Tag Archives: powershell

Disabling Intel Hyper-Threading Technology on Amazon EC2 Windows Instances

Post Syndicated from Brian Beach original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/disabling-intel-hyper-threading-technology-on-amazon-ec2-windows-instances/

In a prior post, Disabling Intel Hyper-Threading on Amazon Linux, I investigated how the Linux kernel enumerates CPUs. I also discussed the options to disable Intel Hyper-Threading (HT Technology) in Amazon Linux running on Amazon EC2.

In this post, I do the same for Microsoft Windows Server 2016 running on EC2 instances. I begin with a quick review of HT Technology and the reasons you might want to disable it. I also recommend that you take a moment to review the prior post for a more thorough foundation.

HT Technology

HT Technology makes a single physical processor appear as multiple logical processors. Each core in an Intel Xeon processor has two threads of execution. Most of the time, these threads can progress independently; one thread executing while the other is waiting on a relatively slow operation (for example, reading from memory) to occur. However, the two threads do share resources and occasionally one thread is forced to wait while the other is executing.

There a few unique situations where disabling HT Technology can improve performance. One example is high performance computing (HPC) workloads that rely heavily on floating point operations. In these rare cases, it can be advantageous to disable HT Technology. However, these cases are rare, and for the overwhelming majority of workloads you should leave it enabled. I recommend that you test with and without HT Technology enabled, and only disable threads if you are sure it will improve performance.

Exploring HT Technology on Microsoft Windows

Here’s how Microsoft Windows enumerates CPUs. As before, I am running these examples on an m4.2xlarge. I also chose to run Windows Server 2016, but you can walk through these exercises on any version of Windows. Remember that the m4.2xlarge has eight vCPUs, and each vCPU is a thread of an Intel Xeon core. Therefore, the m4.2xlarge has four cores, each of which run two threads, resulting in eight vCPUs.

Windows does not have a built-in utility to examine CPU configuration, but you can download the Sysinternals coreinfo utility from Microsoft’s website. This utility provides useful information about the system CPU and memory topology. For this walkthrough, you enumerate the individual CPUs, which you can do by running coreinfo -c. For example:

C:\Users\Administrator >coreinfo -c

Coreinfo v3.31 - Dump information on system CPU and memory topology
Copyright (C) 2008-2014 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

Logical to Physical Processor Map:
**------ Physical Processor 0 (Hyperthreaded)
--**---- Physical Processor 1 (Hyperthreaded)
----**-- Physical Processor 2 (Hyperthreaded)
------** Physical Processor 3 (Hyperthreaded)

As you can see from the screenshot, the coreinfo utility displays a table where each row is a physical core and each column is a logical CPU. In other words, the two asterisks on the first line indicate that CPU 0 and CPU 1 are the two threads in the first physical core. Therefore, my m4.2xlarge has for four physical processors and each processor has two threads resulting in eight total CPUs, just as expected.

It is interesting to note that Windows Server 2016 enumerates CPUs in a different order than Linux. Remember from the prior post that Linux enumerated the first thread in each core, followed by the second thread in each core. You can see from the output earlier that Windows Server 2016, enumerates both threads in the first core, then both threads in the second core, and so on. The diagram below shows the relationship of CPUs to cores and threads in both operating systems.

In the Linux post, I disabled CPUs 4–6, leaving one thread per core, and effectively disabling HT Technology. You can see from the diagram that you must disable the odd-numbered threads (that is, 1, 3, 5, and 7) to achieve the same result in Windows. Here’s how to do that.

Disabling HT Technology on Microsoft Windows

In Linux, you can globally disable CPUs dynamically. In Windows, there is no direct equivalent that I could find, but there are a few alternatives.

First, you can disable CPUs using the msconfig.exe tool. If you choose Boot, Advanced Options, you have the option to set the number of processors. In the example below, I limit my m4.2xlarge to four CPUs. Restart for this change to take effect.

Unfortunately, Windows does not disable hyperthreaded CPUs first and then real cores, as Linux does. As you can see in the following output, coreinfo reports that my c4.2xlarge has two real cores and four hyperthreads, after rebooting. Msconfig.exe is useful for disabling cores, but it does not allow you to disable HT Technology.

Note: If you have been following along, you can re-enable all your CPUs by unselecting the Number of processors check box and rebooting your system.

 

C:\Users\Administrator >coreinfo -c

Coreinfo v3.31 - Dump information on system CPU and memory topology
Copyright (C) 2008-2014 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

Logical to Physical Processor Map:
**-- Physical Processor 0 (Hyperthreaded)
--** Physical Processor 1 (Hyperthreaded)

While you cannot disable HT Technology systemwide, Windows does allow you to associate a particular process with one or more CPUs. Microsoft calls this, “processor affinity”. To see an example, use the following steps.

  1. Launch an instance of Notepad.
  2. Open Windows Task Manager and choose Processes.
  3. Open the context (right click) menu on notepad.exe and choose Set Affinity….

This brings up the Processor Affinity dialog box.

As you can see, all the CPUs are allowed to run this instance of notepad.exe. You can uncheck a few CPUs to exclude them. Windows is smart enough to allow any scheduled operations to continue to completion on disabled CPUs. It then saves its state at the next scheduling event, and resumes those operations on another CPU. To ensure that only one thread in each core is able to run a process, you uncheck every other core. This effectively disables HT Technology for this process. For example:

Of course, this can be tedious when you have a large number of cores. Remember that the x1.32xlarge has 128 CPUs. Luckily, you can set the affinity of a running process from PowerShell using the Get-Process cmdlet. For example:

PS C:\> (Get-Process -Name 'notepad').ProcessorAffinity = 0x55;

The ProcessorAffinity attribute takes a bitmask in hexadecimal format. 0x55 in hex is equivalent to 01010101 in binary. Think of the binary encoding as 1=enabled and 0=disabled. This is slightly confusing, but we work left to right so that CPU 0 is the rightmost bit and CPU 7 is the leftmost bit. Therefore, 01010101 means that the first thread in each CPU is enabled just as it was in the diagram earlier.

The calculator built into Windows includes a “programmer view” that helps you convert from hexadecimal to binary. In addition, the ProcessorAffinity attribute is a 64-bit number. Therefore, you can only configure the processor affinity on systems up to 64 CPUs. At the moment, only the x1.32xlarge has more than 64 vCPUs.

In the preceding examples, you changed the processor affinity of a running process. Sometimes, you want to start a process with the affinity already configured. You can do this using the start command. The start command includes an affinity flag that takes a hexadecimal number like the PowerShell example earlier.

C:\Users\Administrator>start /affinity 55 notepad.exe

It is interesting to note that a child process inherits the affinity from its parent. For example, the following commands create a batch file that launches Notepad, and starts the batch file with the affinity set. If you examine the instance of Notepad launched by the batch file, you see that the affinity has been applied to as well.

C:\Users\Administrator>echo notepad.exe > test.bat
C:\Users\Administrator>start /affinity 55 test.bat

This means that you can set the affinity of your task scheduler and any tasks that the scheduler starts inherits the affinity. So, you can disable every other thread when you launch the scheduler and effectively disable HT Technology for all of the tasks as well. Be sure to test this point, however, as some schedulers override the normal inheritance behavior and explicitly set processor affinity when starting a child process.

Conclusion

While the Windows operating system does not allow you to disable logical CPUs, you can set processor affinity on individual processes. You also learned that Windows Server 2016 enumerates CPUs in a different order than Linux. Therefore, you can effectively disable HT Technology by restricting a process to every other CPU. Finally, you learned how to set affinity of both new and running processes using Task Manager, PowerShell, and the start command.

Note: this technical approach has nothing to do with control over software licensing, or licensing rights, which are sometimes linked to the number of “CPUs” or “cores.” For licensing purposes, those are legal terms, not technical terms. This post did not cover anything about software licensing or licensing rights.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

New – Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs for Windows

Post Syndicated from Randall Hunt original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-elastic-gpus-for-windows/

Today we’re excited to announce the general availability of Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs for Windows. An Elastic GPU is a GPU resource that you can attach to your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance to accelerate the graphics performance of your applications. Elastic GPUs come in medium (1GB), large (2GB), xlarge (4GB), and 2xlarge (8GB) sizes and are lower cost alternatives to using GPU instance types like G3 or G2 (for OpenGL 3.3 applications). You can use Elastic GPUs with many instance types allowing you the flexibility to choose the right compute, memory, and storage balance for your application. Today you can provision elastic GPUs in us-east-1 and us-east-2.

Elastic GPUs start at just $0.05 per hour for an eg1.medium. A nickel an hour. If we attach that Elastic GPU to a t2.medium ($0.065/hour) we pay a total of less than 12 cents per hour for an instance with a GPU. Previously, the cheapest graphical workstation (G2/3 class) cost 76 cents per hour. That’s over an 80% reduction in the price for running certain graphical workloads.

When should I use Elastic GPUs?

Elastic GPUs are best suited for applications that require a small or intermittent amount of additional GPU power for graphics acceleration and support OpenGL. Elastic GPUs support up to and including the OpenGL 3.3 API standards with expanded API support coming soon.

Elastic GPUs are not part of the hardware of your instance. Instead they’re attached through an elastic GPU network interface in your subnet which is created when you launch an instance with an Elastic GPU. The image below shows how Elastic GPUs are attached.

Since Elastic GPUs are network attached it’s important to provision an instance with adequate network bandwidth to support your application. It’s also important to make sure your instance security group allows traffic on port 2007.

Any application that can use the OpenGL APIs can take advantage of Elastic GPUs so Blender, Google Earth, SIEMENS SolidEdge, and more could all run with Elastic GPUs. Even Kerbal Space Program!

Ok, now that we know when to use Elastic GPUs and how they work, let’s launch an instance and use one.

Using Elastic GPUs

First, we’ll navigate to the EC2 console and click Launch Instance. Next we’ll select a Windows AMI like: “Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Base”. Then we’ll select an instance type. Then we’ll make sure we select the “Elastic GPU” section and allocate an eg1.medium (1GB) Elastic GPU.

We’ll also include some userdata in the advanced details section. We’ll write a quick PowerShell script to download and install our Elastic GPU software.


<powershell>
Start-Transcript -Path "C:\egpu_install.log" -Append
(new-object net.webclient).DownloadFile('http://ec2-elasticgpus.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/latest', 'C:\egpu.msi')
Start-Process "msiexec.exe" -Wait -ArgumentList "/i C:\egpu.msi /qn /L*v C:\egpu_msi_install.log"
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", $env:Path + ";C:\Program Files\Amazon\EC2ElasticGPUs\manager\", [EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)
Restart-Computer -Force
</powershell>

This software sends all OpenGL API calls to the attached Elastic GPU.

Next, we’ll double check to make sure my security group has TCP port 2007 exposed to my VPC so my Elastic GPU can connect to my instance. Finally, we’ll click launch and wait for my instance and Elastic GPU to provision. The best way to do this is to create a separate SG that you can attach to the instance.

You can see an animation of the launch procedure below.

Alternatively we could have launched on the AWS CLI with a quick call like this:

$aws ec2 run-instances --elastic-gpu-specification Type=eg1.2xlarge \
--image-id ami-1a2b3c4d \
--subnet subnet-11223344 \
--instance-type r4.large \
--security-groups "default" "elasticgpu-sg"

then we could have followed the Elastic GPU software installation instructions here.

We can now see our Elastic GPU is humming along and attached by checking out the Elastic GPU status in the taskbar.

We welcome any feedback on the service and you can click on the Feedback link in the bottom left corner of the GPU Status Box to let us know about your experience with Elastic GPUs.

Elastic GPU Demonstration

Ok, so we have our instance provisioned and our Elastic GPU attached. My teammates here at AWS wanted me to talk about the amazingly wonderful 3D applications you can run, but when I learned about Elastic GPUs the first thing that came to mind was Kerbal Space Program (KSP), so I’m going to run a quick test with that. After all, if you can’t launch Jebediah Kerman into space then what was the point of all of that software? I’ve downloaded KSP and added the launch parameter of -force-opengl to make sure we’re using OpenGL to do our rendering. Below you can see my poor attempt at building a spaceship – I used to build better ones. It looks pretty smooth considering we’re going over a network with a lossy remote desktop protocol.

I’d show a picture of the rocket launch but I didn’t even make it off the ground before I experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the rocket. Back to the drawing board for me.

In the mean time I can check my Amazon CloudWatch metrics and see how much GPU memory I used during my brief game.

