AWS Auditing Security Checklist for 2025

Amazon Web Services (AWS) saw significant growth, with revenue up 19 percent from last year. With this massive expansion of cloud services, AWS has become one of the most profitable revenue streams for Amazon. However, as more and more organizations depend on the cloud, AWS is a prime target for cyberattacks and misconfigurations because of its scale.

Since companies are migrating critical data and applications to AWS, robust security measures are needed. Security audits conducted on a regular basis can highlight IAM vulnerabilities, storage configuration, and compliance settings. An AWS security audit checklist helps in proactively addressing security gaps before they turn into big threats by following best practices and official guidelines.

In this guide, we will look at AWS security audits and how they help to improve cloud environments against internal and external threats. It underscores how often misconfigurations are the cause of security breaches like ransomware attacks or data theft. In this article, we will outline how to create an AWS security audit checklist that covers IAM best practices, encryption, monitoring, and compliance.

Finally, we will recommend the best practices for an AWS security audit policy and explain how SentinelOne reinforces security by detecting threats in real-time.

What is AWS Security Audit?

An AWS security audit is a process of reviewing all the cloud assets, including accounts, networks, storage, and users’ activities, to determine potential vulnerabilities that can be used by unauthorized individuals. This process includes automated scans, manual inspections, and comparing your AWS security audit guidelines to frameworks such as HIPAA, GDPR, or SOC 2. In general, a security audit AWS approach covers all aspects of a cloud system, including users’ identities, security groups, encryption, logs, and alerts.

When you compile your findings into an AWS security audit policy-aligned structure, it identifies issues that require fixing and addresses compliance concerns at the same time. These audits help to keep the environment proactive as there is no question that infiltration attempts will not occur, but the question is what state of readiness the environment will be in when they do. Lastly, performing these kinds of checks regularly creates a culture of maintaining healthy DevOps, which enables functionality with the zero-trust concept for unpreventable cloud security.

Why is AWS Security Audit Important?

Ransomware attacks are now affecting nearly half of large-scale enterprises, and their infiltration results in data loss or downtime. According to a survey conducted among CISOs, 41% pointed to ransomware as a primary threat, 38% pointed to malware, and the rest of the percentage or respondents agreed with email fraud and DDoS attacks. In AWS environments, infiltration angles typically involve misconfigurations such as open S3 buckets or poor monitoring. Here are five reasons why it is important to have a frequent AWS security audit in your risk management plan:

1. Preempting Ransomware & Malware Infiltrations: Hackers search for open ports, unsecured storage, or unpatched systems that leave organizations vulnerable to a breach. By frequently reviewing your AWS auditing security checklist, you plug these holes, checking security group settings, prohibiting the use of root keys, or enabling auto patching. When an attacker is blocked at the outer layer, they cannot move up to the next level to encrypt or destroy your information. Through several cycles of scanning, you adjust the blocking of infiltration angles before they result in massive events.
2. Protecting Data and Business: Data is the core of cloud operations spanning from analytics to user-generated content in real-time. In the case of infiltration, it can lead to data tampering or unauthorized encryption and can even completely halt key operations. A comprehensive audit combines vulnerability scanning for sabotage with checking for regular backups to roll back operations if intrusion affects production. This integration ensures that there is little disruption, which in turn strengthens your brand image and customer confidence.
3. Meets Regulatory Compliance and Industry Requirements: Sectors that require strict measures regarding data processing and storage include healthcare (HIPAA), finance (PCI DSS), and privacy (GDPR). Therefore, by adopting an AWS security audit policy in compliance with such mandates, you bring together infiltration prevention and the law. This synergy ensures your organization does not incur fines or harm to its brand when regulators conduct a review of the cloud environment you use. In the long run, constant auditing leads to the development of a documented position that can be quickly modified to accommodate new rules or new AWS additions.
4. Minimizing Financial & Reputational Damage: A single infiltration event can lead to a loss of revenues, damage to reputation, and legal issues that overshadow business processes. Cybercriminals may steal valuable assets and leak them online, sell them on the black market, or demand a ransom. Using the AWS auditing security checklist, you proactively identify and neutralize the infiltration angles, such as the IAM roles that remain active or the code that was not updated. This synergy ensures that infiltration attempts are either short-lived or completely averted, hence significantly reducing the costs of a breach.
5. Driving a Security-First Culture: When organizations set up regular audits, they foster the practice where every development or operations task is run through a security lens. Rotating credentials or verifying configurations becomes second nature to the staff and thus decreases the possibilities of infiltration windows day by day. This integrates training with the consistency of scanning, meaning infiltration resilience becomes part of the development cycle, not an additional consideration. As the cycles progress, your entire team transitions from mending breaches to constantly enhancing the security of the cloud.

