Amazon Web Services SCS-C02 Dumps

Enable AWS Config Managed Rule:

Activate therestricted-sshAWS Config managed rule to evaluate security groups for SSH access from0.0.0.0/0.

Create an EventBridge Rule:

Configure an EventBridge rule to trigger on compliance change events generated by therestricted-sshmanaged rule.

Set Target to SNS:

Configure the EventBridge rule to target an SNS topic that notifies the security team when a noncompliant security group is detected.

Advantages:

Provides near-real-time notifications.

Fully integrates with AWS native services for compliance monitoring.

AWS Config Managed Rules

Amazon EventBridge Documentation

The correct answer is D.

To design a solution that will proactively monitor for suspicious behavior across all the accounts that contain production workloads, the security engineer needs to use a service that can aggregate and analyze security findings from multiple sources. AWS Security Hub is a service that provides a comprehensive view of your security posture across your AWS accounts and enables you to check your environment against security standards and best practices. Security Hub also integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Config, and AWS Systems Manager, to collect and correlate security findings.

To automate remediation of incidents across the production accounts, the security engineer needs to use a service that can trigger actions based on events. Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus service that allows you to connect your applications with data from a variety of sources. EventBridge can use rules to match events and route them to targets for processing. You can use EventBridge to invoke a custom AWS Lambda function from the Security Hub findings. Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers.

To publish a notification to an Amazon SNS topic when a critical security finding is detected, the security engineer needs to use a service that can send messages to subscribers. Amazon SNS is a fully managed messaging service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SNS can deliver messages to a variety of endpoints, such as email, SMS, or HTTP. You can configure the Lambda function to also publish notifications to the SNS topic.

To send all security incident logs to a dedicated account, the security engineer needs to use a service that can aggregate and store log data from multiple sources. AWS Security Hub allows you to aggregate security findings from multiple accounts into a single account using the delegated administrator feature. This feature enables you to designate an AWS account as the administrator for Security Hub in an organization. The administrator account can then view and manage Security Hub findings from all member accounts.

Therefore, option D is correct because it meets all the requirements of the solution. Option A is incorrect because GuardDuty does not provide a comprehensive view of your security posture across your AWS accounts. GuardDuty is primarily a threat detection service that monitors for malicious or unauthorized behavior. Option B is incorrect because Config and Systems Manager are not designed to automate remediation of incidents based on Security Hub findings. Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources, while Systems Manager is a service that allows you to manage your infrastructure on AWS at scale. Option C is incorrect because GuardDuty does not provide a comprehensive view of your security posture across your AWS accounts.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Using SSE-KMS with customer-managed keys enables separation of duties:

The operations team can configure the bucket policy to enforce encryption.

The security team manages access to the encryption keys via KMS key policies.

This ensures that neither team alone can access plaintext data, aligning with data protection and least privilege principles.

Storing sensitive information in environment variables is not a secure practice, as anyone who has access to the Lambda console or the Lambda function code can view them asplaintext. To address this security issue, the security engineer needs to use a service that can store and encrypt the environment variables, and access them at runtime using IAM permissions. The most cost-effective way to do this is to use AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, which is a service that provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management. Parameter Store allows you to store values as standard parameters (plaintext) or secure string parameters (encrypted). Secure string parameters use a AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) customer master key (CMK) to encrypt the parameter value. To access the parameter value at runtime, the Lambda function needs to have IAM permissions to decrypt the parameter using the KMS CMK.

The other options are incorrect because:

Option A is incorrect because setting up IAM policies from the Lambda console to hide access to the environment variables will not prevent someone who has access to the Lambda function code from viewing them as plaintext. IAM policies can only control who can perform actions on AWS resources, not what they can see in the code or the console.

Option B is incorrect because using AWS Step Functions to store the environment variables is not a secure or cost-effective solution. AWS Step Functions is a service that lets you coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows. Step Functions does not provide any encryption or secrets management capabilities, and it will incur additional charges for each state transition in the workflow. Moreover, storing environment variables in Step Functions will make them visible in the execution history of the workflow, which can be accessed by anyone who has permission to view the Step Functions console or API.

Option C is incorrect because storing the environment variables in AWS Secrets Manager and accessing them at runtime is not a cost-effective solution. AWS Secrets Manager is a service that helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. Secrets Manager enables you to rotate, manage, and retrieve secrets throughout their lifecycle. While Secrets Manager can securely store and encrypt environment variables using KMS CMKs, it will incur higher charges than Parameter Store for storing and retrieving secrets. Unless the security engineer needs the advanced features of Secrets Manager, such as automatic rotation of secrets or integration with other AWS services, Parameter Store is a cheaper and simpler option.