Partners, Pricing, and Documentation

To continue to build out great experiences for our customers, our 3D software partners like ANSYS and Siemens are looking to take advantage of the OpenGL APIs on Elastic GPUs, and are currently certifying Elastic GPUs for their software. You can learn more about our partnerships here.

You can find information on Elastic GPU pricing here. You can find additional documentation here.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have some virtual rockets to build.

– Randall

Winpayloads – Undetectable Windows Payload Generation

Post Syndicated from Darknet original http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/darknethackers/~3/y3Szx2PyNH4/

Winpayloads is a tool to provide undetectable Windows payload generation with some extras running on Python 2.7. It provides persistence, privilege escalation, shellcode invocation and much more. Features UACBypass – PowerShellEmpire PowerUp – PowerShellEmpire Invoke-Shellcode Invoke-Mimikatz Invoke-EventVwrBypass Persistence – Adds payload…

Read the full post at darknet.org.uk

How to Deploy Local Administrator Password Solution with AWS Microsoft AD

Post Syndicated from Dragos Madarasan original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-deploy-local-administrator-password-solution-with-aws-microsoft-ad/

Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS) from Microsoft simplifies password management by allowing organizations to use Active Directory (AD) to store unique passwords for computers. Typically, an organization might reuse the same local administrator password across the computers in an AD domain. However, this approach represents a security risk because it can be exploited during lateral escalation attacks. LAPS solves this problem by creating unique, randomized passwords for the Administrator account on each computer and storing it encrypted in AD.

Deploying LAPS with AWS Microsoft AD requires the following steps:

  1. Install the LAPS binaries on instances joined to your AWS Microsoft AD domain. The binaries add additional client-side extension (CSE) functionality to the Group Policy client.
  2. Extend the AWS Microsoft AD schema. LAPS requires new AD attributes to store an encrypted password and its expiration time.
  3. Configure AD permissions and delegate the ability to retrieve the local administrator password for IT staff in your organization.
  4. Configure Group Policy on instances joined to your AWS Microsoft AD domain to enable LAPS. This configures the Group Policy client to process LAPS settings and uses the binaries installed in Step 1.

The following diagram illustrates the setup that I will be using throughout this post and the associated tasks to set up LAPS. Note that the AWS Directory Service directory is deployed across multiple Availability Zones, and monitoring automatically detects and replaces domain controllers that fail.

Diagram illustrating this blog post's solution

In this blog post, I explain the prerequisites to set up Local Administrator Password Solution, demonstrate the steps involved to update the AD schema on your AWS Microsoft AD domain, show how to delegate permissions to IT staff and configure LAPS via Group Policy, and demonstrate how to retrieve the password using the graphical user interface or with Windows PowerShell.

This post assumes you are familiar with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol Data Interchange Format (LDIF) files and AWS Microsoft AD. If you need more of an introduction to Directory Service and AWS Microsoft AD, see How to Move More Custom Applications to the AWS Cloud with AWS Directory Service, which introduces working with schema changes in AWS Microsoft AD.

Prerequisites

In order to implement LAPS, you must use AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD. Any instance on which you want to configure LAPS must be joined to your AWS Microsoft AD domain. You also need a Management instance on which you install the LAPS management tools.

In this post, I use an AWS Microsoft AD domain called example.com that I have launched in the EU (London) region. To see which the regions in which Directory Service is available, see AWS Regions and Endpoints.

Screenshot showing the AWS Microsoft AD domain example.com used in this blog post

In addition, you must have at least two instances launched in the same region as the AWS Microsoft AD domain. To join the instances to your AWS Microsoft AD domain, you have two options:

  1. Use the Amazon EC2 Systems Manager (SSM) domain join feature. To learn more about how to set up domain join for EC2 instances, see joining a Windows Instance to an AWS Directory Service Domain.
  2. Manually configure the DNS server addresses in the Internet Protocol version 4 (TCP/IPv4) settings of the network card to use the AWS Microsoft AD DNS addresses (172.31.9.64 and 172.31.16.191, for this blog post) and perform a manual domain join.

For the purpose of this post, my two instances are:

  1. A Management instance on which I will install the management tools that I have tagged as Management.
  2. A Web Server instance on which I will be deploying the LAPS binary.

Screenshot showing the two EC2 instances used in this post

Implementing the solution

 

1. Install the LAPS binaries on instances joined to your AWS Microsoft AD domain by using EC2 Run Command

LAPS binaries come in the form of an MSI installer and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center. You can install the LAPS binaries manually, with an automation service such as EC2 Run Command, or with your existing software deployment solution.

For this post, I will deploy the LAPS binaries on my Web Server instance (i-0b7563d0f89d3453a) by using EC2 Run Command:

  1. While signed in to the AWS Management Console, choose EC2. In the Systems Manager Services section of the navigation pane, choose Run Command.
  2. Choose Run a command, and from the Command document list, choose AWS-InstallApplication.
  3. From Target instances, choose the instance on which you want to deploy the LAPS binaries. In my case, I will be selecting the instance tagged as Web Server. If you do not see any instances listed, make sure you have met the prerequisites for Amazon EC2 Systems Manager (SSM) by reviewing the Systems Manager Prerequisites.
  4. For Action, choose Install, and then stipulate the following values:
    • Parameters: /quiet
    • Source: https://download.microsoft.com/download/C/7/A/C7AAD914-A8A6-4904-88A1-29E657445D03/LAPS.x64.msi
    • Source Hash: f63ebbc45e2d080630bd62a195cd225de734131a56bb7b453c84336e37abd766
    • Comment: LAPS deployment

Leave the other options with the default values and choose Run. The AWS Management Console will return a Command ID, which will initially have a status of In Progress. It should take less than 5 minutes to download and install the binaries, after which the Command ID will update its status to Success.

Status showing the binaries have been installed successfully

If the Command ID runs for more than 5 minutes or returns an error, it might indicate a problem with the installer. To troubleshoot, review the steps in Troubleshooting Systems Manager Run Command.

To verify the binaries have been installed successfully, open Control Panel and review the recently installed applications in Programs and Features.

Screenshot of Control Panel that confirms LAPS has been installed successfully

You should see an entry for Local Administrator Password Solution with a version of 6.2.0.0 or newer.

2. Extend the AWS Microsoft AD schema

In the previous section, I used EC2 Run Command to install the LAPS binaries on an EC2 instance. Now, I am ready to extend the schema in an AWS Microsoft AD domain. Extending the schema is a requirement because LAPS relies on new AD attributes to store the encrypted password and its expiration time.

In an on-premises AD environment, you would update the schema by running the Update-AdmPwdADSchema Windows PowerShell cmdlet with schema administrator credentials. Because AWS Microsoft AD is a managed service, I do not have permissions to update the schema directly. Instead, I will update the AD schema from the Directory Service console by importing an LDIF file. If you are unfamiliar with schema updates or LDIF files, see How to Move More Custom Applications to the AWS Cloud with AWS Directory Service.

To make things easier for you, I am providing you with a sample LDIF file that contains the required AD schema changes. Using Notepad or a similar text editor, open the SchemaChanges-0517.ldif file and update the values of dc=example,dc=com with your own AWS Microsoft AD domain and suffix.

After I update the LDIF file with my AWS Microsoft AD details, I import it by using the AWS Management Console:

  1. On the Directory Service console, select from the list of directories in the Microsoft AD directory by choosing its identifier (it will look something like d-534373570ea).
  2. On the Directory details page, choose the Schema extensions tab and choose Upload and update schema.
    Screenshot showing the "Upload and update schema" option
  3. When prompted for the LDIF file that contains the changes, choose the sample LDIF file.
  4. In the background, the LDIF file is validated for errors and a backup of the directory is created for recovery purposes. Updating the schema might take a few minutes and the status will change to Updating Schema. When the process has completed, the status of Completed will be displayed, as shown in the following screenshot.

Screenshot showing the schema updates in progress
When the process has completed, the status of Completed will be displayed, as shown in the following screenshot.

Screenshot showing the process has completed

If the LDIF file contains errors or the schema extension fails, the Directory Service console will generate an error code and additional debug information. To help troubleshoot error messages, see Schema Extension Errors.

The sample LDIF file triggers AWS Microsoft AD to perform the following actions:

  1. Create the ms-Mcs-AdmPwd attribute, which stores the encrypted password.
  2. Create the ms-Mcs-AdmPwdExpirationTime attribute, which stores the time of the password’s expiration.
  3. Add both attributes to the Computer class.

3. Configure AD permissions

In the previous section, I updated the AWS Microsoft AD schema with the required attributes for LAPS. I am now ready to configure the permissions for administrators to retrieve the password and for computer accounts to update their password attribute.

As part of configuring AD permissions, I grant computers the ability to update their own password attribute and specify which security groups have permissions to retrieve the password from AD. As part of this process, I run Windows PowerShell cmdlets that are not installed by default on Windows Server.

Note: To learn more about Windows PowerShell and the concept of a cmdlet (pronounced “command-let”), go to Getting Started with Windows PowerShell.

Before getting started, I need to set up the required tools for LAPS on my Management instance, which must be joined to the AWS Microsoft AD domain. I will be using the same LAPS installer that I downloaded from the Microsoft LAPS website. In my Management instance, I have manually run the installer by clicking the LAPS.x64.msi file. On the Custom Setup page of the installer, under Management Tools, for each option I have selected Install on local hard drive.

Screenshot showing the required management tools

In the preceding screenshot, the features are:

  • The fat client UI – A simple user interface for retrieving the password (I will use it at the end of this post).
  • The Windows PowerShell module – Needed to run the commands in the next sections.
  • The GPO Editor templates – Used to configure Group Policy objects.

The next step is to grant computers in the Computers OU the permission to update their own attributes. While connected to my Management instance, I go to the Start menu and type PowerShell. In the list of results, right-click Windows PowerShell and choose Run as administrator and then Yes when prompted by User Account Control.

In the Windows PowerShell prompt, I type the following command.

Import-module AdmPwd.PS

Set-AdmPwdComputerSelfPermission –OrgUnit “OU=Computers,OU=MyMicrosoftAD,DC=example,DC=com

To grant the administrator group called Admins the permission to retrieve the computer password, I run the following command in the Windows PowerShell prompt I previously started.

Import-module AdmPwd.PS

Set-AdmPwdReadPasswordPermission –OrgUnit “OU=Computers, OU=MyMicrosoftAD,DC=example,DC=com” –AllowedPrincipals “Admins”

4. Configure Group Policy to enable LAPS

In the previous section, I deployed the LAPS management tools on my management instance, granted the computer accounts the permission to self-update their local administrator password attribute, and granted my Admins group permissions to retrieve the password.

Note: The following section addresses the Group Policy Management Console and Group Policy objects. If you are unfamiliar with or wish to learn more about these concepts, go to Get Started Using the GPMC and Group Policy for Beginners.

I am now ready to enable LAPS via Group Policy:

  1. On my Management instance (i-03b2c5d5b1113c7ac), I have installed the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) by running the following command in Windows PowerShell.
Install-WindowsFeature –Name GPMC
  1. Next, I have opened the GPMC and created a new Group Policy object (GPO) called LAPS GPO.
  2. In the Local Group Policy Editor, I navigate to Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > LAPS. I have configured the settings using the values in the following table.

Setting

State

Options

Password Settings

Enabled

Complexity: large letters, small letters, numbers, specials

Do not allow password expiration time longer than required by policy

Enabled

N/A

Enable local admin password management

Enabled

N/A
  1. Next, I need to link the GPO to an organizational unit (OU) in which my machine accounts sit. In your environment, I recommend testing the new settings on a test OU and then deploying the GPO to production OUs.

Note: If you choose to create a new test organizational unit, you must create it in the OU that AWS Microsoft AD delegates to you to manage. For example, if your AWS Microsoft AD directory name were example.com, the test OU path would be example.com/example/Computers/Test.

  1. To test that LAPS works, I need to make sure the computer has received the new policy by forcing a Group Policy update. While connected to the Web Server instance (i-0b7563d0f89d3453a) using Remote Desktop, I open an elevated administrative command prompt and run the following command: gpupdate /force. I can check if the policy is applied by running the command: gpresult /r | findstr LAPS GPO, where LAPS GPO is the name of the GPO created in the second step.
  2. Back on my Management instance, I can then launch the LAPS interface from the Start menu and use it to retrieve the password (as shown in the following screenshot). Alternatively, I can run the Get-ADComputer Windows PowerShell cmdlet to retrieve the password.
Get-ADComputer [YourComputerName] -Properties ms-Mcs-AdmPwd | select name, ms-Mcs-AdmPwd

Screenshot of the LAPS UI, which you can use to retrieve the password

Summary

In this blog post, I demonstrated how you can deploy LAPS with an AWS Microsoft AD directory. I then showed how to install the LAPS binaries by using EC2 Run Command. Using the sample LDIF file I provided, I showed you how to extend the schema, which is a requirement because LAPS relies on new AD attributes to store the encrypted password and its expiration time. Finally, I showed how to complete the LAPS setup by configuring the necessary AD permissions and creating the GPO that starts the LAPS password change.

