Open-Source AWS Benchmark Lets Teams Compare Cloud Security Tools on Equal Terms

A team has released an open-source, Terraform-deployed AWS environment containing 30 documented misconfigurations across eight services, designed to serve as a standardised benchmark for evaluating cloud security tools. The project was created to address a long-standing gap in the industry: unlike JavaScript's TodoMVC, no common testing ground existed for comparing tools such as Prowler, Wiz, or AWS Config against identical conditions. Each misconfiguration carries a unique ID, severity rating, and manual verification steps, while five multi-resource attack paths test whether tools can connect individual findings into broader threat chains. Evaluators deploy the environment in roughly 10 minutes at an estimated cost of $2 per day, run their chosen tools, and score results using a simple CSV scorecard with FOUND, MISSED, PARTIAL, or N/A ratings. The benchmark aims to shift cloud security evaluations from vendor-curated demos to objective, reproducible data.