AWS is using its public cloud infrastructure as a globe-spanning threat detection tool to protect customers from trillions of malicious attempts to access its resources each year.
The cloud giant revealed the existence of the detector at its security-focused event, AWS re:Inforce, last week. It has been using it for some years, and between May 2023 and April 2024 it blocked over 24 billion attempts to scan customer data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and nearly 2.6 trillion attempts to discover vulnerable services running on customers’ virtual servers in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
It calls this detector Sonaris, a name apparently borrowed from IT-themed TV series Halt and Catch Fire, which featured a computer network exploration tool with the same name.