AWS Security Audit Policy: Key Considerations

A good AWS security audit policy is not limited to merely stating scanning instructions, but also includes roles, responsibilities, schedule, and scope of the review. By defining these boundaries, organizations make it easier to detect infiltration, report it, and remain in compliance with frameworks like ISO 27001 or SOC 2. Here, we outline five key aspects that define successful audit policy, connecting governance with practical scanning:

1. Scope & Frequency: It is crucial to identify which AWS accounts, services, and regions are included in your audit. Most of the infiltration angles start from low-traffic dev accounts or testing zones. This synergy promotes scanning of all the assets at set intervals, such as monthly for risky assets and quarterly scanning the environment. By covering the entire AWS footprint, you reduce the number of opportunities that criminals may find and exploit in obscured areas.
2. Roles & Responsibilities: A policy that defines which teams perform scanning, which reviews logs, or how DevOps incorporates patch results is helpful since it creates accountability. This integration helps in making sure that the infiltration signals resulting from logs or SIEM tools do not go unnoticed. Some organizations may have a dedicated team to manage threat intel on a daily basis, although development leads are responsible for plugin updates or microservice re-deployments. Through role clarity, the risk of having overlapping or half-baked tasks is addressed effectively, thus ensuring that infiltration angles are kept to a minimum.
3. Alignment with AWS Security Guidelines: When you align internal scanning with AWS security audit guidelines, such as official documents on IAM best practices, encryption, or logs, you bring external recognition to your scans. This saves a considerable amount of guesswork about how to set up S3 correctly or prevent the use of temporary ports on an EC2. The advancement of AWS services or features is done in cycles that do not compromise the infiltration resilience. This makes it possible to evolve within a cloud safely at the same pace as the expansions.
4. Logging & Reporting Structure: Any strong policy must identify how logs are collected – CloudTrail, CloudWatch, or a third-party SIEM – and where they are stored. It helps to quickly detect infiltration if criminals activate mass roles or create suspicious instances. Across several iterations, you improve how logs flow into real-time alerts or daily reviews to prevent infiltration signals from being lost in noise. Further, AWS security audit guidelines also describe how to manage logs for purposes of compliance or forensics.
5. Incident Response & Continuous Improvement: Lastly, an effective policy defines what actions should be taken immediately if infiltration is suspected, including isolation measures, staff reporting hierarchy, or actions by a third-party consultant. The integration of the two makes scanning work hand in hand with human crisis management to ensure that episodes of infiltration do not last long and are effectively dealt with. In every cycle of the post-incident analysis, there is always a policy change – a change in the scanning frequency, for instance, or new correlation rules. This approach embeds resiliency and adopts a nimble posture to adapt to the dynamic threat environment.

AWS Auditing Security Checklist

An AWS auditing security checklist combines your scanning activities with user privileges, data encryption, network locking, and compliance. Unlike a random check, it guarantees that it covers all the resources, including IAM configurations and the readiness of the incident response. In the following section, we present six checklists and their components that align the prevention of infiltration with the daily operation of the cloud environment.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) Audit Checklist

Suspended or inactive accounts, forgotten admin privileges, and unchanging access credentials are some of the most common attack vectors. This means that anyone who obtains these credentials, whether through guessing or theft, can create malicious resources or steal data out of the organization unnoticed. Here are four steps to help ensure that IAM remains secure:

