability to track AI behavior and detect anomalies across your workloads.

The threat landscape isn’t waiting

The threat landscape isn’t waiting for us to catch up. Nation-state actors, ransomware operators, and supply chain attackers are already using AI to scale their operations. Our job is to stay ahead by building defenses first, deploying them at scale, and sharing what we learn so the entire community benefits.

That’s what we do every day at AWS. We prove technology works in our own operations before we ask customers to rely on it. We set standards rather than follow them. And we look around corners to address tomorrow’s challenges today.

As AI capabilities continue to evolve, this approach won’t change. We’ll keep building defenses first, refining them at scale, and working with partners like Anthropic to ensure the next generation of AI security tools meets the real-world needs of enterprises defending at this scale.

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Amy Herzog

Amy Herzog is Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Amazon Web Services (AWS) where she leads a global organization of cloud security professionals in a company in which security is the top priority. Prior to joining AWS, Amy served as CISO for Amazon’s Devices and Services, Media and Entertainment, and Advertising businesses, overseeing the security of consumer technology offerings such as Alexa+ and Ring, and playing a key role in the secure development of Project Kuiper, Amazon’s initiative to provide fast, reliable broadband to customers and communities around the world through low earth orbit satellites.

How AWS is simplifying security at scale: Four keys to faster innovation from AWS re:Inforce 2025

Post Syndicated from Amy Herzog original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-aws-is-simplifying-security-at-scale-four-keys-to-faster-innovation-from-aws-reinforce-2025/

When I began my career in security, most people accepted as fact that protecting systems came at the expense of productivity. That didn’t have to be true then, and it’s definitely not true now. The cloud, and specifically the AWS Cloud, is a big reason why. But as technology evolves and systems become more complex, operating at scale demands a fresh approach to security. We take our customers’ security seriously, and that means building guardrails that give organizations the confidence to innovate boldly and scale rapidly.

In my new role as AWS CISO, I see this playing out daily. As I meet with customers, their excitement about technologies like generative AI comes hand in hand with questions about securing complex environments and managing new types of risk. They’re excited about innovation, but they need confidence that their security foundations can keep pace with their ambitions. They want to move fast without compromising security.

Today at re:Inforce, I shared how AWS is working backward from these needs to fundamentally transform how security scales in the cloud. It all starts with a security foundation built on four key pillars: identity and access management, data and network security, monitoring and incident response, and the continuous work of migration, modernization, and patching. Organizations with mature security models across these pillars are the ones moving fastest. Across each of these areas, we’re focused on delivering security capabilities that help customers adopt new technologies and experiment with confidence.

Scaling identity for the cloud

As our customers rapidly scale their cloud operations, they’ve told us that managing identity and access across complex environments becomes increasingly challenging. They need solutions that can grow with their business while maintaining strong security. Identity and access management underpins every aspect of cloud security, and success in this area requires both rigorous authentication controls and comprehensive visibility into access permissions.

I was excited to announce new internal access findings for AWS IAM Access Analyzer today. This capability transforms how organizations manage access to sensitive data at scale, addressing the complexities our customers face as they grow. Using automated reasoning technology, it analyzes complex permission layers across diverse policy types, giving security teams comprehensive visibility into who within their organizations has access to what resources. With daily monitoring and notifications of new access granted, we’re helping teams implement least-privilege access with confidence in even the most complex environments. This provides our customers visibility to strengthen access controls on their critical resources while maintaining the agility their business demands as they scale in the cloud.

Empowering transformation through data and network security

Our customers are eager to transform their businesses, but they need confidence that their security can keep pace with rapid innovation. This is especially true when it comes to protecting their networks and data at scale. During the keynote, Noopur Davis, CISO of Comcast, shared how her organization protects their vast network and customer data while enabling rapid innovation. With millions of customers relying on their services, Comcast’s approach resonated with me: security shouldn’t just defend, it should enable transformation.