The correct answer is A because GuardDuty can detect and alert on EC2 instance credential exfiltration events. These events indicate that the credentials obtained from the EC2 instance metadata service are being used from an IP address that is owned by a differentAWS account than the one that owns the instance1. GuardDuty can also provide details such as the source and destination IP addresses, the AWS account ID of the attacker, and the API calls made using the exfiltrated credentials2.

The other options are incorrect because they do not provide the information needed to determine if the credentials were used to access the company’s resources from an external account. Option B is incorrect because Audit Manager does not generate InstanceCredentialExfiltration events. Audit Manager is a service that helpsyou continuously audit your AWS usage to simplify how you assess risk and compliance with regulations and industry standards3. Option C is incorrect because CloudTrail logs do not show the account ID of the caller for GetSessionToken API calls to AWS STS. CloudTrail logs show the account ID of the identity whose credentials were used to call the API4. Option D is incorrect because CloudWatch logs do not show the GetSessionToken API calls to AWS STS by default. CloudWatch logs can show the API calls made by AWS Lambda functions, Amazon API Gateway, and other AWS services that integrate with CloudWatch5.

The most cost-effective way to correct a typo in a vault lock policy during the 24-hour initiation period is to call theabort-vault-lockoperation. This action stops the vault lock process, allowing the security engineer to correct the policy and re-initiate the vault lock with the corrected policy. This approach avoids the need for data transfer or creating a new vault, thus minimizing costs and operational overhead.

The correct answer is B because it checks the configuration of the CloudWatch alarm that is supposed to monitor the CloudTrail log events. The analyst should verify that a metric filter was created to extract the relevant information from the log events, such as the event name, source, and user identity. The analyst should also verify that the metric filter wasmapped to an alarm that triggers when a certain threshold is reached, and that the alarm notification action is set up correctly to send alerts to the analyst1.

The other options are incorrect because they do not address the issue of the CloudWatch alarm not working as expected. Option A is incorrect because CloudTrail and S3 bucket access logging are not related to the monitoring of security group changes. CloudTrail logs the API calls made to AWS services, and S3 bucket access logging records the requestsmade to thebucket2. OptionC is incorrect because CloudWatch dashboards are used to display metrics and alarms in a graphical way, but they do not affect the functionality of the alarm3. Option D is incorrect because the IAM policy permissions for cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics and cloudwatch:ListMetrics are not required to monitor the CloudTrail log events. These permissions are used to retrieve the statistics and list of metrics for a given namespace4.

The AWS documentation states that you can create an Amazon EventBridge rule with a pattern that matches Security Hub findings events with high severity. You can then configure the rule to send the findings to a target Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. You can subscribe the desired email addresses to the SNS topic. This method is the least operational overhead way to meet the requirements.

To meet the requirements of securing access management and implementing a centralized logging solution, the most secure solution would be to:

Install a bastion host in the management account.

Reconfigure all SSH and RDP to allow access only from the bastion host.

Install AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) on the bastion host.

Attach the AmazonSSMManagedlnstanceCore role to the bastion host.

Configure session data streaming to Amazon CloudWatch Logs in a separate logging account to audit log data

This solution provides the following security benefits:

It uses AWS Systems Manager Session Manager instead of traditional SSH and RDP protocols, which provides a secure method for accessing EC2 instances without requiring inbound firewall rules or open ports.

It provides audit trails by configuring Session Manager logging to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and creating a separate logging account to audit the log data.

It uses the AWS Systems Manager Agent to automate common administrative tasks and improve the security posture of the instances.

The separate logging account with cross-account permissions provides better data separation and improves security posture.

To implement the solution, the security engineer should do the following:

Assign an Elastic IP address to Amazon EFS and add the Elastic IP address to the allow list for the data center firewall. This allows the security engineer to use a specific IP address for the EFS file system that can be added to the firewall rules, instead of a CIDR range or a URL.

Install the AWS CLI on the data center-based servers to mount the EFS file system. This allows the security engineer to use the mount helper provided by AWS CLI to mount the EFS file system with encryption in transit.

In the EFS security group, add the IP addresses of the data center servers to the allow list. This allows the security engineer to restrict access to the EFS file system to only certain data center-based servers.

Mount the EFS using the Elastic IP address. This allows the security engineer to use the Elastic IP address as the DNS name for mounting the EFS file system.

Restrict Root User Capabilities Using Service Control Policies (SCPs):

SCPs in AWS Organizations provide the ability to control permissions for AWS accounts in the organization.

Create a new organizational unit (OU) and move all member accounts into this OU.

Create SCP for Root User Restrictions:

Define an SCP that denies critical actions likeiam:CreateUser,iam:DeleteUser, or other high-risk actions for the root user. Example SCP:

{

"Version": "2012-10-17",

"Statement": [

{

"Effect": "Deny",

"Action": "*",

"Resource": "*",

"Condition": {

"StringEquals": {

"aws:PrincipalAccountRoot": "true"

}

}

}

]

}

Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA):

Enable MFA on root accounts for additional security.

