prowler

Prowler is a free, open-source tool that automatically checks your cloud accounts for security problems and compliance gaps. You point it at your cloud provider, and it runs hundreds of pre-built tests to find misconfigurations, open permissions, and other issues that could put your data at risk.

The tool supports a wide range of cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Microsoft 365, GitHub, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Cloudflare, and MongoDB Atlas, among others. For AWS alone it runs 595 checks across 84 services. It also covers infrastructure-as-code files and AI model safety checks. Results can be viewed through a command-line interface, a web dashboard, or a hosted web application called Prowler Cloud.

Compliance is a big part of what Prowler does. It maps its findings to a long list of industry standards and regulations, including CIS benchmarks, NIST frameworks, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, and more. If your organization needs to demonstrate that it follows one of these frameworks, Prowler can generate a report showing which controls you pass or fail. You can also build custom frameworks tailored to your own requirements.

A newer feature called Attack Paths connects scan results to a graph database to show how individual misconfigurations could be chained together into a larger attack. This requires a Neo4j instance running alongside Prowler, which the bundled Docker Compose setup provides.

Prowler can be installed as a Python package via pip, run as a Docker container, or pulled from the AWS Elastic Container Registry. A hosted version, Prowler Cloud, offers a web interface for teams that prefer not to run the tool themselves. The project is actively maintained, has a public Slack community, and scores well on Linux Foundation health metrics. If you manage cloud infrastructure and want an automated way to catch security issues before attackers do, this is a well-established starting point.