If you have comments about this post, submit them in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions about or issues implementing this solution, please start a new thread on the Directory Service forum.

– Dragos

Amazon EC2 Container Service – Launch Recap, Customer Stories, and Code

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-container-service-launch-recap-customer-stories-and-code/

Today seems like a good time to recap some of the features that we have added to Amazon EC2 Container Service over the last year or so, and to share some customer success stories and code with you! The service makes it easy for you to run any number of Docker containers across a managed cluster of EC2 instances, with full console, API, CloudFormation, CLI, and PowerShell support. You can store your Linux and Windows Docker images in the EC2 Container Registry for easy access.

Launch Recap
Let’s start by taking a look at some of the newest ECS features and some helpful how-to blog posts that will show you how to use them:

Application Load Balancing – We added support for the application load balancer last year. This high-performance load balancing option runs at the application level and allows you to define content-based routing rules. It provides support for dynamic ports and can be shared across multiple services, making it easier for you to run microservices in containers. To learn more, read about Service Load Balancing.

IAM Roles for Tasks – You can secure your infrastructure by assigning IAM roles to ECS tasks. This allows you to grant permissions on a fine-grained, per-task basis, customizing the permissions to the needs of each task. Read IAM Roles for Tasks to learn more.

Service Auto Scaling – You can define scaling policies that scale your services (tasks) up and down in response to changes in demand. You set the desired minimum and maximum number of tasks, create one or more scaling policies, and Service Auto Scaling will take care of the rest. The documentation for Service Auto Scaling will help you to make use of this feature.

Blox – Scheduling, in a container-based environment, is the process of assigning tasks to instances. ECS gives you three options: automated (via the built-in Service Scheduler), manual (via the RunTask function), and custom (via a scheduler that you provide). Blox is an open source scheduler that supports a one-task-per-host model, with room to accommodate other models in the future. It monitors the state of the cluster and is well-suited to running monitoring agents, log collectors, and other daemon-style tasks.

Windows – We launched ECS with support for Linux containers and followed up with support for running Windows Server 2016 Base with Containers.

Container Instance Draining – From time to time you may need to remove an instance from a running cluster in order to scale the cluster down or to perform a system update. Earlier this year we added a set of lifecycle hooks that allow you to better manage the state of the instances. Read the blog post How to Automate Container Instance Draining in Amazon ECS to see how to use the lifecycle hooks and a Lambda function to automate the process of draining existing work from an instance while preventing new work from being scheduled for it.

CI/CD Pipeline with Code* – Containers simplify software deployment and are an ideal target for a CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) pipeline. The post Continuous Deployment to Amazon ECS using AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, Amazon ECR, and AWS CloudFormation shows you how to build and operate a CI/CD pipeline using multiple AWS services.

CloudWatch Logs Integration – This launch gave you the ability to configure the containers that run your tasks to send log information to CloudWatch Logs for centralized storage and analysis. You simply install the Amazon ECS Container Agent and enable the awslogs log driver.

CloudWatch Events – ECS generates CloudWatch Events when the state of a task or a container instance changes. These events allow you to monitor the state of the cluster using a Lambda function. To learn how to capture the events and store them in an Elasticsearch cluster, read Monitor Cluster State with Amazon ECS Event Stream.

Task Placement Policies – This launch provided you with fine-grained control over the placement of tasks on container instances within clusters. It allows you to construct policies that include cluster constraints, custom constraints (location, instance type, AMI, and attribute), placement strategies (spread or bin pack) and to use them without writing any code. Read Introducing Amazon ECS Task Placement Policies to see how to do this!

EC2 Container Service in Action
Many of our customers from large enterprises to hot startups and across all industries, such as financial services, hospitality, and consumer electronics, are using Amazon ECS to run their microservices applications in production. Companies such as Capital One, Expedia, Okta, Riot Games, and Viacom rely on Amazon ECS.

Mapbox is a platform for designing and publishing custom maps. The company uses ECS to power their entire batch processing architecture to collect and process over 100 million miles of sensor data per day that they use for powering their maps. They also optimize their batch processing architecture on ECS using Spot Instances. The Mapbox platform powers over 5,000 apps and reaches more than 200 million users each month. Its backend runs on ECS allowing it to serve more than 1.3 billion requests per day. To learn more about their recent migration to ECS, read their recent blog post, We Switched to Amazon ECS, and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.

Travel company Expedia designed their backends with a microservices architecture. With the popularization of Docker, they decided they would like to adopt Docker for its faster deployments and environment portability. They chose to use ECS to orchestrate all their containers because it had great integration with the AWS platform, everything from ALB to IAM roles to VPC integration. This made ECS very easy to use with their existing AWS infrastructure. ECS really reduced the heavy lifting of deploying and running containerized applications. Expedia runs 75% of all apps on AWS in ECS allowing it to process 4 billion requests per hour. Read Kuldeep Chowhan‘s blog post, How Expedia Runs Hundreds of Applications in Production Using Amazon ECS to learn more.

Realtor.com provides home buyers and sellers with a comprehensive database of properties that are currently for sale. Their move to AWS and ECS has helped them to support business growth that now numbers 50 million unique monthly users who drive up to 250,000 requests per second at peak times. ECS has helped them to deploy their code more quickly while increasing utilization of their cloud infrastructure. Read the Realtor.com Case Study to learn more about how they use ECS, Kinesis, and other AWS services.

Instacart talks about how they use ECS to power their same-day grocery delivery service:

Capital One talks about how they use ECS to automate their operations and their infrastructure management:

Code
Clever developers are using ECS as a base for their own work. For example:

Rack is an open source PaaS (Platform as a Service). It focuses on infrastructure automation, runs in an isolated VPC, and uses a single-tenant build service for security.

Empire is also an open source PaaS. It provides a Heroku-like workflow and is targeted at small and medium sized startups, with an emphasis on microservices.

Cloud Container Cluster Visualizer (c3vis) helps to visualize resource utilization within ECS clusters:

Stay Tuned
We have plenty of new features in the works for ECS, so stay tuned!

— Jeff;

 

PowerMemory – Exploit Windows Credentials In Memory

Post Syndicated from Darknet original http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/darknethackers/~3/xZfoefLWcs0/

PowerMemory is a PowerShell based tool to exploit Windows credentials present in files and memory, it levers Microsoft signed binaries to hack Windows. The method is totally new. It proves that it can be extremely easy to get credentials or any other information from Windows memory without needing to code in C-type languages. In addition,…

Read the full post at darknet.org.uk

New – Tag EC2 Instances & EBS Volumes on Creation

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-tag-ec2-instances-ebs-volumes-on-creation/

Way back in 2010, we launched Resource Tagging for EC2 instances and other EC2 resources. Since that launch, we have raised the allowable number of tags per resource from 10 to 50, and we have made tags more useful with the introduction of resource groups and a tag editor. Our customers use tags to track ownership, drive their cost accounting processes, implement compliance protocols, and to control access to resources via IAM policies.

The AWS tagging model provides separate functions for resource creation and resource tagging. While this is flexible and has worked well for many of our users, it does result in a small time window where the resources exist in an untagged state. Using two separate functions means that resource creation could succeed only for tagging to fail, again leaving resources in an untagged state.

Today we are making tagging more flexible and more useful, with four new features:

Tag on Creation – You can now specify tags for EC2 instances and EBS volumes as part of the API call that creates the resources.

Enforced Tag Usage – You can now write IAM policies that mandate the use of specific tags on EC2 instances or EBS volumes.

Resource-Level Permissions – By popular request, the CreateTags and DeleteTags functions now support IAM’s resource-level permissions.

Enforced Volume Encryption – You can now write IAM policies that mandate the use of encryption for newly created EBS volumes.

Tag on Creation
You now have the ability to specify tags for EC2 instances and EBS volumes as part of the API call that creates the resources (if the call creates both instances and volumes, you can specify distinct tags for the instance and for each volume). The resource creation and the tagging are performed atomically; both must succeed in order for the operation (RunInstances, CreateVolume, and other functions that create resources) to succeed. You no longer need to build tagging scripts that run after instances or volumes have been created.

Here’s how you specify tags when you launch an EC2 instance (the CostCenter and SaveSnapshotFlag tags are also set on any EBS volumes created when the instance is launched):

To learn more, read Using Tags.

Resource-Level Permissions
CreateTags and DeleteTags now support IAM’s resource-level permissions, as requested by many customers. This gives you additional control over the tag keys and values on existing resources.

Also, RunInstances and CreateVolume now support additional resource-level permissions. This allows you to exercise control over the users and groups that can tag resources on creation.

To learn more, see Example Policies for Working with the AWS CLI or an AWS SDK.

Enforced Tag Usage
You can now write IAM policies that enforce the use of specific tags. For example, you could write a policy that blocks the deletion of tags named Owner or Account. Or, you could write a “Deny” policy that disallows the creation of new tags for specific existing resources. You could also use an IAM policy to enforce the use of Department and CostCenter tags to help you achieve more accurate cost allocation reporting. In order to implement stronger compliance and security policies, you could also restrict access to DeleteTags if the resource is not tagged with the user’s name. The ability to enforce tag usage gives you precise control over access to resources, ownership, and cost allocation.

Here’s a statement that requires the use of costcenter and stack tags (with values of “115” and “prod,” respectively) for all newly created volumes:

"Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "AllowCreateTaggedVolumes",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": "ec2:CreateVolume",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123456789012:volume/*",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "aws:RequestTag/costcenter": "115",
          "aws:RequestTag/stack": "prod"
         },
         "ForAllValues:StringEquals": {
             "aws:TagKeys": ["costcenter","stack"]
         }
       }
     },
     {
       "Effect": "Allow",
       "Action": [
         "ec2:CreateTags"
       ],
       "Resource": "arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123456789012:volume/*",
       "Condition": {
         "StringEquals": {
             "ec2:CreateAction" : "CreateVolume"
        }
      }
    }
  ]

Enforced Volume Encryption
Using the additional IAM resource-level permissions now supported by RunInstances and CreateVolume, you can now write IAM policies that mandate the use of encryption for any EBS boot or data volumes created. You can use this to comply with regulatory requirements, enforce enterprise security policies, and to protect your data in compliance with applicable auditing requirements.

Here’s a sample statement that you can incorporate into an IAM policy for RunInstances and CreateVolume to enforce EBS volume encryption:

"Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Deny",
            "Action": [
                       "ec2:RunInstances",
                       "ec2:CreateVolume"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:ec2:*:*:volume/*"
            ],
            "Condition": {
                "Bool": {
                    "ec2:Encrypted": "false"
                }
            }
        },

To learn more and to see some sample policies, take a look at Example Policies for Working with the AWS CLI or an AWS SDK and IAM Policies for Amazon EC2.

Available Now
As you can see, the combination of tagging and the new resource-level permissions on the resource creation and tag manipulation functions gives you the ability to track and control access to your EC2 resources.

This new feature is available now in all regions except AWS GovCloud (US) and China (Beijing). You can start using it today from the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell, or the AWS APIs.

We are planning to add support for additional EC2 resource types over time; stay tuned for more information!

— Jeff;

EC2 Run Command is Now a CloudWatch Events Target

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-run-command-is-now-a-cloudwatch-events-target/

Ok, time for another peanut butter and chocolate post! Let’s combine EC2 Run Command (New EC2 Run Command – Remote Instance Management at Scale) and CloudWatch Events (New CloudWatch Events – Track and Respond to Changes to Your AWS Resources) and see what we get.

EC2 Run Command is part of EC2 Systems Manager. It allows you to operate on collections of EC2 instances and on-premises servers reliably and at scale, in a controlled and selective fashion. You can run scripts, install software, collect metrics and log files, manage patches, and much more, on both Windows and Linux.

CloudWatch Events gives you the ability to track changes to AWS resources in near real-time. You get a stream of system events that you can easily route to one or more targets including AWS Lambda functions, Amazon Kinesis streams, Amazon SNS topics, and built-in EC2 and EBS targets.

