Security Monkey deployment with CloudFormation template

netflix-security-monkey-overview-1-638In order to give back to the Open Source community what we take from it (actually from the Netflix awesome engineers), I wanted to make this work public, a CloudFormation template to easily deploy and configure Security Monkey in AWS. I’m pretty sure it will help many people to get their AWS infrastructure more secure.

Security Monkey is a tool for monitoring and analyzing the security of our Amazon Web Services configurations.

You are maybe thinking on AWS CloudTrail or AWS Trusted Advisor, right? This is what the authors say:
“Security Monkey predates both of these services and meets a bit of each services’ goals while having unique value of its own:
CloudTrail provides verbose data on API calls, but has no sense of state in terms of how a particular configuration item (e.g. security group) has changed over time. Security Monkey provides exactly this capability.
Trusted Advisor has some excellent checks, but it is a paid service and provides no means for the user to add custom security checks. For example, Netflix has a custom check to identify whether a given IAM user matches a Netflix employee user account, something that is impossible to do via Trusted Advisor. Trusted Advisor is also a per-account service, whereas Security Monkey scales to support and monitor an arbitrary number of AWS accounts from a single Security Monkey installation.”

cloud-formationNow, with this provided CloudFormation template you can deploy SecurityMonkey pretty much production ready in a couple of minutes.

For more information, documentation and tests visit my Github project: https://github.com/toniblyx/security_monkey_cloudformation

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