1. User & Role Enumeration: The first step is to list all IAM users, groups, and roles to ensure only active and legitimate employees or services are present. Ensure that there are no hangover tests or dev roles from previous sprints. This synergy ensures that there are limited chances of attackers infiltrating through old credentials or inactive accounts. Repeating the cycle, role naming correlates to actual duties while establishing privileges at a glance for the staff.
2. Least Privilege Enforcement: Limit the access to only the required permissions for the role, such as the logging role having only read-only permissions or the dev build having only S3 access. The synergy ensures that the rate of success in infiltration is minimal if criminals breach one of the credential types. When MFA is required, especially for root or admin accounts, infiltration becomes much more difficult to achieve. After some time, the check ensures staff expansions or reorgs do not have incorrect privilege assignments.
3. Key & Secret Rotation: Rotating secrets such as AWS access keys or session tokens prevents infiltration from the remaining credentials for a short period. The integration combines the scanning with the official AWS security standards, ensuring that every user or service key is within a 90-day or 120-day rotation. The CloudTrail logs indicate whether there are still active keys that have not been rotated and need to be revoked immediately. In the long run, the existence of ephemeral or short-lived credentials minimizes the infiltration angles to just about zero.
4. IAM Policy Review & Cleanup: Consider inline vs. managed policies to make sure there are no universal “:” resource permissions left. The synergy helps in achieving infiltration resilience because a criminal cannot jump from a small dev function to a DB read which is considered critical in production. Through successive iterations, avoid policy proliferation by consolidating or deleting redundant ones. The result is a simplified approach that lets the staff easily identify possible infiltration angles in each of them.

Network Security Audit Checklist

Your VPC, subnets, and security groups determine the network boundary that specifies which IP addresses or ports can communicate with internal services. As long as there are loose or default rules, they become a goldmine for infiltration. In the following section, we outline four tasks that should be done to guarantee that infiltration angles stay below a certain threshold in the AWS networking layer.

1. Security Group & NACL Review: Check for inbound/outbound rules involving large IP ranges or open ports such as port 22 or 3389. This integration connects scanning with real-time logs to determine whether the IPs are targeting these ports consecutively. By restricting possible traffic to only the known addresses or using the temporary rules, infiltration attempts face fewer open gates. Each rule should be reviewed regularly, at least once a quarter, to ensure that expansions match the minimum infiltration angles.
2. VPC Flow Logs & Alert Configurations: It is necessary to turn on VPC Flow Logs to monitor metadata of traffic across subnets. It promotes the identification of intrusion, for instance, many failed attempts from unidentified IP addresses or large data transfers. These logs have to be accumulated in CloudWatch or with a third-party SIEM to allow staff to identify an infiltration process in progress. Iteratively, the correlation process reduces the number of false positives and targets the genuine infiltration signals.
3. WAF & Shield Integration: AWS WAF or AWS Shield helps to counteract different types of attacks – injections, such as SQL or cross-site scripting, or bursts of DDoS attacks. In this way, regular traffic is allowed while infiltration attempts are stopped by WAF rules that are adjusted to your application’s usual traffic. This integration makes sure that any scanning or requests that are malicious are blocked or rate-limited as soon as possible. Periodically, WAF rule sets are updated to encompass new infiltration TTPs while maintaining a consistent perimeter.
4. PrivateLink & VPC Peering Evaluation: If you use VPCs or have external services connected via PrivateLink, ensure that traffic stays limited to the correct subnets or domain references. This makes it possible to have minimal angles of infiltration if the criminals penetrate a partner environment. Determine if there are still cross-VPC route policies that are outdated and reveal internal data or microservices. In the end, consistent checks across multi-region or multi-VPC expansions ensure that infiltration cannot seep through other less secure connections.

Data Protection and Encryption Audit Checklist

Data is a crucial component of cloud usage, whether it is stored in S3 buckets, EBS volumes, or RDS instances. Cybercriminals are known to exploit poorly configured storage or even unencrypted backups in order to gain access and demand a ransom. Here are four tips that can be used to bolster data protection to discourage hackers from achieving much with their attempts:

