AWS – Amazon Inspector agentless vulnerability assessments for Amazon EC2 are now Generally Available (GA)

Amazon Inspector now offers continuous monitoring of your Amazon EC2 instances for software vulnerabilities without installing an agent or additional software. Currently, Inspector leverages the widely deployed AWS Systems Manager (SSM) agent to assess your EC2 instances for third-party software vulnerabilities. With this expansion, Inspector now offers two scan modes for EC2 scanning, hybrid scan mode and agent-based scan mode. In hybrid scan mode, Inspector relies on SSM agents to collect information from instances to perform vulnerability assessments and automatically switches to agentless scanning for instances that do not have SSM agents installed or configured. For agentless scanning, Inspector takes snapshots of EBS volumes to collect software application inventory from the instances to perform vulnerability assessments. For agent-based scan mode, Inspector only scans instances that have a SSM agent installed and configured. New customers enabling EC2 scanning are configured in hybrid mode by default, while existing customers can migrate to hybrid mode by simply visiting the EC2 settings page within the Inspector console. Once enabled, Inspector automatically discovers all your EC2 instances and starts evaluating them for software vulnerabilities.

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