News

AWS Enhances, Expands Reach of IoT Device Defender

• By David Ramel
• 08/13/2019

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) has beefed up the functionality and expanded the reach of its AWS IoT Device Defender security service for the Internet of Things space.

Launched a year ago, AWS IoT Device Defender is a fully managed service that helps organizations secure their fleets of IoT devices by continually auditing IoT configurations to ensure that they aren’t deviating from security best practices. IoT configurations are organization-specified technical controls to help keep information secure when devices are communicating among one another and the cloud.

AWS last week announced that IoT Device Defender's reach has expanded to two additional regions: EU (Paris) and EU (Stockholm). That brings the total number of AWS regions in which IoT Device Defender is available to 15.

The regional expansion came just two days after a functionality enhancement.

"AWS IoT Device Defender now supports the ability for customers to apply mitigation actions to audit findings," AWS said. "This feature enables customers to use predefined mitigation actions or customize them and apply them at scale. With this release, customers can choose from the following set of predefined mitigation actions to automate a response to findings from an audit: add things to thing group, enable IoT logging, publish to SNS topic, replace default policy version, update CA certificate, and update device certificate. You can use mitigation actions by using the AWS IoT Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) or APIs."

The cloud giant has been busy updating IoT Device Defender this year after last year's general availability debut, having added statistical anomaly detection and data visualization in February and incorporating support for monitoring the behavior of unregistered devices in May.