1. S3 Bucket Encryption & Access: Make sure that each bucket uses SSE (for example, SSE-KMS) and that no public read/write ACL is left unless required on purpose. The integration combines the scanning feature with AWS Config rules to ensure default encryption. When you follow the AWS security checklist, it means you systematically clear out the remaining open settings. After a number of cycles, you standardize naming conventions and bucket policies and cut down the angles of data leaks significantly.
2. Database Encryption & Key Management: For RDS or DynamoDB, ensure that data at rest is protected by either AWS KMS or customer-managed keys. This synergy also promotes infiltration resilience, as stolen data from the snapshot file is not useful. It is also important to assess how you rotate or store these keys relative to the AWS security best practices regarding encryption. In the long run, the usage of short-lived or temporary keys minimizes the dwell time and the ability of criminals to depend on the static cryptographic key.
3. Backup & Snapshot Encryption: Infiltration might target unencrypted backups even if your live data is encrypted. This integration combines the scanning feature with your security audit AWS method, confirming the snapshot encryption of EBS, RDS, or manual backup. This means that even if the criminals manage to penetrate one layer of encryption, their chances of getting through the second set of copies are slim. Across the cycles, the staff synchronizes backup naming, backup retention, and backup encryption policies for consistent coverage.
4. Data Lifecycle Policies: Ensure that each data store has a lifecycle policy in place, such as archiving logs after a certain time or deleting data after a certain period. It creates a little entry point manipulation if, for instance, criminals decide to attack the objects that are hardly used. When using the AWS auditing security checklist, you keep records of each data object’s retention, encryption, and deletion mechanisms. Across the multiple cycles, the ephemeral data and logs are maintained well to minimize the angles of exfil or sabotage.

Logging and Monitoring Audit Checklist

In the absence of proper logging and monitoring, infiltration moves unnoticed, enabling criminals to move laterally or exfiltrate data. The foundation for rapid response is built on ensuring that CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and SIEM solutions are functioning correctly. The following are four crucial activities that must be done in order to have effective logging oversight.

1. CloudTrail & Multi-Region Coverage: Turn on CloudTrail in every region to log API activity, specifically creation or deletion events. This synergy makes infiltration detection possible, meaning criminals cannot create instances or alter logs without being noticed. It is recommended to store these logs in a secure S3 bucket—do not allow access or modification by anybody who does not need it. As different cycles are repeated, the analysis of suspicious event patterns helps to speed up the infiltration triage.
2. CloudWatch Alarms & Metrics: Set up alerts for high CPU levels, high 4XX/5XX error rates, or unexpected instance growth. It integrates with staff notifications or third-party SIEM integration, alerting you during the mid-infiltration. When the alerts are set up to have dynamic thresholds—like a baseline of normal traffic—the number of false positives decreases. Re-check these settings quarterly to ensure that the infiltration angles from excessive traffic or CPU spikes cause an instant response from staff.
3. VPC Flow Logs for Network Traffic: Flow Logs contain IP layer information of incoming/outgoing traffic, crucial for infiltration identification. Scanning of open ports or any brute force activity is detected if the logs show multiple blocked traffic from particular IPs. Theis synergy offers the network-level advantage that connects your AWS security checklist to real-time data. In each cycle, staff continue to adjust the correlation rules to show the attempts of intrusions while excluding random fluctuations.
4. SIEM & Advanced Alerting: The logs can be centrally collected and then correlated using a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) or a monitoring tool. It also ensures that infiltration patterns, including multiple login attempts failure plus multiple instance creation, trigger a single alert. By referencing the AWS audit best practices, you determine standard operating procedures for each type of alert. In the end, finely-tuned SIEM solutions exert pressure on attackers, decreasing their dwell time and shortening the time necessary to identify the source of the breach.

Compliance and Governance Audit Checklist

Most organizations use AWS to grow fast, but HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS require strict control. In this way, the systematic verification of each control links infiltration prevention to legal requirements. In the following, we outline four tasks that connect compliance requirements with day-to-day AWS utilization.

1. Policy & Regulatory Mapping: Determine which standards are relevant—e.g., PCI DSS for credit card information, HIPAA for medical data. The combined approach encourages selective scanning to verify the use of encryption, roles with minimum privileges, or logging requirements. Over the course of multiple iterations, the staff integrates all these checks into your primary AWS auditing security checklist. This makes sure that infiltration resilience goes beyond coded standards to legal norms.
2. Tagging & Resource Classification: It is also important to tag the resource (dev, prod, PII, no-PII) to know which policy or encryption rule applies. This synergy ensures that infiltration attempts that target high-value data are recognized, linking advanced alerts or deeper scanning. Through multiple cycles, tagging synchronizes with automation, enabling staff to add or remove resources without affecting compliance. In the end, classification facilitates swift sorting if infiltration takes place in a sensitive area.
3. Documented AWS Security Audit Policy: A good policy also identifies how often each step is to be conducted, what is included in the scan, and who is responsible for each step. This synergy ensures that infiltration is detected by ensuring that staff follow standard procedures when admitting new resources or expansion. By stating that the policy aligns with AWS security audit guidelines, it establishes best practices that are already recognized. In the long run, your environment remains strong while compliance audits emanate from the same architecture.
4. Compliance Reporting & Evidence: Some regulators demand proof of the scanning logs, patch cycles, or staff training. Ensure that scans are incorporated into official AWS security audit reports and correlate each fix with compliance references. It also enhances traceability in case of infiltration or data queries from outside auditors. Across the cycles, you integrate scanning, patch management, and compliance evidence into one cycle, thus reducing the time for internal and external reviews.

