AWS Security Audit Tool: How to Audit Your AWS Account
An AWS security audit finds the misconfigurations and compliance gaps that lead to breaches. With Prowler Cloud you can connect your AWS account, run 600+ security checks, and get prioritized, fixable findings in minutes. No agents, read-only access, no credit card.
TL;DR
To audit your AWS account, connect it to Prowler Cloud with a read-only IAM role and run a scan. Prowler checks 600+ AWS controls across IAM, S3, EC2, RDS, networking, encryption, and logging, then maps every finding to frameworks like the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, SOC 2, PCI DSS, and HIPAA. Prowler is the most widely adopted open source cloud security platform, with 45M+ downloads and 14,000+ GitHub stars, so you can read every check before you run it. First results appear in under 10 minutes, free, no credit card required.
The Challenge: AWS Is Powerful and Easy to Misconfigure
AWS gives you thousands of configuration knobs across hundreds of services. That flexibility is exactly why AWS misconfigurations are so common and so dangerous. One public S3 bucket, one overly permissive IAM role, one security group open to 0.0.0.0/0, and you have an incident.
AWS is also the most common place this happens, because it is where most workloads live. In Prowler's State of Cloud Security 2026 report, a survey of 633 security professionals, 36% named AWS as their primary cloud provider, more than any other. That same report found security teams handle an average of 71 incidents per week, over 3,600 a year, and most of that time goes to manual triage rather than fixing root causes.
Visibility is the core problem. Only 31% of teams rate their cloud visibility as better than "average," and IAM is the hardest part. A single AWS API call can be evaluated against six or more policy layers before it is allowed or denied, and working out effective permissions for one role takes an experienced engineer 30+ minutes. Most accounts have hundreds of roles. You cannot audit that by hand.
What Is an AWS Security Audit?
An AWS security audit is a systematic review of your AWS account against security best practices and compliance requirements. It inventories your resources and checks each one for misconfigurations, excessive permissions, missing encryption, disabled logging, and exposure to the public internet.
A thorough AWS audit covers these areas:
- Identity and access (IAM) Wildcard permissions, unused access keys, missing MFA on root and admin users, and roles that grant far more access than they need.
- Storage exposure S3 buckets open to the public, missing bucket encryption, and disabled versioning or access logging.
- Network configuration Security groups allowing 0.0.0.0/0 on sensitive ports like SSH (22) and RDP (3389), open databases, and unrestricted VPC rules.
- Encryption EBS volumes, RDS databases, and S3 data without encryption at rest, and resources without encryption in transit.
- Logging and monitoring CloudTrail disabled, VPC Flow Logs off, and GuardDuty not enabled, leaving you blind to activity in the account.
- Compliance posture Whether your account meets the controls required by CIS, SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and other frameworks.
How to Run an AWS Security Audit with Prowler Cloud
Here is the full process, start to finish. Prowler Cloud uses read-only access, so it can assess your account but never change anything. You can get your first results in under 10 minutes.
- Create a free Prowler Cloud account Sign up at cloud.prowler.com. Prowler Cloud is free to try and needs no credit card. If you prefer consolidated AWS billing, you can also subscribe through the AWS Marketplace.
- Add your AWS account as a provider Choose "Add Provider," select AWS, and enter your 12-digit AWS account ID. Prowler Cloud generates a unique External ID that is used to securely assume a role in your account and prevent the confused deputy problem.
- Deploy the read-only Prowler scan role Download the Prowler scan role CloudFormation template, open CloudFormation in the AWS Console, create a stack, upload the template, and paste in the External ID from Prowler Cloud. The role is built from the AWS-managed SecurityAudit and ViewOnlyAccess policies, so Prowler can read your configuration but cannot modify, create, or delete resources. Prefer Terraform? The same role ships as a Terraform module.
- Connect the role and test the connection Back in Prowler Cloud, select the option for Prowler Cloud to assume your IAM role, paste the scan role ARN, and test the connection to confirm everything is wired up.
- Run your first scan Launch the scan. Prowler runs 600+ AWS security checks across IAM, S3, EC2, RDS, networking, logging, and encryption. There are no agents to install and no impact on your workloads. First results appear in minutes.
- Review findings and filter by compliance framework Open the findings dashboard, sort by severity, and filter by framework such as CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, SOC 2, PCI DSS, or HIPAA. Every finding includes the affected resource, the risk, and step-by-step remediation. You can export audit-ready evidence for your assessors.
