CloudWiki
Rules
Medium

Ensure CloudFormation stacks are sending event notifications to an SNS topic

Security & Compliance
Description

To enhance the security and management of your AWS environment, it's recommended that you configure Simple Notification Service (SNS) for all your AWS CloudFormation stacks. This will enable you to receive notifications in case of any events occurring within the stack, such as create, update, or delete. By closely monitoring these events, you can quickly respond to any unauthorized actions that may alter your AWS environment. Integrating SNS with your CloudFormation stack will increase the visibility of its activity, which is beneficial for security and management purposes.

Remediation

To ensure that your AWS CloudFormation stacks are sending event notifications to an SNS topic, you can follow these remediation steps:

  1. Identify the CloudFormation stacks that do not have event notifications set up. You can use the AWS CLI or AWS Management Console to view the stack properties.
  2. For each stack that does not have event notifications set up, update the stack and add an SNS topic for notifications. You can do this using the AWS Management Console or the AWS CLI.
  3. When setting up the SNS topic, make sure that the appropriate IAM permissions are in place. The IAM role associated with the stack needs to have permission to publish messages to the SNS topic.
  4. Configure the events that you want to be notified about. You can choose from a range of events, such as stack creation, update, deletion, and more.
  5. Test the SNS topic and CloudFormation integration to make sure that notifications are working as expected.
  6. It's also a good practice to have multiple subscribers for your SNS topic so that the notifications are sent to multiple channels, such as email, SMS, and more.
  7. Lastly, regularly review your CloudFormation stack event notifications and make any necessary changes to ensure that they are relevant and useful.

By following these remediation steps, you can ensure that your CloudFormation stacks are sending event notifications to an SNS topic, and you can receive timely notifications when important events occur in your AWS infrastructure.

Enforced Resources
Note: Remediation steps provided by Lightlytics are meant to be suggestions and guidelines only. It is crucial to thoroughly verify and test any remediation steps before applying them to production environments. Each organization's infrastructure and security needs may differ, and blindly applying suggested remediation steps without proper testing could potentially cause unforeseen issues or vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that you validate and customize any remediation steps to meet your organization's specific requirements and ensure that they align with your security policies and best practices.