Amazon GuardDuty is a continuous security monitoring service that analyzes and processes the following data sources: VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail event logs, and DNS logs. It uses threat intelligence feeds, such as lists of malicious IPs and domains, and machine learning to identify unexpected and potentially unauthorized and malicious activity within your AWS environment. This can include issues like escalations of privileges, uses of exposed credentials, or communication with malicious IPs, URLs, or domains. For example, GuardDuty can detect compromised EC2 instances serving malware or mining bitcoin. It also monitors AWS account access behavior for signs of compromise, such as unauthorized infrastructure deployments, like instances deployed in a region that has never been used, or unusual API calls, like a password policy change to reduce password strength.

GuardDuty informs you of the status of your AWS environment by producing security findings that you can view in the GuardDuty console or through Amazon CloudWatch events.