- Remediate the findings For each issue, Prowler Cloud shows the affected AWS resource and the fix. Use Lighthouse AI to generate remediation, an IaC change (Terraform, CloudFormation), a CLI command, a cloud-native control, or guided manual steps. To automate it end to end, the Prowler plugin for Claude Code finds the misconfigurations, prioritizes them by blast radius from the attack-path graph, opens the pull requests that fix them, and re-scans to confirm each one cleared.
- Rescan and prove it Re-run the scan to confirm the issue is closed, capture before/after posture, and export audit-ready evidence mapped to your compliance frameworks like CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, SOC 2, PCI DSS, and HIPAA. The Prowler plugin for Claude Code keeps a versioned audit trail of every fix under .prowler/ in your repo.
- Track ownership and schedule recurring scans Assign owners and SLAs, manage exceptions, and turn on daily scheduled scans so your AWS posture is checked continuously. Route findings to Slack, Jira, email, or your SIEM so issues reach the right team within hours instead of at your next annual audit, and accountability stays clear.
The DART-P Framework: From Visibility to Verified Risk Reduction
DART-P helps SecOps teams move from cloud visibility to verified risk reduction: discover what exists, assess what matters, remediate what is risky, track accountability, and prove control effectiveness. Here is how each stage maps to an AWS security audit with Prowler Cloud.
Discover
Inventory every AWS account, IAM role and user, S3 bucket, EC2 instance, RDS database, security group, and VPC across your AWS Organization. Connect a read-only role and scan to map assets, identities, configurations, and exposures.
Assess
Evaluate misconfigurations and compliance gaps against the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, SOC 2, PCI DSS, and HIPAA. Prowler scores exploitability and business impact and uses attack paths between AWS resources to surface what actually matters first.
Remediate
Fix what is risky. Lighthouse AI generates the remediation as Terraform, CloudFormation, a CLI command, a cloud-native control, or guided manual steps. The Prowler plugin for Claude Code automates the whole loop: it finds, prioritizes by blast radius, opens fix pull requests, and re-scans.
Track
Manage owners, SLAs, exceptions, status, and trends across your AWS accounts. Scheduled daily scans keep posture current, and the Claude Code plugin records progress in versioned markdown reports under .prowler/ so accountability stays clear.
Prove
Rescan to confirm each AWS finding is closed, show before/after posture, and export audit-ready evidence mapped to your frameworks. This is what turns a point-in-time audit into demonstrable, repeatable control effectiveness for your assessors.
Automate Your AWS SecOps Workflow with Claude Code
Detection is solved. What still eats your team's time is the glue work between a finding and a verified fix. The Prowler plugin for Claude Code automates the entire DART-P loop: it pulls findings across your connected AWS accounts, prioritizes them by severity, framework relevance, and blast radius from the attack-path graph, proposes fixes (Terraform, AWS CLI, console, or mixed) with exact commands and reversibility, opens pull requests, tracks progress in versioned reports under .prowler/, and re-scans to confirm each check cleared.
Install it from the Claude Code plugin marketplace:
/plugin marketplace add prowler-cloud/prowler /plugin install prowler@prowler-plugins
It requires a Prowler Cloud account and an API key from cloud.prowler.com/profile. Then you drive it with a high-level goal like "Make my AWS production account compliant with CIS 4.0." Because it grounds recommendations in Prowler's open-source check logic and Prowler Hub remediation, the work stays auditable and reproducible.
Key Capabilities for AWS Audits
Prowler does more than list findings. It is built to do the work that usually eats your team's time.
IAM and Permissions Analysis
Finds wildcard permissions, unused keys, missing MFA, and risky trust policies. Prowler untangles the IAM layers that take engineers 30+ minutes per role to evaluate by hand.
S3 and Storage Exposure
Detects public buckets, missing encryption, and disabled logging across every bucket in the account, the single most common cause of AWS data leaks.
Network and Encryption Checks
Flags security groups open to the internet, unencrypted EBS and RDS, and resources missing encryption in transit, across every region.
Attack Path Awareness
Connects findings to show how an exposed resource plus an over-privileged role becomes a real path to your data, so you fix what actually matters first.
Compliance Mapping
Every check maps to frameworks like CIS AWS, SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and NIST. Filter results by standard and export audit-ready evidence in a click.
Continuous, Scheduled Scans
Daily scans catch drift as soon as it happens. Findings flow to Slack, Jira, and your SIEM so they land where your team already works.
