Enhancing Threat Detection with Amazon GuardDuty’s New Custom Entity Lists
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced an exciting enhancement to Amazon GuardDuty, their intelligent threat detection service. As of September 5th, 2025, customers can now leverage Custom Entity Lists within GuardDuty, offering a more tailored and proactive approach to safeguarding their cloud environments. This new capability empowers organizations to integrate their own contextual intelligence into GuardDuty’s sophisticated threat detection mechanisms, thereby improving the accuracy and relevance of findings.
For years, Amazon GuardDuty has been a cornerstone for many organizations seeking to identify malicious activity and unauthorized behavior within their AWS accounts. By continuously monitoring and analyzing various data sources, including VPC flow logs, DNS logs, and CloudTrail event logs, GuardDuty has excelled at detecting a wide spectrum of threats. However, every organization has a unique operational context, including specific IP address ranges, domain names, and file hashes that are either trusted or known to be malicious within their particular landscape. The introduction of Custom Entity Lists addresses this need by allowing organizations to bring their own known-good or known-bad lists directly into GuardDuty’s detection engine.
What are Custom Entity Lists?
Custom Entity Lists allow you to define and manage lists of entities that are relevant to your specific security posture. These entities can include:
- IP Addresses: This could encompass internal IP ranges that should never be accessed from external sources, or known malicious IP addresses observed in your threat intelligence feeds.
- Domain Names: You can specify domains that are part of your organization’s trusted infrastructure, or conversely, domains that are known to be associated with phishing or malware campaigns.
- File Hashes: For organizations that perform in-depth malware analysis, custom lists of known malicious file hashes can be uploaded to GuardDuty to trigger alerts if these files are detected.
How Do Custom Entity Lists Enhance Threat Detection?
The integration of Custom Entity Lists with Amazon GuardDuty offers several significant benefits:
- Reduced False Positives: By explicitly defining trusted internal IP addresses or domains, GuardDuty can be instructed to ignore legitimate network traffic that might otherwise trigger a generic alert. This significantly reduces the noise of false positives, allowing security teams to focus their efforts on genuine threats.
- Faster Detection of Known Threats: For organizations that maintain their own curated threat intelligence, uploading lists of known malicious IP addresses or domains can lead to immediate detection of these specific threats within your environment. This proactive approach can dramatically shorten the time to detect and respond to attacks.
- Increased Contextual Awareness: GuardDuty’s threat detection models are constantly evolving. By enriching these models with your organization’s specific context, you provide GuardDuty with more information to accurately assess the risk associated with observed activities. For example, if a domain on your custom list is suddenly accessed by a system that shouldn’t be, GuardDuty can flag this with higher confidence.
- Streamlined Security Operations: Instead of manually cross-referencing GuardDuty findings with internal security databases or threat intelligence platforms, Custom Entity Lists automate this process. This frees up valuable time for security analysts and improves overall operational efficiency.
- Tailored Security Policies: Custom Entity Lists enable you to enforce security policies at a granular level. You can define specific actions or alerts based on interactions with entities on your lists, aligning GuardDuty’s behavior with your organization’s risk tolerance and compliance requirements.
How to Implement Custom Entity Lists
Implementing Custom Entity Lists is a straightforward process within the GuardDuty console. Organizations can create and manage these lists through a user-friendly interface. This involves uploading the lists, defining the type of entity (IP address, domain, file hash), and configuring how GuardDuty should use these lists in its detection logic. AWS provides clear documentation and best practices to guide users through this implementation, ensuring a smooth and effective integration.
A Step Forward in Cloud Security
The introduction of Custom Entity Lists marks a significant advancement in Amazon GuardDuty’s capabilities. It signifies AWS’s commitment to providing customers with the tools they need to build robust and adaptable security postures in the cloud. By empowering organizations to leverage their own intelligence, GuardDuty becomes an even more powerful ally in the ongoing battle against cyber threats, enabling a more precise, efficient, and ultimately, more secure cloud experience for all AWS customers.
Enhancing threat detection with Amazon GuardDuty new custom entity lists
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