How to subscribe to the new Security Hub Announcements topic for Amazon SNS

With AWS Security Hub you are able to manage your security posture in AWS, perform security best practice checks, aggregate alerts, and automate remediation. Now you are able to use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to subscribe to the new Security Hub Announcements topic to receive updates about new Security Hub services and features, newly supported standards and controls, and other Security Hub changes.

Introducing the Security Hub Announcements topic

Amazon SNS follows the publish/subscribe (pub/sub) messaging model, in which notifications are delivered to you by using a push mechanism that eliminates the need for you to periodically check or poll for new information and updates. You can now use this push mechanism to receive notifications about Security Hub by subscribing to the dedicated Security Hub Announcements topic.

The Security Hub Announcements topic publishes the following types of notifications:

• General notifications
• Upcoming standards and controls
• New AWS Regions supported
• New standards and controls
• Updated standards and controls
• Retired standards and controls
• Updates to the AWS Security Finding Format (ASFF)
• New integrations
• New features
• Changes to existing features

How to use the Security Hub Announcements topic

You can subscribe to the SNS topic for Security Hub Announcements to receive notification messages about newly released finding types, updates to the existing finding types, and other functionality changes. By subscribing to the SNS topic, you will receive Security Hub Announcements messages as soon as they are published. The notifications are available in all protocols that Amazon SNS supports, such as email and SMS. For more information about supported protocols in Amazon SNS, see Subscribing to an Amazon SNS topic.

The Security Hub Announcements topic is available in all AWS Regions in the aws and aws-cn partitions, but is not yet available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions (the aws-us-gov partition). Later in this post, we’ll show you how to subscribe to the Security Hub Announcements topic in a specific AWS Region by using the topic Amazon Resource Name (ARN) for that Region. The SNS topic messages are the same across Regions in a partition, so you can choose to subscribe to only one Region in a partition to avoid receiving duplicate information.

However, if you want to invoke an AWS Lambda function in reaction to a Security Hub Announcements message, you must subscribe to the topic ARN that is in the same Region as the Lambda function. The Lambda function can receive the SNS topic message payload as an input parameter and manipulate the information in the message, publish the message to other SNS topics, or send the message to other AWS services. For more information, see Subscribing a function to a topic in the Amazon SNS Developer Guide.

The same is true if you want to subscribe an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue to the Security Hub Announcements topic, you must use a topic ARN that is in the same Region as the SQS queue. The SQS queue can be used to persist announcement SNS topic messages in the queue for other applications to process at a later time. For more information, see Subscribing an Amazon SQS queue to an Amazon SNS topic in the Amazon SQS Developer Guide.

IAM permissions

Your user account must have sns::subscribe AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions to subscribe to an SNS topic. For more information on IAM permissions for Amazon SNS, see Using identity-based policies with Amazon SNS.

Subscribe to the Security Hub Announcements topic

The following is the list of Security Hub Announcements topic ARNs for each currently supported Region. The examples in this post use the US West (Oregon) Region (us-west-2), but you can update the procedures with one of the following ARNs to use a different supported Region.

Security Hub Announcements topic ARNs by Region

arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:088139225913:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:us-east-2:291342846459:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:us-west-1:137690824926:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:393883065485:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:eu-central-1:871975303681:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:eu-north-1:191971010772:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:eu-south-1:151363035580:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:eu-west-1:705756202095:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:eu-west-2:883600840440:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:eu-west-3:313420042571:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:ca-central-1:137749997395:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:sa-east-1:359811883282:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:me-south-1:585146626860:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:af-south-1:463142546776:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:ap-northeast-1:592469075483:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:ap-northeast-2:374299265323:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:ap-northeast-3:633550238216:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:ap-southeast-1:512267288502:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:ap-southeast-2:475730049140:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:ap-southeast-3:627843640627:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:ap-east-1:464812404305:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws:sns:ap-south-1:707356269775:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws-cn:sns:cn-north-1:672341567257:SecurityHubAnnouncements
arn:aws-cn:sns:cn-northwest-1:672534482217:SecurityHubAnnouncements

The two procedures that follow show you how to subscribe an email address to the Security Hub Announcements topic by using the AWS Management Console and the AWS CLI.

To subscribe an email address to the Security Hub Announcements topic (console)

1. Sign in to the Amazon SNS console.
2. In the Region list, choose the same Region as the topic ARN to which you want to subscribe. This example uses the us-west-2 Region.
3. In the left navigation pane, choose Subscriptions, then choose Create subscription.
4. In the Create subscription dialog box, do the following:
   • For Topic ARN, paste the following topic ARN for the us-west-2 Region, or use one of the ARNs listed above for a different supported Region:

     arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:393883065485:SecurityHubAnnouncements

   • For Protocol, choose Email.
   • For Endpoint, enter an email address that you can use to receive the notification.
5. Choose Create subscription.
6. In your email application, open the message from AWS Notifications and open the link to confirm your subscription. Your web browser displays a confirmation response from Amazon SNS, similar to that shown in Figure 1.
   