Better Together
Today we are bringing these two services together. You can now create CloudWatch Events rules that use EC2 Run Command to perform actions on EC2 instances or on-premises servers. This opens the door to all sorts of interesting ideas; here are a few that I came up with:

Final Log Collection – Collect application or system logs from instances that are being shut down (either manually or as a result of a scale-in operation initiated by Auto Scaling).

Error Log Condition – Collect logs after an application crash or a security incident.

Instance Setup – After an instance has started, download & install applications, set parameters and configurations, and launch processes.

Configuration Updates – When a config file is changed in S3, install it on applicable instances (perhaps determined by tags). For example, you could install an updated Apache web server config file on a set of properly tagged instances, and then restart the server so that it picks up the changes. Or, update an instance-level firewall each time the AWS IP Address Ranges are updated.

EBS Snapshot Testing and Tracking – After a fresh snapshot has been created, mount it on a test instance, check the filesystem for errors, and then index the files in the snapshot.

Instance Coordination – Every time an instance is launched or terminated, inform the others so that they can update internal tracking information or rebalance their workloads.

I’m sure that you have some more interesting ideas; please feel free to share them in the comments.

Time for Action!
Let’s set this up. Suppose I want to run a specific PowerShell script every time Auto Scaling adds another instance to an Auto Scaling Group.

I start by opening the CloudWatch Events Console and clicking on Create rule:

I configure my Event Source to be my Auto Scaling Group (AS-Main-1), and indicate that I want to take action when EC2 instances are launched successfully:

Then I set up the target. I choose SSM Run Command, pick the AWS-RunShellScript document, and indicate that I want the command to be run on the instances that are tagged as coming from my Auto Scaling group:

Then I click on Configure details, give my rule a name and a description, and click on Create rule:

With everything set up, the command service httpd start will be run on each instance launched as a result of a scale out operation.

Available Now
This new feature is available now and you can start using it today.

— Jeff;

 

SessionGopher – Session Extraction Tool

Post Syndicated from Darknet original http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/darknethackers/~3/di3wBU4noU8/

SessionGopher is a PowerShell Session Extraction tool that uses WMI to extract saved session information for remote access tools such as WinSCP, PuTTY, SuperPuTTY, FileZilla, and Microsoft Remote Desktop. The tool can find and decrypt saved session information for remote access tools. It has WMI functionality built in so it can be run remotely,…

Read the full post at darknet.org.uk

Streamline AMI Maintenance and Patching Using Amazon EC2 Systems Manager | Automation

Post Syndicated from Ana Visneski original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/streamline-ami-maintenance-and-patching-using-amazon-ec2-systems-manager-automation/

Here to tell you about using Automation for streamline AMI maintenance and patching is Taylor Anderson, a Senior Product Manager with EC2.

-Ana

 

Last December at re:Invent, we launched Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, which helps you automatically collect software inventory, apply OS patches, create system images, and configure Windows and Linux operating systems. These capabilities enable automated configuration and ongoing management of systems at scale, and help maintain software compliance for instances running in Amazon EC2 or on-premises.

One feature within Systems Manager is Automation, which can be used to patch, update agents, or bake applications into an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). With Automation, you can avoid the time and effort associated with manual image updates, and instead build AMIs through a streamlined, repeatable, and auditable process.

Recently, we released the first public document for Automation: AWS-UpdateLinuxAmi. This document allows you to automate patching of Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, and Amazon Linux AMIs, as well as automating the installation of additional site-specific packages and configurations.

More importantly, it makes it easy to get started with Automation, eliminating the need to first write an Automation document. AWS-UpdateLinuxAmi can also be used as a template when building your own Automation workflow. Windows users can expect the equivalent document―AWS-UpdateWindowsAmi―in the coming weeks.

AWS-UpdateLinuxAmi automates the following workflow:

  1. Launch a temporary EC2 instance from a source Linux AMI.
  2. Update the instance.
    • Invoke a user-provided, pre-update hook script on the instance (optional).
    • Update any AWS tools and agents on the instance, if present.
    • Update the instance’s distribution packages using the native package manager.
    • Invoke a user-provided post-update hook script on the instance (optional).
  3. Stop the temporary instance.
  4. Create a new AMI from the stopped instance.
  5. Terminate the instance.

Warning: Creation of an AMI from a running instance carries a risk that credentials, secrets, or other confidential information from that instance may be recorded to the new image. Use caution when managing AMIs created by this process.

Configuring roles and permissions for Automation

If you haven’t used Automation before, you need to configure IAM roles and permissions. This includes creating a service role for Automation, assigning a passrole to authorize a user to provide the service role, and creating an instance role to enable instance management under Systems Manager. For more details, see Configuring Access to Automation.

Executing Automation

      1. In the EC2 console, choose Systems Manager Services, Automations.
      2. Choose Run automation document
      3. Expand Document name and choose AWS-UpdateLinuxAmi.
      4. Choose the latest document version.
      5.  For SourceAmiId, enter the ID of the Linux AMI to update.
      6. For InstanceIamRole, enter the name of the instance role you created enabling Systems Manager to manage an instance (that is, it includes the AmazonEC2RoleforSSM managed policy). For more details, see Configuring Access to Automation.
      7.  For AutomationAssumeRole, enter the ARN of the service role you created for Automation. For more details, see Configuring Access to Automation.
      8.  Choose Run Automation.
      9. Monitor progress in the Automation Steps tab, and view step-level outputs.

After execution is complete, choose Description to view any outputs returned by the workflow. In this example, AWS-UpdateLinuxAmi returns the new AMI ID.

Next, choose Images, AMIs to view your new AMI.

There is no additional charge to use the Automation service, and any resources created by a workflow incur nominal charges. Note that if you terminate AWS-UpdateLinuxAmi before reaching the “Terminate Instance” step, shut down the temporary instance created by the workflow.

A CLI walkthrough of the above steps can be found at Automation CLI Walkthrough: Patch a Linux AMI.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve successfully run AWS-UpdateLinuxAmi, you may want to create default values for the service and instance roles. You can customize your workflow by creating your own Automation document based on AWS-UpdateLinuxAmi. For more details, see Create an Automaton Document. After you’ve created your document, you can write additional steps and add them to the workflow.

Example steps include:

      • Updating an Auto Scaling group with the new AMI ID (aws:invokeLambdaFunction action type)
      • Creating an encrypted copy of your new AMI (aws:encrypedCopy action type)
      • Validating your new AMI using Run Command with the RunPowerShellScript document (aws:runCommand action type)

Automation also makes a great addition to a CI/CD pipeline for application bake-in, and can be invoked as a CLI build step in Jenkins. For details on these examples, be sure to check out the Automation technical documentation. For updates on Automation, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, Amazon CloudFormation, AWS Config, AWS OpsWorks and other management services, be sure to follow the all-new Management Tools blog.

 

Automating the Creation of Consistent Amazon EBS Snapshots with Amazon EC2 Systems Manager (Part 2)

Post Syndicated from Bryan Liston original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/automating-the-creation-of-consistent-amazon-ebs-snapshots-with-amazon-ec2-systems-manager-part-2/

Nicolas Malaval, AWS Professional Consultant

In my previous blog post, I discussed the challenge of creating Amazon EBS snapshots when you cannot turn off the instance during backup because this might exclude any data that has been cached by any applications or the operating system. I showed how you can use EC2 Systems Manager to run a script remotely on EC2 instances to prepare the applications and the operating system for backup and to automate the creating of snapshots on a daily basis. I gave a practical example of creating consistent Amazon EBS snapshots of Amazon Linux running a MySQL database.

In this post, I walk you through another practical example to create consistent snapshots of a Windows Server instance with Microsoft VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service).

Understanding the example

VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) is a Windows built-in service that coordinates backup of VSS-compatible applications (SQL Server, Exchange Server, etc.) to flush and freeze their I/O operations.

The VSS service initiates and oversees the creation of shadow copies. A shadow copy is a point-in-time and consistent snapshot of a logical volume. For example, C: is a logical volume, which is different than an EBS snapshot. Multiple components are involved in the shadow copy creation:

  • The VSS requester requests the creation of shadow copies.
  • The VSS provider creates and maintains the shadow copies.
  • The VSS writers guarantee that you have a consistent data set to back up. They flush and freeze I/O operations, before the VSS provider creates the shadow copies, and release I/O operations, after the VSS provider has completed this action. There is usually one VSS writer for each VSS-compatible application.

I use Run Command to execute a PowerShell script on the Windows instance:

$EbsSnapshotPsFileName = "C:/tmp/ebsSnapshot.ps1"

$EbsSnapshotPs = New-Item -Type File $EbsSnapshotPsFileName -Force

Add-Content $EbsSnapshotPs '$InstanceID = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id'
Add-Content $EbsSnapshotPs '$AZ = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone'
Add-Content $EbsSnapshotPs '$Region = $AZ.Substring(0, $AZ.Length-1)'
Add-Content $EbsSnapshotPs '$Volumes = ((Get-EC2InstanceAttribute -Region $Region -Instance "$InstanceId" -Attribute blockDeviceMapping).BlockDeviceMappings.Ebs |? {$_.Status -eq "attached"}).VolumeId'
Add-Content $EbsSnapshotPs '$Volumes | New-EC2Snapshot -Region $Region -Description " Consistent snapshot of a Windows instance with VSS" -Force'
Add-Content $EbsSnapshotPs 'Exit $LastExitCode'

First, the script writes in a local file named ebsSnapshot.ps1 a PowerShell script that creates a snapshot of every EBS volume attached to the instance.

$EbsSnapshotCmdFileName = "C:/tmp/ebsSnapshot.cmd"
$EbsSnapshotCmd = New-Item -Type File $EbsSnapshotCmdFileName -Force

Add-Content $EbsSnapshotCmd 'powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -file $EbsSnapshotPsFileName'
Add-Content $EbsSnapshotCmd 'exit $?'

It writes in a second file named ebsSnapshot.cmd a shell script that executes the PowerShell script created earlier.

$VssScriptFileName = "C:/tmp/scriptVss.txt"
$VssScript = New-Item -Type File $VssScriptFileName -Force

Add-Content $VssScript 'reset'
Add-Content $VssScript 'set context persistent'
Add-Content $VssScript 'set option differential'
Add-Content $VssScript 'begin backup'

$Drives = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_LogicalDisk |? {$_.VolumeName -notmatch "Temporary" -and $_.DriveType -eq "3"} | Select-Object DeviceID

$Drives | ForEach-Object { Add-Content $VssScript $('add volume ' + $_.DeviceID + ' alias Volume' + $_.DeviceID.Substring(0, 1)) }

Add-Content $VssScript 'create'
Add-Content $VssScript "exec $EbsSnapshotCmdFileName"
Add-Content $VssScript 'end backup'

$Drives | ForEach-Object { Add-Content $VssScript $('delete shadows id %Volume' + $_.DeviceID.Substring(0, 1) + '%') }

Add-Content $VssScript 'exit'

It creates a third file named scriptVss.txt containing DiskShadow commands. DiskShadow is a tool included in Windows Server 2008 and above, that exposes the functionality offered by the VSS service. The script creates a shadow copy of each logical volume stored on EBS, runs the shell script ebsSnapshot.cmd to create a snapshot of underlying EBS volumes, and then deletes the shadow copies to free disk space.

diskshadow.exe /s $VssScriptFileName
Exit $LastExitCode

Finally, it runs DiskShadow in script mode.

This PowerShell script is contained in a new SSM document and the maintenance window executes a command from this document every day at midnight on every Windows instance that has a tag “ConsistentSnapshot” equal to “WindowsVSS”.

Implementing and testing the example

First, use AWS CloudFormation to provision some of the required resources in your AWS account.

  1. Open Create a Stack to create a CloudFormation stack from the template.
  2. Choose Next.
  3. Enter the ID of the latest AWS Windows Server 2016 Base AMI available in the current region (see Finding a Windows AMI) in pWindowsAmiId.
  4. Follow the on-screen instructions.

CloudFormation creates the following resources:

  • A VPC with an Internet gateway attached.
  • A subnet on this VPC with a new route table, to enable access to the Internet and therefore to the AWS APIs.
  • An IAM role to grant an EC2 instance the required permissions.
  • A security group that allows RDP access from the Internet, as you need to log on to the instance later on.
  • A Windows instance in the subnet with the IAM role and the security group attached.
  • A SSM document containing the script described in the section above to create consistent EBS snapshots.
  • Another SSM document containing a script to restore logical volumes to a consistent state, as explained in the next section.
  • An IAM role to grant the maintenance window the required permissions.

