Vulnerabilities are bad. We all know this. They expose your infrastructure to attackers.
Images come with packages, and installed packages don't automatically update for you. Stuff gets out of date.
It might be the EC2 instances that run your production apps, or it might just be that EC2 instance you or your developers use to test stuff, the one with a public IP and port 22 open. Would it really be okay if someone got in there? Are any important creds possibly exposed via env var? Source code? How sure are you? What kind of lateral access could an attacker gain?
Take a minute to check for vulnerabilities with open source cnspec and quickly assess the state of your EC2 instance. Here are the results from an instance created with the latest Amazon Linux 2 image available via the EC2 instance-create wizard:
AWS_REGION=us-east-1 AWS_PROFILE="vvdefault" cnspec vuln aws ec2 instance-connect ec2-user@i-0d22a683bacf1c30cYou've got a full list of results, and scores to tell you what should be prioritized. So what's next?
SSH to the instance and run a sudo yum update -y.
That should actually take care of most (if not all) of these.
AWS_REGION=us-east-1 AWS_PROFILE="vvdefault" cnspec vuln aws ec2 instance-connect ec2-user@i-0d22a683bacf1c30cIn this case, we didn't install any additional packages, so a simple update took care of it all! 🎉