Monitor Root User Activity:

Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor and log root user actions. Configure alerts with CloudWatch for any unauthorized root usage.

AWS Organizations SCP Documentation

Best Practices for Root User Account

Users in member accounts will not have sufficient permissions to delete the organization trail, turn logging on or off, change what types of events are logged, or otherwise alter the organization trail in any

The key length for an RSA certificate that you use with CloudFront is 2048 bits, even though ACM supports larger keys. If you use an imported certificate with CloudFront, your key length must be 1024 or 2048 bits and cannot exceed 2048 bits. You must import the certificate in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. You must have permission to use and importthe SSL/TLS certificate

The correct answer is D. Change the existing CloudTrail trail so that it applies to all Regions.

According to the AWS documentation1, you can configure CloudTrail to deliver log files from multiple Regions to a single S3 bucket for a single account.To change an existing single-Region trail to log in all Regions, you must use the AWS CLI and add the --is-multi-region-trail option to the update-trail command2. This will ensure that you log global service events and capture all management event activity in your account.

Option A is incorrect because creating a new CloudTrail trail for each Region will incur additional costs and increase operational overhead. Option B is incorrect because changing the S3 bucket to receive notifications will not affect the delivery of log files from other Regions. Option C is incorrect because creating a new CloudTrail trail that applies to all Regions will result in duplicate log files for the original Region and also incur additional costs.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

IAM paths allow organizations to logically group IAM resources such as roles. By setting IAM paths for different teams, the company can identify and control access granularly. The iam:PassRole action is critical for delegating permissions, especially to AWS services. By attaching a Service Control Policy (SCP) that denies iam:PassRole for all roles except those in the platform team's IAM path, the organization enforces centralized delegation control.

This approach fulfills the need for logical grouping (via paths) and enforces delegated access through SCPs, in line with IAM and Governance best practices.

AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. AWS Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations.

To evaluate configuration changes to a specific AWS resource and ensure that it meets compliance standards, the security engineer should use AWS Config to detect the configuration changes and to record the latest configuration in case of multiple configuration changes. This will allow the security engineer to view the current state of the resource and its compliance status, as well as its configuration history and timeline.

AWS Config records configuration changes as ConfigurationItems, which are point-in-time snapshots of the resource’s attributes, relationships, and metadata. If multiple configuration changes occur within a short period of time, AWS Config records only the latest ConfigurationItem for that resource. This indicates the cumulative impact of the set of changes on the resource’s configuration.

This solution will meet the requirement in the most operationally efficient way, as it leverages AWS Config’s features to monitor, record, and evaluate resource configurations without requiring additional tools or services.

The other options are incorrect because they either do not record the latest configuration in case of multiple configuration changes (A, C), or do not use a valid service for evaluating resource configurations (D).

Verified References:

The possible steps to troubleshoot this issue are:

A. Ensure that the EC2 instance profile that is attached to the EC2 instances has permissions to create log streams and write logs.This is a necessary step because the CloudWatch agent uses the credentialsfrom the instance profile to communicate with CloudWatch1.

C. Check the CloudWatch agent configuration file on each EC2 instance to make sure that the CloudWatch agent is collecting the proper log files.This is a necessary step because the CloudWatch agent needs to know which logfiles to monitor and send to CloudWatch2.

D. Check the VPC endpoint policies of both VPC endpoints to ensure that the EC2 instances have permissions to use them.This is a necessary step because the VPC endpoint policies control which principals can access the AWS services through the endpoints3.

The other options are incorrect because:

B. Creating a metric filter on the logs is not a troubleshooting step, but a way to extract metric data from the logs. Metric filters do not affect the visibility of the logs in the AWS Management Console.

E. Creating a NAT gateway in the subnet is not a solution, because the EC2 instances do not need internet access to communicate with CloudWatch through the VPC endpoints.A NAT gateway would also incur additional costs.

F. Ensuring that the security groups allow all the EC2 instances to communicate with each other is not a necessary step, because the CloudWatch agent does not require log aggregation before sending. Each EC2 instance can send its own logs independently to CloudWatch.

because these are the actions that can improve IAM account root user security. IAM account root user is a user that has complete access to all AWS resources and services in an account. IAM account root user security is a set of best practices that help protect the account root user from unauthorized oraccidental use. Deleting the access keys for the account root user in every account can help prevent programmatic access by the account root user, which reduces the risk of compromise or misuse. Enabling MFA on every account root user in all accounts can help add an extra layer of security for console access by requiring a verification code in addition to a password. Creating a custom IAM policy to limit permissions to required actions for the account root user and attaching the policy to the account root user can help enforce the principle of least privilege and restrict the account root user from performing unnecessary or dangerous actions. The other options are either invalid or ineffective for improving IAM account root user security.