Incident Response and Security Best Practices Checklist

Despite best practices in scanning and configurations, instances of infiltration may still be witnessed. The integration of a good incident response plan with best practices ensures that the damage is controlled as early as possible. In the following, we describe four tasks that connect infiltration detection with immediate response actions throughout your AWS environment.

1. Incident Response Plan & Playbooks: Provide detailed procedures for staff in case there is infiltration, such as how to contain the affected EC2 instances or how to block malicious keys. This synergy helps to avoid confusion in the middle of the crisis to keep the infiltration windows as short as possible. When using your AWS auditing security checklist logs, you get to know which resources criminals were interacting with. These playbooks evolve over multiple cycles as staff incorporate lessons from near-misses or simulations.
2. Rollback & Snapshot Readiness: Ensure that you have a recent and up-to-date backup or snapshot for each crucial data repository. This synergy enables a quick rollback in case infiltration results in data modification or encryption. You monitor how often the snapshots are taken and if they are encrypted based on the official AWS security checklist points. In conclusion, a good rollback plan guarantees that infiltration never progresses to prolonged outages or significant data loss.
3. Root Cause Analysis & Lessons Learned: Once infiltration is contained, staff carry out a root cause analysis—was it a stolen key, open S3 bucket, or zero-day plugin exploit? This synergy enhances policy or scanning changes that decrease the recurrence of intrusion angles. Executive summaries must go to your AWS Security Audit Guidelines document, where every discovery should inform future scanning intervals or staff training. In the context of the problem, it is found that infiltration success reduces with cyclical increases over time as the environment becomes matured.
4. Continuous Staff Training & Testing: Employees are still one of the key threats, whether through phishing or reusing credentials. By integrating regular training with partial infiltration exercises, you are able to assess preparedness across dev, ops, and compliance departments. This synergy promotes infiltration resilience not only into code but also into human processes, such as quickly recalling compromised keys. In the long run, the staff gets accustomed to these practices thus reducing the infiltration angles as human beings stand as the last defense line.

AWS Security Auditing Best Practices

An AWS auditing security checklist shows what to scan, but operational effectiveness is based on general rules that link scans, personnel, and lean development. In the following, we outline five best practices connecting infiltration prevention, user education, and real-time threat identification. When implemented consistently, your environment develops from having basic checks to a set structured and documented security.

1. Principle of Least Privilege: Limit each IAM user or role to only those things that are essential and do not allow “AdministratorAccess” whenever you can. The synergy with staff education means that new resources or expansions are set to have the least privilege possible. You trim down the remaining dev roles or test keys in subsequent cycles and reduce the number of infiltration angles significantly. This principle also supports compliance, as regulators may require minimal user scope to interfere with or misuse information.
2. Continuous Monitoring & Alerting: This means that even when a network is scanned monthly, the criminals can easily infiltrate if they attack the day after a patch cycle. With real-time monitoring using CloudWatch, SIEM, or custom solutions, the staff witnesses the infiltration attempts in progress. It also contributes to minimal dwell times, which means if an activity is considered suspicious, such as multiple login attempts or high CPU usage, an alarm is raised to engage the staff. In each cycle, you improve the correlation logic, ensuring that it provides both good infiltration detection and low false positive rates.
3. Infrastructure as Code & Automated Deployment: Manually spinning up instances or toggling settings can mean that some of those misconfigurations are missed. Services such as AWS CloudFormation or Terraform tie together environment creation with pre-scanned and pre-tested templates. The synergy helps prevent infiltration, which means any change to the infrastructure has to go through scanning or code reviews. By integrating IAC with your AWS security audit policy, each update is in compliance with the best practices, thus eradicating human mistakes.
4. Frequent Key & Secret Rotation: Old AWS keys or credentials pose the same risk if an employee departs or the keys get out. Through rotation of accounts every 60 or 90 days and checking of usage logs, infiltration from stolen secrets is short-lived. This synergy works alongside scanning to make sure no secret is left behind in code repositories or environment variables. It has become a norm for developers to use ephemeral credentials for development processes or temporary tokens for CI/CD processes, which greatly reduces the chances of attack.
5. Integrate Threat Intelligence & Zero-Trust: Hackers often change the tactics and techniques of infiltration, searching for new plugin openings or day-zero flaws. Through integration with external threat feeds, the staff can modify the scanning rules or blacklist IP addresses in real-time. This synergy creates a zero-trust environment where every request or instance spawn is validated. In the long run, infiltration angles erode as temporary moments, constant surveillance, and least access converge for unyielding sustainability.