After the stack creation completes, choose Outputs in the CloudFormation console and note the values returned:

  • IAM role for the maintenance window
  • Names of the two SSM documents

Then, manually create a maintenance window, if you have not already created it. For detailed instructions, see the “Example” section in the previous blog post.

After you create a maintenance window, assign a target where the task will run:

  1. In the Maintenance Window list, choose the maintenance window that you just created.
  2. For Actions, choose Register targets.
  3. For Owner information, enter WindowsVSS.
  4. Under the Select targets by section, choose Specifying tags. For Tag Name, choose ConsistentSnapshot. For Tag Value, choose WindowsVSS.
  5. Choose Register targets.

Finally, assign a task to perform during the window:

  1. In the Maintenance Window list, choose the maintenance window that you just created.
  2. For Actions, choose Register tasks.
  3. For Document, select the name of the SSM document that was returned by CloudFormation, with which to create snapshots.
  4. Under the Target by section, choose the target that you just created.
  5. Under the Role section, select the IAM role that was returned by CloudFormation.
  6. Under Execute on, for Targets, enter 1. For Stop after, enter 1 errors.
  7. Choose Register task.

You can view the history either in the History tab of the Maintenance Windows navigation pane of the Amazon EC2 console, as illustrated on the following figure, or in the Run Command navigation pane, with more details about each command executed.

Restoring logical volumes to a consistent state

DiskShadow―the VSS requester in this case―uses the Windows built-in VSS provider. To create a shadow copy, this built-in provider does not make a complete copy of the data. Instead, it keeps a copy of a block data before a change overwrites it, in a dedicated storage area. The logical volume can be restored to its initial consistent state, by combining the actual volume data with the initial data of the changed blocks.

The DiskShadow command create instructs the VSS service to proceed with the creation of shadow copies, including the release of I/O operations by the VSS writers after the shadow copies are created. Therefore, the EBS snapshots created by the next command exec may not be fully consistent.

Note: A workaround could be to build your own VSS provider in charge of creating EBS snapshots. Doing so would enable the EBS snapshots to be created before I/O operations are released. We will not develop this solution in this blog post.

Therefore, you need to “undo” any I/O operations that may have happened between the moment when the shadow copy was created and the moment when the EBS snapshots were created.

A solution consists of creating an EBS volume from the snapshot, attaching it to an intermediate Windows instance and to “revert” the VSS shadow copy to restore the EBS volume to a consistent state. For sake of simplicity, use the Windows instance that was backed up as the intermediate instance.

To manually restore an EBS snapshot to a consistent state:

  1. In the Amazon EC2 console, choose Instances.
  2. In the search box, enter Consistent EBS Snapshots – Windows with VSS. The search results should display a single instance. Note the Availability Zone for this instance.
  3. Choose Snapshots.
  4. Select the latest snapshot with the description “Consistent snapshot of Windows with VSS” and choose Actions, Create Volume.
  5. Select the same Availability Zone as the instance and choose Create, Volumes.
  6. Select the volume that was just created and choose Actions, Attach Volume.
  7. For Instance, choose Consistent EBS Snapshots – Windows with VSS and choose Attach.
  8. Choose Run Command, Run a command.
  9. In Command document, select the name of a SSM document to restore snapshots returned by CloudFormation. For Target instances, select the Windows and choose Run.

Run Command executes the following PowerShell script on the Windows instance. It retrieves the list of offline disks—which corresponds in this case to the EBS volume that you just attached—and for each offline disk, takes it online, revert existing shadow copies and takes it offline again.

$OfflineDisks = (Get-Disk |? {$_.OperationalStatus -eq "Offline"})

foreach ($OfflineDisk in $OfflineDisks) {
  Set-Disk -Number $OfflineDisk.Number -IsOffline $False
  Set-Disk -Number $OfflineDisk.Number -IsReadonly $False
  Write-Host "Disk " $OfflineDisk.Signature " is now online"
}

$ShadowCopyIds = (Get-CimInstance Win32_ShadowCopy).Id
Write-Host "Number of shadow copies found: " $ShadowCopyIds.Count

foreach ($ShadowCopyId in $ShadowCopyIds) {
  "revert " + $ShadowCopyId | diskshadow
}

foreach ($OfflineDisk in $OfflineDisks) {
  $CurrentSignature = (Get-Disk -Number $OfflineDisk.Number).Signature
  if ($OfflineDisk.Signature -eq $CurrentSignature) {
    Set-Disk -Number $OfflineDisk.Number -IsReadonly $True
    Set-Disk -Number $OfflineDisk.Number -IsOffline $True
    Write-Host "Disk " $OfflineDisk.Number " is now offline"
  }
  else {
    Set-Disk -Number $OfflineDisk.Number -Signature $OfflineDisk.Signature
    Write-Host "Reverting to the initial disk signature: " $OfflineDisk.Signature
  }
}

The EBS volume is now in a consistent state and can be detached from the intermediate instance.

Conclusion

In this series of blog posts, I showed how you can use Amazon EC2 Systems Manager to create consistent EBS snapshots on a daily basis, with two practical examples for Linux and Windows. You can adapt this solution to your own requirements. For example, you may develop scripts for your own applications.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

Duqu Malware Techniques Used by Cybercriminals

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/02/duqu_malware_te.html

Duqu 2.0 is a really impressive piece of malware, related to Stuxnet and probably written by the NSA. One of its security features is that it stays resident in its host’s memory without ever writing persistent files to the system’s drives. Now, this same technique is being used by criminals:

Now, fileless malware is going mainstream, as financially motivated criminal hackers mimic their nation-sponsored counterparts. According to research Kaspersky Lab plans to publish Wednesday, networks belonging to at least 140 banks and other enterprises have been infected by malware that relies on the same in-memory design to remain nearly invisible. Because infections are so hard to spot, the actual number is likely much higher. Another trait that makes the infections hard to detect is the use of legitimate and widely used system administrative and security tools­ — including PowerShell, Metasploit, and Mimikatz — ­to inject the malware into computer memory.

[…]

The researchers first discovered the malware late last year, when a bank’s security team found a copy of Meterpreter — ­an in-memory component of Metasploit — ­residing inside the physical memory of a Microsoft domain controller. After conducting a forensic analysis, the researchers found that the Meterpreter code was downloaded and injected into memory using PowerShell commands. The infected machine also used Microsoft’s NETSH networking tool to transport data to attacker-controlled servers. To obtain the administrative privileges necessary to do these things, the attackers also relied on Mimikatz. To reduce the evidence left in logs or hard drives, the attackers stashed the PowerShell commands into the Windows registry.

BoingBoing post.

Amazon EBS Update – New Elastic Volumes Change Everything

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ebs-update-new-elastic-volumes-change-everything/

It is always interesting to speak with our customers and to learn how the dynamic nature of their business and their applications drives their block storage requirements. These needs change over time, creating the need to modify existing volumes to add capacity or to change performance characteristics. Today’s 24×7 operating models leaves no room for downtime; as a result, customers want to make changes without going offline or otherwise impacting operations.

Over the years, we have introduced new EBS offerings that support an ever-widening set of use cases. For example, we introduced two new volume types in 2016 – Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1). Our customers want to use these volume types as storage tiers, modifying the volume type to save money or to change the performance characteristics, without impacting operations.

In other words, our customers want their EBS volumes to be even more elastic!

New Elastic Volumes
Today we are launching a new EBS feature we call Elastic Volumes and making it available for all current-generation EBS volumes attached to current-generation EC2 instances. You can now increase volume size, adjust performance, or change the volume type while the volume is in use. You can continue to use your application while the change takes effect.

This new feature will greatly simplify (or even eliminate) many of your planning, tuning, and space management chores. Instead of a traditional provisioning cycle that can take weeks or months, you can make changes to your storage infrastructure instantaneously, with a simple API call.

You can address the following scenarios (and many more that you can come up with on your own) using Elastic Volumes:

Changing Workloads – You set up your infrastructure in a rush and used the General Purpose SSD volumes for your block storage. After gaining some experience you figure out that the Throughput Optimized volumes are a better fit, and simply change the type of the volume.

Spiking Demand – You are running a relational database on a Provisioned IOPS volume that is set to handle a moderate amount of traffic during the month, with a 10x spike in traffic  during the final three days of each month due to month-end processing.  You can use Elastic Volumes to dial up the provisioning in order to handle the spike, and then dial it down afterward.

Increasing Storage – You provisioned a volume for 100 GiB and an alarm goes off indicating that it is now at 90% of capacity. You increase the size of the volume and expand the file system to match, with no downtime, and in a fully automated fashion.

Using Elastic Volumes
You can manage all of this from the AWS Management Console, via API calls, or from the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

To make a change from the Console, simply select the volume and choose Modify Volume from the Action menu:

Then make any desired changes to the volume type, size, and Provisioned IOPS (if appropriate). Here I am changing my 75 GiB General Purpose (gp2) volume into a 400 GiB Provisioned IOPS volume, with 20,000 IOPS:

When I click on Modify I confirm my intent, and click on Yes:

The volume’s state reflects the progress of the operation (modifying, optimizing, or complete):

The next step is to expand the file system so that it can take advantage of the additional storage space. To learn how to do that, read Expanding the Storage Space of an EBS Volume on Linux or Expanding the Storage Space of an EBS Volume on Windows. You can expand the file system as soon as the state transitions to optimizing (typically a few seconds after you start the operation). The new configuration is in effect at this point, although optimization may continue for up to 24 hours. Billing for the new configuration begins as soon as the state turns to optimizing (there’s no charge for the modification itself).

Automatic Elastic Volume Operations
While manual changes are fine, there’s plenty of potential for automation. Here are a couple of ideas:

Right-Sizing – Use a CloudWatch alarm to watch for a volume that is running at or near its IOPS limit. Initiate a workflow and approval process that could provision additional IOPS or change the type of the volume. Or, publish a “free space” metric to CloudWatch and use a similar approval process to resize the volume and the filesystem.

Cost Reduction – Use metrics or schedules to reduce IOPS or to change the type of a volume. Last week I spoke with a security auditor at a university. He collects tens of gigabytes of log files from all over campus each day and retains them for 60 days. Most of the files are never read, and those that are can be scanned at a leisurely pace. They could address this use case by creating a fresh General Purpose volume each day, writing the logs to it at high speed, and then changing the type to Throughput Optimized.

As I mentioned earlier, you need to resize the file system in order to be able to access the newly provisioned space on the volume. In order to show you how to automate this process, my colleagues built a sample that makes use of CloudWatch Events, AWS Lambda, EC2 Systems Manager, and some PowerShell scripting. The rule matches the modifyVolume event emitted by EBS and invokes the logEvents Lambda function:

The function locates the volume, confirms that it is attached to an instance that is managed by EC2 Systems Manager, and then adds a “maintenance tag” to the instance:

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    volume =(event['resources'][0].split('/')[1])
    attach=ec2.describe_volumes(VolumeIds=[volume])['Volumes'][0]['Attachments']
    if len(attach)>0: 
        instance = attach[0]['InstanceId']
        filter={'key': 'InstanceIds', 'valueSet': [instance]}
        info = ssm.describe_instance_information(InstanceInformationFilterList=[filter])['InstanceInformationList']
        if len(info)>0:
            ec2.create_tags(Resources=[instance],Tags=[tags])
            print (info[0]['PlatformName']+' Instance '+ instance+ ' has been tagged for maintenance' )

Later (either manually or on a schedule), EC2 Systems Manager is used to run a PowerShell script on all of the instances that are tagged for maintenance. The script looks at the instance’s disks and partitions, and resizes all of the drives (filesystems) to the maximum allowable size. Here’s an excerpt:

foreach ($DriveLetter in $DriveLetters) {
	$Error.Clear()
        $SizeMax = (Get-PartitionSupportedSize -DriveLetter $DriveLetter).SizeMax
}

To learn more, take a look at the [[Elastic Volume Sample]].

Available Today
The Elastic Volumes feature is available today and you can start using it right now!

To learn about some important special cases and a few limitations on instance types, read Considerations When Modifying EBS Volumes.

— Jeff;

PS – If you would like to design and build cool, game-changing storage services like EBS, take a look at our EBS Jobs page!