The correct answer is D. The AWS Config rules have a MaximumExecutionFrequency value of 24 hours.

According to the AWS documentation1, the MaximumExecutionFrequency parameter specifies the maximum frequency with which AWS Config runs evaluations for a rule. For AWS Config managed rules, this value can be one of the following:

One_Hour

Three_Hours

Six_Hours

Twelve_Hours

TwentyFour_Hours

If the rule is triggered by configuration changes, it will still run evaluations when AWS Config delivers the configuration snapshot. However, if the rule is triggered periodically, it will not run evaluations more often than the specified frequency.

In this case, the security engineer enabled four AWS Config managed rules that are triggered periodically. Therefore, these rules will only run evaluations every 24 hours, regardless of when the IAM credential report is generated. This means that the resources will display as noncompliant until the next evaluation cycle, which could take up to 24 hours after the IAM access keys are rotated.

The other options are incorrect because:

A. The IAM credential report can be generated at any time, but it will not affect the compliance status of the resources until the next evaluation cycle of the AWS Config rules.

B. The security engineer was able to invoke the IAM GenerateCredentialReport API operation, which means they have the GenerateCredentialReport permission.This permission is required to generate a credential report that lists all IAM users in an AWS account and their credential status2.

C. The security engineer does not need the GetCredentialReport permission to enable or evaluate AWS Config rules.This permission is required to retrieve a credential report that was previously generated by using the GenerateCredentialReport operation2.

The combination of solutions that will meet the requirements are:

A. Create a local individual break glass IAM user for the security team. Create a trail in AWS CloudTrail that has Amazon CloudWatch Logs turned on. Use Amazon EventBridge to monitor local user activities. This is a valid solution because it allows the security team to access the workload AWS account and instances using a local IAM user that does not depend on SAML federation.It also enables logging and monitoring of the break glass user activities using AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, and Amazon EventBridge123.

E. Configure AWS Systems Manager Session Manager for Amazon EC2. Configure an AWS CloudTrail filter based on Session Manager. Send the results to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. This is a valid solution because it allows the security team to access the workload instances without opening any inbound ports or managing SSH keys or bastion hosts.It also enables logging and notification of the breakglass user activities using AWS CloudTrail, Session Manager, and Amazon SNS456.

The other options are incorrect because:

B.Creating a break glass EC2 key pair for the AWS account and providing it to the security team is not a valid solution, because it requires opening inbound ports on the instances and managing SSH keys, which increases the security risk and complexity7.

C.Creating a break glass IAM role for the account and allowing security team members to perform the AssumeRoleWithSAML operation is not a valid solution, because it still dependson SAML federation, which might not work in case of SAML errors8.

D.Creating a local individual break glass IAM user on the operating system level of each workload instance and configuring unrestricted security groups on theinstances to grant access to the break glass IAM users is not a valid solution,because it requires opening inbound ports on the instances and managing multiple local users, which increases the security risk and complexity9.

An Application Load Balancer (ALB) is a type of load balancer that operates at the application layer (layer 7) of the OSI model. It can distribute incoming traffic based on the content of the request, such as the host header, path, or query parameters. An ALB can also terminate TLS connections and decrypt requests from clients before sending them to the targets.

To implement TLS for incoming traffic to the application, the following steps are required:

Create a public ALB in a public subnet and register the EC2 instances as targets in a target group.

Create two listeners for the ALB, one on port 80 for HTTP traffic and one on port 443 for HTTPS traffic.

Create a rule for the listener on port 80 to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS using the same host, path, and query parameters.

Provision a public TLS certificate in AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for the domain name of the application. ACM is a service that lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates for use with AWS services and your internal connected resources.

Attach the certificate to the listener on port 443 and configure the security policy to negotiate secure connections between clients and the ALB.

Configure the security groups for the ALB and the EC2 instances to allow inbound traffic on ports 80 and 443 from the internet and outbound traffic on any port to the EC2 instances.

This solution will meet the requirements of implementing TLS for incoming traffic without impacting performance or requiring end-to-end encryption. The ALB will handle the TLS termination and decryption, while forwarding unencrypted requests to the EC2 instances.

Verified References:

The correct answer is A, C, and E because they provide the most secure and efficient way to implement private connectivity to AWS services. Using interface VPC endpoints for Amazon SQS and gateway VPC endpoints for Amazon S3 allows the application to access these services without using public IP addresses or internet gateways. Modifying the endpoint policies on all VPC endpoints enables the security engineer to specify the SQS and S3 resources that the application uses and restrict access to other resources.