AWS Services Prowler Audits
Prowler runs 600+ checks across the AWS services where misconfigurations actually happen. A sample of what gets assessed:
| Area | AWS Services Checked | Example Findings |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | IAM, Organizations, IAM Identity Center, STS | Wildcard policies, no MFA on root, stale access keys |
| Storage | S3, EBS, EFS, RDS, DynamoDB, Backup | Public buckets, unencrypted volumes, no backups |
| Network | VPC, EC2 Security Groups, ELB, CloudFront, API Gateway | Open SSH/RDP, public databases, no WAF |
| Logging | CloudTrail, CloudWatch, VPC Flow Logs, Config | Logging disabled, no multi-region trail |
| Detection | GuardDuty, Security Hub, Inspector, Macie | Threat detection not enabled, findings ignored |
| Compute | EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS, ECR | Public AMIs, over-privileged functions, exposed clusters |
Want the exact logic behind any check? Every AWS check, its severity, and its remediation steps are published on the Prowler Hub. That transparency is something closed-source AWS scanners cannot offer.
Compliance Frameworks for AWS
Most teams run an AWS security audit because an auditor is asking for evidence. Prowler maps your AWS findings to 70+ frameworks automatically, so you can prove your posture instead of assembling spreadsheets the night before.
Need to go deeper on a single framework? See the guide to automated SOC 2 cloud compliance or browse the full list of frameworks in the Prowler documentation.
Why Teams Trust Prowler for AWS Security
Prowler is an open cloud security platform built by a community of 300+ contributors. It started as the go-to AWS security tool and is now used by security teams from startups to enterprises to audit AWS at scale.
Open Source Transparency
Prowler is open source under Apache 2.0. You can read every AWS check on the Prowler Hub before you run it. No black boxes when your auditor asks how a control was validated.
Read-Only by Design
The scan role uses AWS-managed SecurityAudit and ViewOnlyAccess. Prowler reads your configuration to assess it and never makes changes to your account.
Built for AWS Organizations
Onboard every account in your AWS Organization and audit them from one place, with centralized findings and compliance across hundreds of accounts.
10x Cost Efficiency
By leveraging open source, Prowler Cloud delivers up to 10x cost efficiency versus black box commercial CSPM tools, with the same or better AWS coverage.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an AWS security audit?
An AWS security audit is a systematic review of your AWS account against security best practices and compliance requirements. It checks IAM permissions, S3 bucket exposure, security group rules, encryption settings, logging configuration, and hundreds of other controls to find misconfigurations before attackers do. With Prowler Cloud you can run a full AWS security audit in minutes using read-only access.
How do I audit my AWS account for security issues?
Connect your AWS account to Prowler Cloud using a read-only IAM role, run a scan, and review the findings. Prowler runs 600+ AWS-specific checks mapped to frameworks like the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, SOC 2, PCI DSS, and HIPAA. Each finding tells you the affected resource, the severity, and how to fix it. You can sign up free with no credit card and get your first results in under 10 minutes.
Is there a free AWS security audit tool?
Yes. Prowler is the most widely adopted open source cloud security platform, with over 45 million downloads and 14,000+ GitHub stars, and it is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Prowler Cloud, the managed SaaS version, is free to try with no credit card required and runs the same AWS security checks as a hosted service.
Does an AWS security audit make changes to my account?
No. Prowler audits your AWS account using read-only access. The scan role is built from the AWS-managed SecurityAudit and ViewOnlyAccess policies, so Prowler can read your configuration to assess it but cannot modify, create, or delete any resources.
How often should I run an AWS security audit?
Continuously. A point-in-time audit is outdated the moment someone spins up a new resource or changes a configuration. Prowler Cloud supports scheduled daily scans so your AWS account is assessed every day, and findings are routed to Slack, Jira, or your SIEM so drift gets caught within hours instead of at your next annual audit.
Can Prowler audit multiple AWS accounts and AWS Organizations?
Yes. Prowler Cloud can onboard every account in your AWS Organization and audit them from a single place, with centralized findings and compliance reporting across all accounts. This is how teams running dozens or hundreds of AWS accounts keep a consistent security baseline. Learn more about AWS Organizations security.
How do I fix the issues Prowler finds?
Prowler Cloud gives you two remediation paths. Use Lighthouse AI to turn any finding into a concrete fix: an IaC change (Terraform or CloudFormation), a CLI command, a cloud-native control, or guided manual steps for the affected AWS resource. To automate the whole loop, install the Prowler plugin for Claude Code. The agent pulls findings across your connected AWS accounts, prioritizes them by blast radius from the attack-path graph, opens pull requests with the exact fixes, keeps a versioned audit trail under .prowler/, and re-scans to confirm each check cleared.
Audit Your AWS Account in Minutes
Prowler Cloud is free to try. Connect your AWS account with a read-only role and get a full security and compliance assessment in under 10 minutes. No credit card required.
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