 

How to Simplify Security Assessment Setup Using Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and Amazon Inspector

Post Syndicated from Eric Fitzgerald original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-simplify-security-assessment-setup-using-ec2-systems-manager-and-amazon-inspector/

In a July 2016 AWS Blog post, I discussed how to integrate Amazon Inspector with third-party ticketing systems by using Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and AWS Lambda.

This AWS Security Blog post continues in the same vein, describing how to use Amazon Inspector to automate various aspects of security management. In this post, I show you how to install the Amazon Inspector agent automatically through the Amazon EC2 Systems Manager when a new Amazon EC2 instance is launched. In a subsequent post, I will show you how to update EC2 instances automatically that run Linux when Amazon Inspector discovers a missing security patch.

An overview of EC2 Systems Manager and EC2 Simple Systems Manager (SSM)

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager is a set of services that makes it easy to manage your Windows or Linux hosts running on EC2 instances. EC2 Systems Manager does this through an agent called EC2 Simple Systems Manager (SSM), which is installed on your instances. With SSM on your EC2 instances, you can save yourself an SSH or RDP session to the instance to perform management tasks.

With EC2 Systems Manager, you can perform various tasks at scale through a simple API, CLI, or EC2 Run Command. The EC2 Run Command can execute a Unix shell script on Linux instances or a Windows PowerShell script on Windows instances. When you use EC2 Systems Manager to run a script on an EC2 instance, the output is piped to a text file in Amazon S3 for you automatically. Therefore, you can examine the output without visiting the system or inventing your own mechanism for capturing console output.

The solution

Step 1: Enable EC2 Systems Manager and install the EC2 SSM agent

Setting up EC2 Systems Manager is relatively straightforward, but you must set up EC2 Systems Manager at the time you launch the instance. This is because the SSM agent will use an instance role to communicate with the EC2 Systems Manager securely. When launched with the appropriately configured IAM role, the EC2 instance is provided with a set of credentials that allows the SSM agent to perform actions on behalf of the account owner. The policy on the IAM role determines the permissions associated with these credentials.

The easiest way I have found to do this is to create the role, and then each time you launch an instance, associate the role with the instance and provide the SSM agent installation script in the instance’s user data in the launch wizard or API. Here’s how:

  1. Create an instance role so that the on-instance SSM agent can communicate with EC2 Systems Manager. If you already need an instance role for some other purpose, use the IAM console to attach the AmazonEC2RoleforSSM managed policy to your existing role.
  2. When launching the instance with the EC2 launch wizard, associate the role you just created with the new instance.
  3. When launching the instance with the EC2 launch wizard, provide the appropriate script as user data for your operating system and architecture to install the SSM agent as the instance is launched. To see this process and scripts in full, see Installing the SSM Agent.

Note: You must change the scripts slightly when copying them from the instructions to the EC2 user data: the word region in the curl command must be replaced with the AWS region code (for example, us-east-1).

When your instance starts, the SSM agent is installed. Having the SSM agent on the instance is the key component to the automated installation of the Amazon Inspector agent on the instance.

Step 2: Automatically install the Amazon Inspector agent when new EC2 instances are launched

Let’s assume that you will install the SSM agent when you first launch your instances. With that assumption in mind, you have two methods for installing the Amazon Inspector agent.

Method 1: Install the Amazon Inspector agent with user data

Just as we did above with the SSM agent, we can use the user data feature of EC2 to execute the Amazon Inspector agent installation script during instance launch. This is useful if you have decided not to install the SSM agent, but it is more work than necessary if you are in the habit of deploying the SSM agent at the launch of an instance.

To install the Amazon Inspector agent with user data on Linux systems, simply add the following commands to the User data box in the instance launch wizard (as shown in the following screenshot). This script works without modification on any Linux distribution that Amazon Inspector supports.

#!/bin/bash
cd /tmp
curl -O https://d1wk0tztpsntt1.cloudfront.net/linux/latest/install
chmod +x /tmp/install
/tmp/install

Note: If you are adding these commands to existing user data, be sure that only the first line of user data is #!/bin/bash. You should not have multiple copies of this line.

Finish launching the EC2 instance and the Amazon Inspector agent is installed as the instance is starting for the first time. To read more about this process, see Working with AWS Agents on Linux-based Operating Systems.

Method 2: Install the Amazon Inspector agent whenever a new EC2 instance starts

In environments that launch new instances continually, installing the Amazon Inspector agent automatically when an instance starts prevents some additional work. As we discussed in the previous method, you need to modify your instance launch process to include the EC2 SSM agent. This means you need to configure your instances with an EC2 Systems Manager role, as well as run the EC2 SSM agent.

First, create an IAM role that gives your Lambda function the permissions it needs to deploy the Amazon Inspector agent. Then, create the Lambda job that uses the SSM RunShellScript to install the Amazon Inspector agent. Finally, set up Amazon CloudWatch Events to run the Lambda job whenever a new instance enters the Running state.

Here are the details of the three-step process:

Step 1 – Create an IAM role for the Lambda function to use to send commands to EC2 Systems Manager:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the IAM console.
  2. Choose Roles in the navigation pane. Choose Create new role.
  3. Type a name for a role. You should (but are not required to) use a descriptive name such as Inspector-agent-autodeploy-Lambda. Remember the name you choose because you will need it in Step 2.
  4. Choose the AWS Lambda role type.
  5. Attach the policies AWSLambdaBasicExecutionRole and AmazonSSMFullAccess.
  6. Choose Create the role to finish.

Step 2 – Create the Lambda function that will run EC2 Systems Manager commands to install the Amazon Inspector agent:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console in your chosen region and navigate to the Lambda console.
  2. Choose Create a Lambda function.
  3. Skip Select blueprint.
  4. On the Configure triggers page, choose Next. Type a Name and Description for the function. Choose Python 2.7 for Runtime.
  5. Download and save autodeploy.py. Unzip the file, and copy the entire contents of autodeploy.py.
  6. From the Code entry type drop-down list, choose Edit code inline, and replace all the existing text with the text that you just copied from autodeploy.py.
  7. From the Role drop-down list, choose Choose an existing role, and then from the Existing role drop-down list, choose the role that you created in Step 1.
  8. Choose Next and then Create function to finish creating the function.

Step 3 – Set up CloudWatch Events to trigger the function:

  1. In the AWS Management Console in the same region as you used in Step 2, navigate to the CloudWatch console and then choose Events in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose Create rule. From the Select event source drop-down list, choose Amazon EC2.
  3. Choose Specific state(s) and Running. This tells CloudWatch to generate an event when an instance enters the Running state.
  4. Under Targets, choose Add target and then Lambda function.
  5. Choose the function that you created in Step 2.
  6. Click Configure details. Type a name and description for the event, and choose Create rule.

Summary

You have completed the setup! Now, whenever an EC2 instance enters the Running state (either on initial creation or on reboot), CloudWatch Events triggers an event that invokes the Lambda function that you created. The Lambda function then uses EC2 System Manager to install the Amazon Inspector agent on the instance.

In a subsequent AWS Security Blog post, I will show you how to take your security assessment automation a step further by automatically performing remediations for Amazon Inspector findings by using EC2 System Manager and Lambda.

If you have comments about this blog post, submit them in the “Comments” section below. If you have implementation questions, start a new thread on the Amazon Inspector forum.

– Eric

The command-line, for cybersec

Post Syndicated from Robert Graham original http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/01/the-command-line-for-cybersec.html

On Twitter I made the mistake of asking people about command-line basics for cybersec professionals. A got a lot of useful responses, which I summarize in this long (5k words) post. It’s mostly driven by the tools I use, with a bit of input from the tweets I got in response to my query.

bash

By command-line this document really means bash.

There are many types of command-line shells. Windows has two, ‘cmd.exe’ and ‘PowerShell’. Unix started with the Bourne shell ‘sh’, and there have been many variations of this over the years, ‘csh’, ‘ksh’, ‘zsh’, ‘tcsh’, etc. When GNU rewrote Unix user-mode software independently, they called their shell “Bourne Again Shell” or “bash” (queue “JSON Bourne” shell jokes here).

Bash is the default shell for Linux and macOS. It’s also available on Windows, as part of their special “Windows Subsystem for Linux”. The windows version of ‘bash’ has become my most used shell.

For Linux IoT devices, BusyBox is the most popular shell. It’s easy to clear, as it includes feature-reduced versions of popular commands.

man

‘Man’ is the command you should not run if you want help for a command.

Man pages are designed to drive away newbies. They are only useful if you already mostly an expert with the command you desire help on. Man pages list all possible features of a program, but do not highlight examples of the most common features, or the most common way to use the commands.

Take ‘sed’ as an example. It’s used most commonly to do a search-and-replace in files, like so:

$ sed ‘s/rob/dave/’ foo.txt

This usage is so common that many non-geeks know of it. Yet, if you type ‘man sed’ to figure out how to do a search and replace, you’ll get nearly incomprehensible gibberish, and no example of this most common usage.

I point this out because most guides on using the shell recommend ‘man’ pages to get help. This is wrong, it’ll just endlessly frustrate you. Instead, google the commands you need help on, or better yet, search StackExchange for answers.

You might try asking questions, like on Twitter or forum sites, but this requires a strategy. If you ask a basic question, self-important dickholes will respond by telling you to “rtfm” or “read the fucking manual”. A better strategy is to exploit their dickhole nature, such as saying “too bad command xxx cannot do yyy”. Helpful people will gladly explain why you are wrong, carefully explaining how xxx does yyy.

If you must use ‘man’, use the ‘apropos’ command to find the right man page. Sometimes multiple things in the system have the same or similar names, leading you to the wrong page.

apt-get install yum

Using the command-line means accessing that huge open-source ecosystem. Most of the things in this guide do no already exist on the system. You have to either compile them from source, or install via a package-manager. Linux distros ship with a small footprint, but have a massive database of precompiled software “packages” in the cloud somewhere. Use the “package manager” to install the software from the cloud.

On Debian-derived systems (like Ubuntu, Kali, Raspbian), type “apt-get install masscan” to install “masscan” (as an example). Use “apt-cache search scan” to find a bunch of scanners you might want to install.

On RedHat systems, use “yum” instead. On BSD, use the “ports” system, which you can also get working for macOS.

If no pre-compiled package exists for a program, then you’ll have to download the source code and compile it. There’s about an 80% chance this will work easy, following the instructions. There is a 20% chance you’ll experience “dependency hell”, for example, needing to install two mutually incompatible versions of Python.

Bash is a scripting language

Don’t forget that shells are really scripting languages. The bit that executes a single command is just a degenerate use of the scripting language. For example, you can do a traditional for loop like:

$ for i in $(seq 1 9); do echo $i; done

In this way, ‘bash’ is no different than any other scripting language, like Perl, Python, NodeJS, PHP CLI, etc. That’s why a lot of stuff on the system actually exists as short ‘bash’ programs, aka. shell scripts.

Few want to write bash scripts, but you are expected to be able to read them, either to tweek existing scripts on the system, or to read StackExchange help.

File system commands

The macOS “Finder” or Windows “File Explorer” are just graphical shells that help you find files, open, and save them. The first commands you learn are for the same functionality on the command-line: pwd, cd, ls, touch, rm, rmdir, mkdir, chmod, chown, find, ln, mount.

The command “rm –rf /” removes everything starting from the root directory. This will also follow mounted server directories, deleting files on the server. I point this out to give an appreciation of the raw power you have over the system from the command-line, and how easy you can disrupt things.

Of particular interest is the “mount” command. Desktop versions of Linux typically mount USB flash drives automatically, but on servers, you need to do it manually, e.g.:

$ mkdir ~/foobar
$ mount /dev/sdb ~/foobar

You’ll also use the ‘mount’ command to connect to file servers, using the “cifs” package if they are Windows file servers:

# apt-get install cifs-utils
# mkdir /mnt/vids
# mount -t cifs -o username=robert,password=foobar123  //192.168.1.11/videos /mnt/vids

Linux system commands

The next commands you’ll learn are about syadmin the Linux system: ps, top, who, history, last, df, du, kill, killall, lsof, lsmod, uname, id, shutdown, and so on.

The first thing hackers do when hacking into a system is run “uname” (to figure out what version of the OS is running) and “id” (to figure out which account they’ve acquired, like “root” or some other user).

The Linux system command I use most is “dmesg” (or ‘tail –f /var/log/dmesg’) which shows you the raw system messages. For example, when I plug in USB drives to a server, I look in ‘dmesg’ to find out which device was added so that I can mount it. I don’t know if this is the best way, it’s just the way I do it (servers don’t automount USB drives like desktops do).