The other options are incorrect because they do not provide private connectivity to AWS services or they introduce unnecessary complexity or cost. Option B is incorrect because AWS Transit Gateway is used to connect multiple VPCs and on-premises networks, not to connect to AWS services. Option D is incorrect because modifying the IAM role applied to the EC2 instances is not sufficient to allow outbound traffic to the interface endpoints. The security group and route table associated with the interface endpoints also need to be configured. Option F is incorrect because AWS Firewall Manager is used to centrally manage firewall rules across multiple accounts and resources, not to connect to AWS services.

By disabling SSL termination, you are leaving an unsecure connection from the ELB to the back end instances. Hence this means that part of the data transit is not being encrypted.

Option B is incorrect because this would not guarantee complete encryption of data in transit

Option C and D are incorrect because these would not guarantee encryption

For more information on SSL Listeners for your load balancer, please visit the below URL:

The correct answer is: Use S3 SSE and use SSL for data in transit

Submit your Feedback/Queries to our Experts

To allow a Lambda function in one AWS account to access a KMS customer managed key in another AWS account, the following steps are required:

Configure the key policy for the customer managed key in the production account to allow access to the IAM role of the Lambda function in the development account. A key policy is a resource-based policy that defines who can use or manage a KMS key. To grant cross-account access to a KMS key, you must specify the AWS account ID and the IAM role ARN of the external principal in the key policy statement. For more information, see Allowing users in other accounts to use a KMS key.

Configure the IAM role for the Lambda function in the development account by attaching an IAM policy that allows access to the customer managed key in the production account. An IAM policy is an identity-based policy that defines what actions an IAM entity can perform on which resources. To allow an IAM role to use a KMS key in another account, you must specify the KMS key ARN and the kms:Encrypt action (or any other action that requires access to the KMS key) in the IAM policy statement. For more information, see Using IAM policies with AWS KMS.

This solution will meet the requirements of allowing secure access to a KMS customermanaged key across AWS accounts.

The other options are incorrect because they either do not grant cross-account access to the KMS key (A, C), or do not use a valid policy type for KMS keys (D).

Verified References:

This answer is correct because AWS Shield Advanced is a service that provides comprehensive protection against DDoS attacks of any size or duration. It also provides metrics and reports on the DDoS attack vectors, duration, and size. You can create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm that monitors Shield Advanced metrics such as DDoSAttackBitsPerSecond, DDoSAttackPacketsPerSecond, and DDoSAttackRequestsPerSecond to receive alerts if a DDoS attack occurs against your account.

For more information, see Monitoring AWS Shield Advanced with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Shield Advanced metrics and alarms.

Option B: This option meets the requirements of scanning ECS containers and ECR registries for vulnerabilities, and providing a centralized view of the findings for the audit team. AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. AWS Config conformance packs are a collection of AWS Config rules and remediation actions that can be easily deployed as a single entity in an account and a Region or across an organization in AWS Organizations. Conformance packs can help you manage configuration compliance of your AWS resources at scale by using a common framework and packaging model. You can use prebuilt conformance packs for vulnerability scanning, such as CIS Operating System SecurityConfiguration Benchmarks or Amazon Inspector Rules for Linux Instances1. You can also create custom conformance packs to scan for vulnerabilities in programming language libraries. AWS Config aggregator is a feature that enables you to aggregate configuration and compliance data from multiple accounts and Regions into a single accountand Region2. You can provide access for the audit team to use AWS Config in the account where the aggregator is configured, and view the aggregated data in the AWS Config console or API.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The AWS Encryption SDK supports client-side encryption and cryptographic signing, enabling applications to protect and verify sensitive data before it is transmitted or stored. This allows end-to-end protection and helps detect unauthorized data changes using signatures.

While both AWS Encryption SDK and the DynamoDB Encryption Client provide similar functionalities, the AWS Encryption SDK is broader in scope and better supported for generalized end-to-end encryption patterns.

This solution ensures:

Data protection in transit and at rest

Integrity assurance through signing

Compliance with best practices under the Data Protection domain.

To avoid AccessDeniedExceptions when users first attempt to encrypt using the CMK, the security specialist should recommend the following solution:

Instruct the engineering team to pass the grant token returned in the CreateGrant response to users. This allows the engineering team to use the grant token as a form of temporary authorization for the grant.

Instruct users to use that grant token in their call to encrypt. This allows the users to use the grant token as a proof that they have permission to use the CMK, and to avoid any eventual consistency issues with the grant creation.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

To mitigate traffic volume from a specific IP address without entirely blocking it, AWS WAF’s rate-based rules are the appropriate solution. AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) provides rate-based rules that allow a user to count and limit the rate of requests from individual IP addresses.

