A lack of audit records limits the ability to detect and respond to security-related incidents and prevents forensic investigation.

Configuration settings that undermine logging capabilities include but are not limited to:
- deliberately disabling audit logging
- exempting actions of specific users, groups, or processes from being logged
- inadequately protecting log integrity
- not enabling optional audit logging
- reducing the log sampling rate

Backups are critical to protect against data loss or corruption. Settings that undermine backups include but are not limited to:
- Disabling data backup
- Failure to back up data regularly
- Failure to check the integrity of backups regularly
- Insufficient backup retention period

Backups are critical to protect against data loss or corruption. Settings that undermine backups include but are not limited to:
- Disabling data backup
- Failure to back up data regularly
- Failure to check the integrity of backups regularly
- Insufficient backup retention period

A lack of audit records limits the ability to detect and respond to security-related incidents and prevents forensic investigation.

Configuration settings that undermine logging capabilities include but are not limited to:
- deliberately disabling audit logging
- exempting actions of specific users, groups, or processes from being logged
- inadequately protecting log integrity
- not enabling optional audit logging
- reducing the log sampling rate

Any delayed response to breaches undermines an organization's ability to limit the impact of a breach.

Configuration settings that undermine monitoring capabilities include but are not limited to:
- deliberately disabling monitoring
- not enabling optional monitoring
- not specifying relevant events to export to monitoring services
- exempting actions of specific users, groups, processes, and geographical regions from monitoring

Any delayed response to breaches undermines an organization's ability to limit the impact of a breach.

Configuration settings that undermine monitoring capabilities include but are not limited to:
- deliberately disabling monitoring
- not enabling optional monitoring
- not specifying relevant events to export to monitoring services
- exempting actions of specific users, groups, processes, and geographical regions from monitoring

By default, CloudTrail log file validation is disabled, which prevents investigators from confirming that there has been no external tampering with CloudTrail log files.

This enables an attacker with the necessary privileges to perform harmful configuration changes and hide them by modifying the CloudTrail logs.

Example 1: The following Ansible task sets up a CloudTrail configuration without log file integrity validation because the enable_log_file_validation parameter is missing.

- name: create a single region cloudtrail
  community.aws.cloudtrail:
    s3_bucket_name: mylogbucket
    s3_key_prefix: cloudtrail
    region: us-west-2