Networking commands

The permanent state of the network (what gets configured on the next bootup) is configured in text files somewhere. But there are a wealth of commands you’ll use to view the current state of networking, make temporary changes, and diagnose problems.

The ‘ifconfig’ command has long been used to view the current TCP/IP configuration and make temporary changes. Learning how TCP/IP works means playing a lot with ‘ifconfig’. Use “ifconfig –a” for even more verbose information.

Use the “route” command to see if you are sending packets to the right router.

Use ‘arp’ command to make sure you can reach the local router.

Use ‘traceroute’ to make sure packets are following the correct route to their destination. You should learn the nifty trick it’s based on (TTLs). You should also play with the TCP, UDP, and ICMP options.

Use ‘ping’ to see if you can reach the target across the Internet. Usefully measures the latency in milliseconds, and congestion (via packet loss). For example, ping NetFlix throughout the day, and notice how the ping latency increases substantially during “prime time” viewing hours.

Use ‘dig’ to make sure DNS resolution is working right. (Some use ‘nslookup’ instead). Dig is useful because it’s the raw universal DNS tool – every time they add some new standard feature to DNS, they add that feature into ‘dig’ as well.

The ‘netstat –tualn’ command views the current TCP/IP connections and which ports are listening. I forget what the various options “tualn” mean, only it’s the output I always want to see, rather than the raw “netstat” command by itself.

You’ll want to use ‘ethtool –k’ to turn off checksum and segmentation offloading. These are features that break packet-captures sometimes.

There is this new fangled ‘ip’ system for Linux networking, replacing many of the above commands, but as an old timer, I haven’t looked into that.

Some other tools for diagnosing local network issues are ‘tcpdump’, ‘nmap’, and ‘netcat’. These are described in more detail below.

ssh

In general, you’ll remotely log into a system in order to use the command-line. We use ‘ssh’ for that. It uses a protocol similar to SSL in order to encrypt the connection. There are two ways to use ‘ssh’ to login, with a password or with a client-side certificate.

When using SSH with a password, you type “ssh [email protected]”. The remote system will then prompt you for a password for that account.

When using client-side certificates, use “ssh-keygen” to generate a key, then either copy the public-key of the client to the server manually, or use “ssh-copy-id” to copy it using the password method above.

How this works is basic application of public-key cryptography. When logging in with a password, you get a copy of the server’s public-key the first time you login, and if it ever changes, you get a nasty warning that somebody may be attempting a man in the middle attack.

$ ssh [email protected]
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@    WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!     @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!

When using client-side certificates, the server trusts your public-key. This is similar to how client-side certificates work in SSL VPNs.

You can use SSH for things other than loging into a remote shell. You can script ‘ssh’ to run commands remotely on a system in a local shell script. You can use ‘scp’ (SSH copy) to transfer files to and from a remote system. You can do tricks with SSH to create tunnels, which is popular way to bypass the restrictive rules of your local firewall nazi.

openssl

This is your general cryptography toolkit, doing everything from simple encryption, to public-key certificate signing, to establishing SSL connections.

It is extraordinarily user hostile, with terrible inconsistency among options. You can only figure out how to do things by looking up examples on the net, such as on StackExchange. There are competing SSL libraries with their own command-line tools, like GnuTLS and Mozilla NSS that you might find easier to use.

The fundamental use of the ‘openssl’ tool is to create public-keys, “certificate requests”, and creating self-signed certificates. All the web-site certificates I’ve ever obtained has been using the openssl command-line tool to create CSRs.

You should practice using the ‘openssl’ tool to encrypt files, sign files, and to check signatures.

You can use openssl just like PGP for encrypted emails/messages, but following the “S/MIME” standard rather than PGP standard. You might consider learning the ‘pgp’ command-line tools, or the open-source ‘gpg’ or ‘gpg2’ tools as well.

You should learn how to use the “openssl s_client” feature to establish SSL connections, as well as the “openssl s_server” feature to create an SSL proxy for a server that doesn’t otherwise support SSL.

Learning all the ways of using the ‘openssl’ tool to do useful things will go a long way in teaching somebody about crypto and cybersecurity. I can imagine an entire class consisting of nothing but learning ‘openssl’.

netcat (nc, socat, cyptocat, ncat)

A lot of Internet protocols are based on text. That means you can create a raw TCP connection to the service and interact with them using your keyboard. The classic tool for doing this is known as “netcat”, abbreviated “nc”. For example, connect to Google’s web server at port and type the HTTP HEAD command followed by a blank line (hit [return] twice):

$ nc www.google.com 80
HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2017 01:53:28 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
P3P: CP=”This is not a P3P policy! See https://www.google.com/support/accounts/answer/151657?hl=en for more info.”
Server: gws
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Set-Cookie: NID=95=o7GT1uJCWTPhaPAefs4CcqF7h7Yd7HEqPdAJncZfWfDSnNfliWuSj3XfS5GJXGt67-QJ9nc8xFsydZKufBHLj-K242C3_Vak9Uz1TmtZwT-1zVVBhP8limZI55uXHuPrejAxyTxSCgR6MQ; expires=Wed, 19-Jul-2017 01:53:28 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com; HttpOnly
Accept-Ranges: none
Vary: Accept-Encoding

Another classic example is to connect to port 25 on a mail server to send email, spoofing the “MAIL FROM” address.

There are several versions of ‘netcat’ that work over SSL as well. My favorite is ‘ncat’, which comes with ‘nmap’, as it’s actively maintained. In theory, “openssl s_client” should also work this way.

nmap

At some point, you’ll need to port scan. The standard program for this is ‘nmap’, and it’s the best. The classic way of using it is something like:

# nmap –A scanme.nmap.org

The ‘-A’ option means to enable all the interesting features like OS detection, version detection, and basic scripts on the most common ports that a server might have open. It takes awhile to run. The “scanme.nmap.org” is a good site to practice on.

Nmap is more than just a port scanner. It has a rich scripting system for probing more deeply into a system than just a port, and to gather more information useful for attacks. The scripting system essentially contains some attacks, such as password guessing.

Scanning the Internet, finding services identified by ‘nmap’ scripts, and interacting with them with tools like ‘ncat’ will teach you a lot about how the Internet works.

BTW, if ‘nmap’ is too slow, using ‘masscan’ instead. It’s a lot faster, though has much more limited functionality.

Packet sniffing with tcpdump and tshark

All Internet traffic consists of packets going between IP addresses. You can capture those packets and view them using “packet sniffers”. The most important packet-sniffer is “Wireshark”, a GUI. For the command-line, there is ‘tcpdump’ and ‘tshark’.

You can run tcpdump on the command-line to watch packets go in/out of the local computer. This performs a quick “decode” of packets as they are captured. It’ll reverse-lookup IP addresses into DNS names, which means its buffers can overflow, dropping new packets while it’s waiting for DNS name responses for previous packets (which can be disabled with -n):

# tcpdump –p –i eth0

A common task is to create a round-robin set of files, saving the last 100 files of 1-gig each. Older files are overwritten. Thus, when an attack happens, you can stop capture, and go backward in times and view the contents of the network traffic using something like Wireshark:

# tcpdump –p -i eth0 -s65535 –C 1000 –W 100 –w cap

Instead of capturing everything, you’ll often set “BPF” filters to narrow down to traffic from a specific target, or a specific port.

The above examples use the –p option to capture traffic destined to the local computer. Sometimes you may want to look at all traffic going to other machines on the local network. You’ll need to figure out how to tap into wires, or setup “monitor” ports on switches for this to work.

A more advanced command-line program is ‘tshark’. It can apply much more complex filters. It can also be used to extract the values of specific fields and dump them to a text files.

Base64/hexdump/xxd/od

These are some rather trivial commands, but you should know them.

The ‘base64’ command encodes binary data in text. The text can then be passed around, such as in email messages. Base64 encoding is often automatic in the output from programs like openssl and PGP.

In many cases, you’ll need to view a hex dump of some binary data. There are many programs to do this, such as hexdump, xxd, od, and more.

grep

Grep searches for a pattern within a file. More important, it searches for a regular expression (regex) in a file. The fu of Unix is that a lot of stuff is stored in text files, and use grep for regex patterns in order to extra stuff stored in those files.

The power of this tool really depends on your mastery of regexes. You should master enough that you can understand StackExhange posts that explain almost what you want to do, and then tweek them to make them work.

Grep, by default, shows only the matching lines. In many cases, you only want the part that matches. To do that, use the –o option. (This is not available on all versions of grep).

You’ll probably want the better, “extended” regular expressions, so use the –E option.

You’ll often want “case-insensitive” options (matching both upper and lower case), so use the –i option.

For example, to extract all MAC address from a text file, you might do something like the following. This extracts all strings that are twelve hex digits.

$ grep –Eio ‘[0-9A-F]{12}’ foo.txt

Text processing

Grep is just the first of the various “text processing filters”. Other useful ones include ‘sed’, ‘cut’, ‘sort’, and ‘uniq’.

You’ll be an expert as piping output of one to the input of the next. You’ll use “sort | uniq” as god (Dennis Ritchie) intended and not the heresy of “sort –u”.

You might want to master ‘awk’. It’s a new programming language, but once you master it, it’ll be easier than other mechanisms.

You’ll end up using ‘wc’ (word-count) a lot. All it does is count the number of lines, words, characters in a file, but you’ll find yourself wanting to do this a lot.

csvkit and jq

You get data in CSV format and JSON format a lot. The tools ‘csvkit’ and ‘jq’ respectively help you deal with those tools, to convert these files into other formats, sticking the data in databases, and so forth.

It’ll be easier using these tools that understand these text formats to extract data than trying to write ‘awk’ command or ‘grep’ regexes.

strings

Most files are binary with a few readable ASCII strings. You use the program ‘strings’ to extract those strings.

This one simple trick sounds stupid, but it’s more powerful than you’d think. For example, I knew that a program probably contained a hard-coded password. I then blindly grabbed all the strings in the program’s binary file and sent them to a password cracker to see if they could decrypt something. And indeed, one of the 100,000 strings in the file worked, thus finding the hard-coded password.

tail -f

So ‘tail’ is just a standard Linux tool for looking at the end of files. If you want to keep checking the end of a live file that’s constantly growing, then use “tail –f”. It’ll sit there waiting for something new to be added to the end of the file, then print it out. I do this a lot, so I thought it’d be worth mentioning.

tar –xvfz, gzip, xz, 7z

In prehistorical times (like the 1980s), Unix was backed up to tape drives. The tar command could be used to combine a bunch of files into a single “archive” to be sent to the tape drive, hence “tape archive” or “tar”.

These days, a lot of stuff you download will be in tar format (ending in .tar). You’ll need to learn how to extract it:

$ tar –xvf something.tar

Nobody knows what the “xvf” options mean anymore, but these letters most be specified in that order. I’m joking here, but only a little: somebody did a survey once and found that virtually nobody know how to use ‘tar’ other than the canned formulas such as this.

Along with combining files into an archive you also need to compress them. In prehistoric Unix, the “compress” command would be used, which would replace a file with a compressed version ending in ‘.z’. This would found to be encumbered with patents, so everyone switched to ‘gzip’ instead, which replaces a file with a new one ending with ‘.gz’.

$ ls foo.txt*
foo.txt
$ gzip foo.txt
$ ls foo.txt*
foo.txt.gz

Combined with tar, you get files with either the “.tar.gz” extension, or simply “.tgz”. You can untar and uncompress at the same time:

$ tar –xvfz something .tar.gz

Gzip is always good enough, but nerds gonna nerd and want to compress with slightly better compression programs. They’ll have extensions like “.bz2”, “.7z”, “.xz”, and so on. There are a ton of them. Some of them are supported directly by the ‘tar’ program:

$ tar –xvfj something.tar.bz2

Then there is the “zip/unzip” program, which supports Windows .zip file format. To create compressed archives these days, I don’t bother with tar, but just use the ZIP format. For example, this will recursively descend a directory, adding all files to a ZIP file that can easily be extracted under Windows:

$ zip –r test.zip ./test/

dd

I should include this under the system tools at the top, but it’s interesting for a number of purposes. The usage is simply to copy one file to another, the in-file to the out-file.

$ dd if=foo.txt of=foo2.txt

But that’s not interesting. What interesting is using it to write to “devices”. The disk drives in your system also exist as raw devices under the /dev directory.