A rate-based rule tracks the number of requests that each originating IP makes in a rolling five-minute period. If the number of requests exceeds a specified threshold, WAF applies an action such as block or count.

This makes AWS WAF an ideal tool to throttle traffic rather than block it, which directly meets the use case described.

Reference from AWS Certified Security - Specialty Official Guide:

This capability is part of AWS WAF’s standard feature set, explicitly covered under the topics of Logging and Monitoring and Mitigating DDoS and Abnormal Behavior. Rate-based rules are discussed as a method for limiting the number of incoming requests based on request patterns without denying access outright.

To prevent unauthorized access to the EC2 instances, the security engineer should do the following:

Restrict SSH access in the security group to only known corporate IP addresses. This allows the security engineer to use a virtual firewall that controls inbound and outbound traffic for their EC2 instances, and limit SSH access to only trusted sources.

To allow an IAM user in one AWS account to access resources in another AWS account using IAM roles, the following steps are required:

Create a role in the AWS account that contains the resources (the trusting account) and specify the AWS account that contains the IAM user (the trusted account) as a trusted entity in the role’s trust policy. This allows users from the trusted account to assume the role and access resources in the trusting account.

Attach a policy to the IAM user in the trusted account that allows the user to assume the role in the trusting account. The policy must specify the ARN of the role that was created in the trusting account.

The IAM user can then switch roles or use temporary credentials to access the resources in the trusting account.

Verified References:

To configure end-to-end encryption between the Elastic Load Balancer and the EC2 instances with the least operational effort, the most appropriate solution would be to use Amazon issued AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) certificates on the EC2 instances and the Elastic Load Balancer to configure end-to-end encryption.

 AWS Certificate Manager - Amazon Web Services : Elastic Load Balancing - Amazon Web Services : Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - Amazon Web Services : AWS Certificate Manager - Amazon Web Services

Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Elasticsearch are both suitable for forensic-logging solutions. Amazon Kinesis can collect, process, and analyze streaming data in real time3. Amazon Elasticsearch can store, search, and analyze log data using the popular open-source tool Elasticsearch. The other options are not designed for forensic-logging purposes. Amazon Athena is a query service that can analyze data in S3, Amazon SQS is a message queue service that can decouple and scale microservices, and AmazonEMR is a big data platform that can run Apache Spark and Hadoop clusters.

Verify File Permissions:

Ensure that the log files being monitored by the CloudWatch Logs agent are still accessible.

Check permissions to confirm that the agent's process can read the files.

Check Log Rotation Rules:

Operating systems may rotate logs periodically, causing the monitored file path to change.

Update the CloudWatch Logs agent configuration to handle rotated log files (e.g., wildcards or new file paths).

Diagnose with Agent Logs:

Review the agent logs in/var/log/amazon/or equivalent to identify potential issues.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Agent Setup

Handling Log Rotation

To detect suspicious activity in an AWS account for VPC hosted resources, the security engineer needs to use a service that can monitor network traffic and API calls across all AWS Regions. Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that can do this by analyzing VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail event logs, and DNS logs. By activating GuardDuty across all AWS Regions, the security engineer can provide visibility for as many regions as possible. GuardDuty generates findings that contain details about the potential threats detected in the account. To respond to these findings, the security engineer needs to create a mechanism that can notify the relevant stakeholders or take remedial actions. One way to do this is to use Amazon EventBridge, which is a serverless event bus service that can connect AWS services and third-party applications. By creating an EventBridge rule that responds to GuardDuty findings and publishes them to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic, the security engineer can enable subscribers of the topic to receive notifications via email, SMS, or other methods. This is a cost-effective solution that does not require any additional infrastructure or code.

the most scalable solution for accessing the IAM infrastructure in a multi-account strategy. A multi-account strategy is a way of organizing your AWS resources into multiple IAM accounts for security, billing, and management purposes. Federation is a process that allows users to access AWS resources using credentials from an external identity provider such as Active Directory or SAML. IAM roles are sets of permissions that grant access to AWS resources. Cross-account roles are IAM roles that allow users in one account to access resources in another account. By using a centralized account with IAM roles that employees can assume through federation with their existing identity provider, you can simplify and streamline the access management process. By using cross-account roles to allow the federated users to assume their target role in the resource accounts, you can enable granular and flexible access control across multiple accounts. The other options are either less scalable or less secure for accessing the IAM infrastructure in a multi-account strategy.

CloudHSM allows full control of your keys such including Symmetric (AES), Asymmetric (RSA), Sha-256, SHA 512, Hash Based, Digital Signatures (RSA). On the other hand, AWS Key Management Service is a multi-tenant key storage that is owned and managed byAWS1.

Enable Amazon Macie:

Amazon Macie automatically scans S3 buckets for sensitive data, such as PII, and uses managed data identifiers for efficient classification.

