Organizations often overlook outbound traffic in their AWS environments, creating significant security blind spots that attackers exploit. Traditional monitoring methods fail to adequately address these risks, as they focus primarily on inbound threats. Adopting a network flow analysis approach can enhance visibility and enable proactive responses to suspicious outbound behaviors.

AWS detection engineering practices were critically assessed after a breach simulation revealed undetected attacker persistence. The team rebuilt their detection capabilities by focusing on key log sources like CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and GuardDuty, emphasizing the importance of correlation across these sources for effective threat detection.