AWS Security with SentinelOne

SentinelOne offers Cloud Native Security for AWS environments. It delivers real-time protection with its agentless CNAPP and accelerates incident responses. SentinelOne can enhance visibility and threat hunting with seamless integrations for Amazon Security Lake, AppFabric, Security Hub, GuardDuty, and more.

It can simulate all forms of attacks on different AWS vectors, identify exploits, and provide agentless vulnerability scanning for AWS workloads and containers. It provides well-rounded security and fully complies with the latest industry standards like ISO 27001, PCI, NIST, and DSS.

SentinelOne protects organizations from phishing, ransomware, zero-days, fileless attacks, and malware, and generates detailed reports on security incidents. The platform minimizes the risk of security data breaches with its 1-click automated remediation and includes a unique Offensive Security Engine that delivers verified exploit pathways.

SentinelOne can enforce custom security policies and PurpleAI, its personal cyber security analyst, enhances visibility into cloud infrastructures through careful analysis. SentinelOne’s patented Storyline technology and BinaryVault enable enterprises with cutting-edge cloud forensics; it predicts future attacks, thus effectively blocking them ahead before they have a chance to occur in real time.

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Conclusion

A comprehensive AWS auditing security checklist combines the search for known CVEs, checking of IAM policies, and encryption compliance, connecting the absence of misconfiguration to constant monitoring. This is done through the enumeration of accounts, reduction of privileges where necessary, log reviews, and bringing the system within official frameworks to thereby minimize the angles of infiltration exploited by criminals. Overall, across multiple audit cycles, staff develop a security-oriented mentality, addressing open dev settings by either patching or locking them. This not only helps prevent infiltration but also helps to gain the confidence of customers, partners, and regulators who rely on your environment being secure.

However, as infiltration TTPs continue to emerge, it is best to combine your standard checks with advanced tools such as SentinelOne to be on the lookout for stealthy zero-days or clever movement laterally. With threat detection and automated remediation backed by AI and the scanning discipline that you have developed, the AWS environment is secure and immune to new threats.

Want to take your AWS security to the next level? Request a SentinelOne Singularity™ Cloud Security demo today for AI-based threat identification and response.

FAQs

What is an AWS security auditing?

An AWS security audit systematically evaluates your cloud environment—services, configurations, and data flows—to uncover vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Skilled auditors inspect IAM roles, network rules, and encryption policies, aiming to thwart threats and maintain compliance.

How often should AWS security audits be performed?

Organizations should perform AWS security audits regularly—often quarterly or after significant infrastructure changes. Pairing ongoing monitoring with scheduled hands-on reviews ensures potential risks are identified quickly.

What is included in an AWS security checklist?

An AWS security checklist covers IAM reviews, network restrictions, data encryption, and logging configurations. It verifies least-privilege roles, S3 bucket permissions, VPC flow log enablement, and compliance mandates like HIPAA or PCI DSS.

How can organizations improve AWS security compliance?

Organizations can enhance AWS security compliance by adopting automated policies, rotating credentials, and enforcing encryption for data at rest and in transit. Regularly auditing IAM privileges, aligning configurations with frameworks like ISO 27001, and integrating real-time threat intelligence can help identity and mitigate vulnerabilities.