Configure Data Identifiers:

Use managed data identifiers for pre-configured sensitive data patterns like credit card numbers, personal information, etc.

Set Up Notifications:

Create an Amazon EventBridge rule to trigger on Macie findings.

Configure the rule to send notifications to the existing SNS topic.

Advantages:

Automated: Minimal manual intervention needed.

Efficient: Leverages Macie’s built-in capabilities to reduce implementation effort.

Amazon Macie Documentation

EventBridge Rules for Macie

 This option suggests updating the outbound network ACL for the subnet in us-east-1b to explicitly deny all connections as the first rule, replacing the security group with a new one that only allows connections from a diagnostics security group, and launching a new EC2 instance with diagnostic tools to investigate the suspicious instance. This option will immediately mitigate the attack and provide the necessary tools for investigation.

Understanding the IAM Policy:

The IAM useralicehas an explicit permission in the IAM policy to perform alls3:*actions on bothbucket1andbucket2resources.

This grants useralicefull access to both buckets from the IAM policy perspective.

Bucket Policy for bucket1:

The bucket policy forbucket1explicitly grants useralicefull access to this bucket.

This policy reinforces the permissions provided by the IAM policy.

Bucket Policy for bucket2:

bucket2does not have a bucket policy defined.

In the absence of a bucket policy, the permissions fall back to the IAM policy.

Effective Permissions:

Since the IAM policy grants access to both buckets, and there are no conflicting explicit deny statements, useralicecan access bothbucket1andbucket2.

IAM Policies and Bucket Policies

Evaluating Access with S3 Policies

To preserve the data for 7 years and prevent anyone from changing or deleting it, the security officer needs to use a service that can store the data securely and enforce compliance controls. The most cost-effective way to do this is to use Amazon S3 Glacier, which is a low-cost storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. S3 Glacier allows you to create a vault, which is a container for storing archives. Archives are any data such as photos, videos, or documents that you want to store durably and reliably.

S3 Glacier also offers a feature called Vault Lock, which helps you to easily deploy and enforce compliance controls for individual vaults with a Vault Lock policy. You can specify controls such as “write once read many” (WORM) in a Vault Lock policy and lock the policy from future edits. Once a Vault Lock policy is locked, the policy can no longer be changed or deleted. S3 Glacier enforces the controls set in the Vault Lock policy to help achieve your compliance objectives. For example, you can use Vault Lock policies to enforce data retention by denying deletes for a specified period of time.

To use S3 Glacier and Vault Lock, the security officer needs to follow these steps:

Create a vault in S3 Glacier using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS SDKs.

Create a Vault Lock policy in S3 Glacier that meets all the regulatory requirements using the IAM policy language. The policy can include conditions such as aws:CurrentTime or aws:SecureTransport to further restrict access to the vault.

Initiate the lock by attaching the Vault Lock policy to the vault, which sets the lock to an in-progress state and returns a lock ID. While the policy is in the in-progress state, you have 24 hours to validate your Vault Lock policy before the lock ID expires. To prevent your vault from exiting the in-progress state, you must complete the Vault Lock process within these 24 hours.Otherwise, your Vault Lock policy will be deleted.

Use the lock ID to complete the lock process. If the Vault Lock policy doesn’t work as expected, you can stop the Vault Lock process and restart from the beginning.

Upload the data to the vault using either direct upload or multipart upload methods.

For more information about S3 Glacier and Vault Lock, seeS3 Glacier Vault Lock.

The other options are incorrect because:

Option A is incorrect because creating an Amazon S3 bucket and configuring it to use S3 Object Lock in compliance mode will not prevent anyone from changing or deleting the data. S3 Object Lock is a feature that allows you to store objects using a WORM model in S3. You can apply two types of object locks: retention periods and legal holds. A retention period specifies a fixed period of time during which an object remains locked. A legal hold is an indefinite lock on an object until it is removed. However, S3 Object Lock only prevents objects from being overwritten or deleted by any user, including the root user in your AWS account. It does not prevent objects from being modified by other means, such as changingtheir metadata or encryption settings. Moreover, S3 Object Lock requires that you enable versioning on your bucket, which will incur additional storage costs for storing multiple versions of an object.

Option B is incorrect because creating an Amazon S3 bucket and configuring it to use S3 Object Lock in governance mode will not prevent anyone from changing or deleting the data. S3 Object Lock in governance mode works similarly to compliance mode, except that users with specific IAM permissions can change or delete objects that are locked. This means that users who have s3:BypassGovernanceRetention permission can remove retention periods or legal holds from objects and overwrite or delete them before they expire. This option does not provide strong enforcement for compliance controls as required by the regulatory requirements.