For example, if you want to create a boot USB drive for your Raspberry Pi:

# dd if=rpi-ubuntu.img of=/dev/sdb

Or, you might want to hard erase an entire hard drive by overwriting random data:

# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdc

Or, you might want to image a drive on the system, for later forensics, without stumbling on things like open files.

# dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/Lexar/infected.img

The ‘dd’ program has some additional options, like block size and so forth, that you’ll want to pay attention to.

screen and tmux

You log in remotely and start some long running tool. Unfortunately, if you log out, all the processes you started will be killed. If you want it to keep running, then you need a tool to do this.

I use ‘screen’. Before I start a long running port scan, I run the “screen” command. Then, I type [ctrl-a][ctrl-d] to disconnect from that screen, leaving it running in the background.

Then later, I type “screen –r” to reconnect to it. If there are more than one screen sessions, using ‘-r’ by itself will list them all. Use “-r pid” to reattach to the proper one. If you can’t, then use “-D pid” or “-D –RR pid” to forced the other session to detached from whoever is using it.

Tmux is an alternative to screen that many use. It’s cool for also having lots of terminal screens open at once.

curl and wget

Sometimes you want to download files from websites without opening a browser. The ‘curl’ and ‘wget’ programs do that easily. Wget is the traditional way of doing this, but curl is a bit more flexible. I use curl for everything these days, except mirroring a website, in which case I just do “wget –m website”.

The thing that makes ‘curl’ so powerful is that it’s really designed as a tool for poking and prodding all the various features of HTTP. That it’s also useful for downloading files is a happy coincidence. When playing with a target website, curl will allow you do lots of complex things, which you can then script via bash. For example, hackers often write their cross-site scripting/forgeries in bash scripts using curl.

node/php/python/perl/ruby/lua

As mentioned above, bash is its own programming language. But it’s weird, and annoying. So sometimes you want a real programming language. Here are some useful ones.

Yes, PHP is a language that runs in a web server for creating web pages. But if you know the language well, it’s also a fine command-line language for doing stuff.

Yes, JavaScript is a language that runs in the web browser. But if you know it well, it’s also a great language for doing stuff, especially with the “nodejs” version.

Then there are other good command line languages, like the Python, Ruby, Lua, and the venerable Perl.

What makes all these great is the large library support. Somebody has already written a library that nearly does what you want that can be made to work with a little bit of extra code of your own.

My general impression is that Python and NodeJS have the largest libraries likely to have what you want, but you should pick whichever language you like best, whichever makes you most productive. For me, that’s NodeJS, because of the great Visual Code IDE/debugger.

iptables, iptables-save

I shouldn’t include this in the list. Iptables isn’t a command-line tool as such. The tool is the built-in firewalling/NAT features within the Linux kernel. Iptables is just the command to configure it.

Firewalling is an important part of cybersecurity. Everyone should have some experience playing with a Linux system doing basic firewalling tasks: basic rules, NATting, and transparent proxying for mitm attacks.

Use ‘iptables-save’ in order to persistently save your changes.

MySQL

Similar to ‘iptables’, ‘mysql’ isn’t a tool in its own right, but a way of accessing a database maintained by another process on the system.

Filters acting on text files only goes so far. Sometimes you need to dump it into a database, and make queries on that database.

There is also the offensive skill needed to learn how targets store things in a database, and how attackers get the data.

Hackers often publish raw SQL data they’ve stolen in their hacks (like the Ashley-Madisan dump). Being able to stick those dumps into your own database is quite useful. Hint: disable transaction logging while importing mass data.

If you don’t like SQL, you might consider NoSQL tools like Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and Redis that can similarly be useful for arranging and searching data. You’ll probably have to learn some JSON tools for formatting the data.

Reverse engineering tools

A cybersecurity specialty is “reverse engineering”. Some want to reverse engineer the target software being hacked, to understand vulnerabilities. This is needed for commercial software and device firmware where the source code is hidden. Others use these tools to analyze viruses/malware.

The ‘file’ command uses heuristics to discover the type of a file.

There’s a whole skillset for analyzing PDF and Microsoft Office documents. I play with pdf-parser. There’s a long list at this website:
https://zeltser.com/analyzing-malicious-documents/

There’s a whole skillset for analyzing executables. Binwalk is especially useful for analyzing firmware images.

Qemu is useful is a useful virtual-machine. It can emulate full systems, such as an IoT device based on the MIPS processor. Like some other tools mentioned here, it’s more a full subsystem than a simple command-line tool.

On a live system, you can use ‘strace’ to view what system calls a process is making. Use ‘lsof’ to view which files and network connections a process is making.

Password crackers

A common cybersecurity specialty is “password cracking”. There’s two kinds: online and offline password crackers.

Typical online password crackers are ‘hydra’ and ‘medusa’. They can take files containing common passwords and attempt to log on to various protocols remotely, like HTTP, SMB, FTP, Telnet, and so on. I used ‘hydra’ recently in order to find the default/backdoor passwords to many IoT devices I’ve bought recently in my test lab.

Online password crackers must open TCP connections to the target, and try to logon. This limits their speed. They also may be stymied by systems that lock accounts, or introduce delays, after too many bad password attempts.

Typical offline password crackers are ‘hashcat’ and ‘jtr’ (John the Ripper). They work off of stolen encrypted passwords. They can attempt billions of passwords-per-second, because there’s no network interaction, nothing slowing them down.

Understanding offline password crackers means getting an appreciation for the exponential difficulty of the problem. A sufficiently long and complex encrypted password is uncrackable. Instead of brute-force attempts at all possible combinations, we must use tricks, like mutating the top million most common passwords.

I use hashcat because of the great GPU support, but John is also a great program.

WiFi hacking

A common specialty in cybersecurity is WiFi hacking. The difficulty in WiFi hacking is getting the right WiFi hardware that supports the features (monitor mode, packet injection), then the right drivers installed in your operating system. That’s why I use Kali rather than some generic Linux distribution, because it’s got the right drivers installed.

The ‘aircrack-ng’ suite is the best for doing basic hacking, such as packet injection. When the parents are letting the iPad babysit their kid with a loud movie at the otherwise quite coffeeshop, use ‘aircrack-ng’ to deauth the kid.

The ‘reaver’ tool is useful for hacking into sites that leave WPS wide open and misconfigured.

Remote exploitation

A common specialty in cybersecurity is pentesting.

Nmap, curl, and netcat (described above) above are useful tools for this.

Some useful DNS tools are ‘dig’ (described above), dnsrecon/dnsenum/fierce that try to enumerate and guess as many names as possible within a domain. These tools all have unique features, but also have a lot of overlap.

Nikto is a basic tool for probing for common vulnerabilities, out-of-date software, and so on. It’s not really a vulnerability scanner like Nessus used by defenders, but more of a tool for attack.

SQLmap is a popular tool for probing for SQL injection weaknesses.

Then there is ‘msfconsole’. It has some attack features. This is humor – it has all the attack features. Metasploit is the most popular tool for running remote attacks against targets, exploiting vulnerabilities.

Text editor

Finally, there is the decision of text editor. I use ‘vi’ variants. Others like ‘nano’ and variants. There’s no wrong answer as to which editor to use, unless that answer is ‘emacs’.

Conclusion

Obviously, not every cybersecurity professional will be familiar with every tool in this list. If you don’t do reverse-engineering, then you won’t use reverse-engineering tools.

On the other hand, regardless of your specialty, you need to know basic crypto concepts, so you should know something like the ‘openssl’ tool. You need to know basic networking, so things like ‘nmap’ and ‘tcpdump’. You need to be comfortable processing large dumps of data, manipulating it with any tool available. You shouldn’t be frightened by a little sysadmin work.

The above list is therefore a useful starting point for cybersecurity professionals. Of course, those new to the industry won’t have much familiarity with them. But it’s fair to say that I’ve used everything listed above at least once in the last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. I spend a lot of time on StackExchange and Google searching the exact options I need, so I’m not an expert, but I am familiar with the basic use of all these things.

p0wnedShell – PowerShell Runspace Post Exploitation Toolkit

Post Syndicated from Darknet original http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/darknethackers/~3/-L_vg16oZEo/

p0wnedShell is an offensive PowerShell Runspace Post Exploitation host application written in C# that does not rely on powershell.exe but runs PowerShell commands and functions within a PowerShell run space environment (.NET). It has a lot of offensive PowerShell modules and binaries included making the process of Post Exploitation easier. What…

Read the full post at darknet.org.uk

The Top 20 Most Viewed AWS IAM Documentation Pages in 2016

Post Syndicated from Dave Bishop original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/the-top-20-most-viewed-aws-iam-documentation-pages-in-2016/

The following 20 pages were the most viewed AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) documentation pages in 2016. I have included a brief description with each link to give you a clearer idea of what each page covers. Use this list to see what other people have been viewing and perhaps to pique your own interest about a topic you’ve been meaning to research.

  1. What Is IAM?
    IAM is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources for your users. You use IAM to control who can use your AWS resources (authentication) and what resources they can use and in what ways (authorization).
  2. Creating an IAM User in Your AWS Account
    You can create one or more IAM users in your AWS account. You might create an IAM user when someone joins your organization, or when you have a new application that needs to make API calls to AWS.
  3. The IAM Console and the Sign-in Page
    This page provides information about the IAM-enabled AWS Management Console sign-in page and explains how to create a unique sign-in URL for your account.
  4. How Users Sign In to Your Account
    After you create IAM users and passwords for each, users can sign in to the AWS Management Console for your AWS account with a special URL.
  5. IAM Best Practices
    To help secure your AWS resources, follow these recommendations for IAM.
  6. IAM Policy Elements Reference
    This page describes the elements that you can use in an IAM policy. The elements are listed here in the general order you use them in a policy.
  7. Managing Access Keys for IAM Users
    Users need their own access keys to make programmatic calls to AWS from the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), Tools for Windows PowerShell, the AWS SDKs, or direct HTTP calls using the APIs for individual AWS services. To fill this need, you can create, modify, view, or rotate access keys (access key IDs and secret access keys) for IAM users.
  8. Working with Server Certificates
    Some AWS services can use server certificates that you manage with IAM or AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). In many cases, we recommend that you use ACM to provision, manage, and deploy your SSL/TLS certificates.
  9. Your AWS Account ID and Its Alias
    Learn how to find your AWS account ID number and its alias.
  10. Overview of IAM Policies
    This page provides an overview of IAM policies. A policy is a document that formally states one or more permissions.
  11. Using Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) in AWS
    For increased security, we recommend that you configure MFA to help protect your AWS resources. MFA adds extra security because it requires users to enter a unique authentication code from an approved authentication device or SMS text message when they access AWS websites or services.
  12. Example Policies for Administering AWS Resources
    This page shows some examples of policies that control access to resources in AWS services.
  13. Using an IAM Role to Grant Permissions to Applications Running on Amazon EC2 Instances
    Use an IAM role to manage temporary credentials for applications that run on an EC2 instance. When you use a role, you do not have to distribute long-term credentials to an EC2 instance. Instead, the role supplies temporary permissions that applications can use when they make calls to other AWS resources.
  14. IAM Roles
    An IAM role is similar to a user, in that it is an AWS identity with permission policies that determine what the identity can and cannot do in AWS. However, instead of being uniquely associated with one person, a role is intended to be assumable by anyone who needs it.
  15. Enabling a Virtual MFA Device
    A virtual MFA device uses a software application to generate a six-digit authentication code that is compatible with the time-based one-time password (TOTP) standard, as described in RFC 6238. The app can run on mobile hardware devices, including smartphones.
  16. Creating Your First IAM Admin User and Group
    This procedure describes how to create an IAM group named Administrators, grant the group full permissions for all AWS services, and then create an administrative IAM user for yourself by adding the user to the Administrators group.
  17. Using Instance Profiles
    An instance profile is a container for an IAM role that you can use to pass role information to an EC2 instance when the instance starts.
  18. Working with Server Certificates
    After you obtain or create a server certificate, you upload it to IAM so that other AWS services can use it. You might also need to get certificate information, rename or delete a certificate, or perform other management tasks.
  19. Temporary Security Credentials
    You can use the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) to create and provide trusted users with temporary security credentials that can control access to your AWS resources. Temporary security credentials work almost identically to the long-term access key credentials that your IAM users can use.
  20. Setting an Account Password Policy for IAM Users
    You can set a password policy on your AWS account to specify complexity requirements and mandatory rotation periods for your IAM users’ passwords.

In the “Comments” section below, let us know if you would like to see anything on these or other IAM documentation pages expanded or updated to make the documentation more useful for you.

– Dave