We’re delivering on this vision with new capabilities that simplify security at scale. Today, I announced that AWS Certificate Manager now allows you to export ACM-issued public certificates and their private keys for use inside or outside of AWS, giving you automated certificate management with the flexibility to help secure your workloads. We’re also expanding AWS Shield with enhanced network and application protection that performs a network security analysis to identify configuration issues and provides remediation recommendations. You can even use AWS generative AI powered assistant Amazon Q Developer to gain actionable insights using simple natural language. These innovations help teams protect their data and stay ahead of evolving threats even as their environments grow more complex.

Elevating threat detection and response

Our customers have shared their challenges in keeping pace with the evolving threat landscape, especially as they scale their cloud operations. While traditional automation helps manage growing complexity, AI represents an even more powerful opportunity to transform security operations. When implemented thoughtfully, AI dramatically improves our ability to spot complex attack patterns, reduce false positives, and automate responses at massive scale.

Today at re:Inforce, I announced two key security innovations: expanded capabilities in Amazon GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection and enhanced AWS Security Hub that directly address these needs. Together, these services help simplify security at scale. GuardDuty uses AWS-trained AI and machine learning (AI/ML) models to detect sophisticated multi-stage threats and provide actionable insights, while Security Hub prioritizes critical security issues by automatically analyzing and correlating security signals into clear, prioritized actions. This approach gives teams the confidence to scale their operations, knowing they can detect and respond to security risks efficiently across their entire AWS environment.

Accelerating the journey to better security

While advanced capabilities like AI and automation help strengthen security operations, the foundation matters most. Moving to the cloud represents a transformative opportunity to build on a fundamentally stronger security foundation than most organizations can ever hope to achieve with on-premises environments. When migrating to AWS, you reduce the need to manage physical infrastructure security while gaining access to built-in protections that are continuously updated and maintained.

Successful cloud adoption means going beyond simple lift-and-shift. Modernization is key to realizing these benefits. By moving solutions further up the stack to use managed services like AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), or AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), you benefit from security controls that are built in rather than bolted on. These services are continuously patched and maintained by AWS, freeing your teams to focus on innovating for your customers. After all, the fastest path to better security is the one where core protections are already built in.

Partnering for security success

Security transformation isn’t a journey organizations need to take alone. Throughout my career, I’ve seen how the right partnerships can accelerate success, bringing fresh perspectives and deep expertise to complex challenges. Our security partners help customers across the four pillars we discussed today, from implementing identity solutions to modernizing security operations. They understand both the technical complexities and the business realities of scaling security in the cloud, often bringing valuable industry-specific experience that helps organizations move faster with confidence.

Looking ahead

As you scale your operations in the cloud, our goal is to give you the confidence to move quickly while maintaining strong security controls. When security scales naturally with your business, teams can focus on building what’s next instead of managing infrastructure.

To dive deeper into how AWS designs, builds, and operates security at unprecedented scale, I encourage you to join our Innovation Talks at re:Inforce. These hour-long sessions explore the key pillars of modern cloud security: secure foundations, resilient architectures, AI-powered innovations, and large-scale threat intelligence.

As I step into my role as AWS CISO, I’m energized by the opportunity ahead. For nearly 20 years, AWS has maintained a unique culture of security that enables us to innovate rapidly while shipping securely. As we navigate the landscape of generative AI and rapid technological change, earning your trust means not just keeping pace with innovation, but helping to make it even more successful. I couldn’t be more excited to carry this mission forward.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.

Amy Herzog

Amy Herzog

Amy is Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at AWS where she leads a global organization of cloud security professionals in a company in which security is the top priority. Prior to joining AWS, Amy served as CISO for Amazon’s Devices and Services, Media and Entertainment, and Advertising businesses, overseeing the security of consumer technology offerings such as Alexa+ and Ring, and playing a key role in the secure development of Project Kuiper, Amazon’s initiative to provide fast, reliable broadband to customers and communities around the world through low earth orbit satellites. Amy’s career spans more than two decades at the intersection of cybersecurity, innovation, and enterprise transformation. She spent 15 years at the MITRE Corporation, developing cutting-edge solutions for complex security challenges across government and industry. She also held leadership roles at Pivotal Software, VMware and Travelers Insurance, and co-founded two startups focused on technology-driven business transformation. Amy holds a BA in Mathematics from Pomona College and an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She is also the author of several publications and holds two patents.