Get details on security finding changes with the new Finding History feature in Security Hub

In today’s evolving security threat landscape, security teams increasingly require tools to detect and track security findings to protect their organizations’ assets. One objective of cloud security posture management is to identify and address security findings in a timely and effective manner. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes security alerts and findings from various AWS services and supported security solutions from the AWS Partner Network.

As the volume of findings increases, tracking the changes and actions that have been taken on each finding becomes more difficult, as well as more important to perform timely and effective investigations. In this post, we will show you how to use the new Finding History feature in Security Hub to track and understand the history of a security finding.

Updates to findings occur when finding providers update certain fields, such as resource details, by using the BatchImportFindings API. You, as a user, can update certain fields, such as workflow status, in the AWS Management Console or through the BatchUpdateFindings API. Ticketing, incident management, security information and event management (SIEM), and automatic remediation solutions can also use the BatchUpdateFindings API to update findings. This new capability highlights these various changes and when they occurred so that you don’t need to investigate this yourself.

Finding History

The new Finding History feature in Security Hub helps you understand the state of a finding by providing an immutable history of changes within the finding details. By using this feature, you can track the history of each finding, including the before and after values of the fields that were changed, who or what made the changes, and when the changes were made. This simplifies how you operate on a finding by giving you visibility into the changes made to a finding over time, alongside the rest of the finding details, which removes the need for separate tooling or additional processes. This feature is available at no additional cost in AWS Regions where Security Hub is available, and appears by default for new or updated findings. Finding History is also available through the Security Hub APIs.

To try out this new feature, open the Security Hub console, select a finding, and choose the History tab. There you will see a chronological list of changes that have been made to the finding. The transparency of the finding history helps you quickly assess the status of the finding, understand actions already taken, and take the necessary actions to mitigate risk. For example, upon resolving a finding, you can add a note to the finding to indicate why you resolved it. Both the resolved status and note will appear in the history.

In the following example, the finding was updated and then resolved with an explanatory note left by the person that reviewed the finding. With Finding History, you can see the previous updates and events in the finding’s History tab.

Figure 1: Finding History shows recent updates to the finding

In addition, you can still view the current state of the finding in its Details tab.

Figure 2: Finding Details shows the record of a security check or security-related detection

Conclusion

With the new Finding History feature in Security Hub, you have greater visibility into the activity and updates on each finding, allowing for more efficient investigation and response to potential security risks. Next time that you start work to investigate and respond to a security finding in Security Hub, begin by checking the finding history.

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