   Figure 1: SNS notification subscription confirmation

The following steps show you how to subscribe an email address to the Security Hub Announcements topic by using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

To subscribe an email address to the Security Hub Announcements topic (AWS CLI)

1. Run the following command in the AWS CLI, replacing <your_email@example.com> with your email address, and optionally replacing the ARN and reference to us-west-2 if you want to use a different Region:
   aws sns --region us-west-2 subscribe --topic-arn arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:393883065485:SecurityHubAnnouncements --protocol email --notification-endpoint <your_email@example.com>
2. In your email application, open the message from AWS Notifications and open the link to confirm your subscription.
3. Your web browser displays a confirmation response from Amazon SNS, similar to that shown in Figure 1.

Example subscription responses

The following sections contain examples of a message announcing new standard controls supported by Security Hub in email and sqs protocol types.

Example message from an email subscription (protocol type: email)

{"AnnouncementType":"NEW_STANDARDS_CONTROLS",
“Title”:”[New Controls] 36 new Security Hub controls added to the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard”,
"Description":"We have added 36 new controls to the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard. These include controls for Amazon Auto Scaling (AutoScaling.3, AutoScaling.4, AutoScaling.6), AWS CloudFormation (CloudFormation.1), Amazon CloudFront (CloudFront.10), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) (EC2.23, EC2.24, EC2.27), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) (ECR.1, ECR.2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) (ECS.3, ECS.4, ECS.5, ECS.8, ECS.10, ECS.12), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) (EFS.3, EFS.4), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) (EKS.2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB.12, ELB.13, ELB.14), Amazon Kinesis (Kinesis.1), AWS Network Firewall (NetworkFirewall.3, NetworkFirewall.4, NetworkFirewall.5), Amazon OpenSearch Service (Opensearch.7), Amazon Redshift (Redshift.9), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) (S3.13), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS.2), AWF WAF (WAF.2, WAF.3, WAF.4, WAF.6, WAF.7, WAF.8). If you enabled the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard in an account and configured Security Hub to automatically enable new controls, these controls are enabled by default. Availability of controls can vary by Region."}

Example message from an SQS queue subscription (protocol type: sqs)

The following message shows the additional metadata included with an SQS subscription to the Security Hub Announcements topic. For more information about the metadata included in an SNS topic message delivered to an SQS queue, see Fanout to Amazon SQS Queues.

{
  "Type" : "Notification",
  "MessageId" : "c9c03e46-69df-5c3c-84e9-6520708ac394",
  "TopicArn" : "arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:393883065485:SecurityHubAnnouncements",
  "Message" : "{\"AnnouncementType\":\"NEW_STANDARDS_CONTROLS\",\"Title\":\"[New Controls] 36 new Security Hub controls added to the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard\",\"Description\":\"We have added 36 new controls to the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard. These include controls for Amazon Auto Scaling (AutoScaling.3, AutoScaling.4, AutoScaling.6), AWS CloudFormation (CloudFormation.1), Amazon CloudFront (CloudFront.10), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) (EC2.23, EC2.24, EC2.27), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) (ECR.1, ECR.2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) (ECS.3, ECS.4, ECS.5, ECS.8, ECS.10, ECS.12), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) (EFS.3, EFS.4), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) (EKS.2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB.12, ELB.13, ELB.14), Amazon Kinesis (Kinesis.1), AWS Network Firewall (NetworkFirewall.3, NetworkFirewall.4, NetworkFirewall.5), Amazon OpenSearch Service (Opensearch.7), Amazon Redshift (Redshift.9), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) (S3.13), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS.2), AWF WAF (WAF.2, WAF.3, WAF.4, WAF.6, WAF.7, WAF.8). If you enabled the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard in an account and configured Security Hub to automatically enable new controls, these controls are enabled by default. Availability of controls can vary by Region. \"}",
  "Timestamp" : "2022-08-04T18:59:33.319Z",
  "SignatureVersion" : "1",
  "Signature" : "GdKokPEUexpKZn5da5u/p5eZF1cE3JUyL0uPVKmPnDzd3orkk5jJ211VsOflUFi6V9lSXF/V6RBpQN/9f3+JBFBprng7BRQwT9I4jSa1xOn1L3xKXEVGvWI6nl1oDqBl21Pj3owV+NZ+Exd2W0dpgg8B1LG4bYq5T73MjHjWGtelcBa15TpIz/+rynqanXCKCvc/50V/XZLjA5M7gU6Dzs9CULIjkdEpCsw5FvSxbtkEd6Ktx4LH7Zq6FlPKNli3EaEHRKh9uYPo6sR/yvF4RWg3E9O4dVsK7A8uTdR+pwVCU1M601KMRxO1OWF8VIdvyPINJND8Nu/70GRA2L+MRA==",
  "SigningCertURL" : "https://sns.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/SimpleNotificationService-56e67fcb41f6fec09b0196692625d385.pem",
  "UnsubscribeURL" : "https://sns.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/?Action=Unsubscribe&SubscriptionArn=arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:393883065485:SecurityHubAnnouncements:1eb29a83-8726-4366-891c-293ad5e35a53"
}

Note: You need to set up the SQS access policy in order for SNS to push message to the SNS queue. For more information, see Basic examples of Amazon SQS policies.

Available now

The SNS topic for Security Hub Announcements is available today in the Regions described in this post. Subscribe now to stay informed of Security Hub updates. With Amazon SNS, there is no minimum fee, and you pay only for what you use. For more information, see the Amazon SNS pricing page.

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