Option D is incorrect because creating an Amazon S3 bucket and using a lifecycle rule to transition the data to a vault in S3 Glacier will not prevent anyone from changing or deleting the data. Lifecycle rules are actions that Amazon S3 automatically performs on objects during their lifetime. You can use lifecycle rules to transition objects between storage classes or expire them after a certain period of time. However, lifecycle rules do not apply any compliance controls on objects or prevent them from being modified or deleted by users. Moreover, transitioning objects from S3 to S3 Glacier using lifecycle rules will incur additional charges for retrieval requests and data transfers.

A bucket policy is a resource-based policy that defines permissions for a specific S3 bucket. It can be used to grant cross-account access to another AWS account or an IAM user or role in another account. A bucket policy can also specify which actions, resources, and conditions are allowed or denied.

A bucket ACL is an access control list that grants basic read or write permissions to predefined groups of users. It cannot be used to grant cross-account access to a specific IAM user or role in another account.

An object ACL is an access control list that grants basic read or write permissions to predefined groups of users for a specific object in an S3 bucket. It cannot be used to grant cross-account access to a specific IAM user or role in another account.

A user policy is an IAM policy that defines permissions for an IAM user or role in the same account. It cannot be used to grant cross-account access to another AWS account or an IAM user or role in another account.

For more information, see Provide cross-account access to objects in Amazon S3 buckets and Example 2: Bucket owner granting cross-account bucket permissions.

Understand the Risk:

Unauthorized users could stop or delete CloudTrail logging, creating a gap in audit trails.

Create a Service Control Policy (SCP):

Define an SCP at the root organizational unit (OU) level. The SCP should explicitly denyStopLoggingandDeleteTrailactions.

Example SCP:

{

"Version": "2012-10-17",

"Statement": [

{

"Effect": "Deny",

"Action": [

"cloudtrail:StopLogging",

"cloudtrail:DeleteTrail"

],

"Resource": "*"

}

]

}

Attach the SCP:

Attach the SCP to the root OU in AWS Organizations. This ensures the policy is enforced across all accounts within the organization.

Test and Verify:

Attempt to stop or delete a CloudTrail trail to ensure the SCP prevents these actions.

AWS CloudTrail Security Best Practices

Service Control Policies Documentation

Enable Amazon Macie for Sensitive Data Discovery (Option A):

Use Amazon Macie to identify personal health information (PHI) in S3 buckets.

Create an on-demand sensitive data discovery job with the PERSONAL_INFORMATION managed data identifier.

Enable AWS Audit Manager for Compliance Evidence (Option C):

Use AWS Audit Manager to automate evidence collection for compliance.

Select a supported framework (e.g., HIPAA) to assess compliance readiness.

Enable AWS Security Hub for Public Access Monitoring (Option E):

Enable Security Hub and use the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard.

Review the dashboard for failed controls related to S3 Block Public Access.

Advantages:

Automated Discovery: Macie and Security Hub reduce manual effort.

Centralized Compliance Management: Audit Manager streamlines evidence collection.

Amazon Macie Documentation

AWS Audit Manager Documentation

AWS Security Hub Documentation

Restrict Access Using S3 Bucket Policy:

Use theaws:SourceVpccondition key in the S3 bucket policy to ensure that requests are only allowed from the specified VPC ID.

Example Bucket Policy:

The following bucket policy ensures requests originate from the same VPC:

{

"Version": "2012-10-17",

"Statement": [

{

"Effect": "Allow",

"Principal": "*",

"Action": "s3:*",

"Resource": [

"arn:aws:s3:::example-bucket",

"arn:aws:s3:::example-bucket/*"

],

"Condition": {

"StringEquals": {

"aws:SourceVpc": "vpc-xxxxxxxx"

}

}

}

]

}

Advantages:

Prevents misuse of credentials in unauthorized VPCs.

Adds an additional layer of security by limiting S3 access to specific VPCs.

Test and Validate:

Verify that only requests from the allowed VPC can access the S3 bucket.

AWS S3 Bucket Policy Conditions

AWS Condition Keys for S3

The correct answer is D. Remove Amazon SES from the root SCP.

This answer is correct because the root SCP is the most restrictive policy that applies to all accounts in the organization. The root SCP explicitly denies access to Amazon SES by using the NotAction element, which means that any action that is not listed in the element is denied. Therefore, removing Amazon SES from the root SCP will allow the developers to access it, as long as there are no other SCPs or IAM policies that deny it.

The other options are incorrect because:

A.Adding a resource policy that allows each member of the group to access Amazon SES is not a solution, because resource policies are not supported by Amazon SES1.Resource policies are policies that are attached to AWS resources, suchas S3 buckets or SNS topics, to control access to those resources2. Amazon SES does not have any resources that can have resource policies attached to them.

B.Adding a resource policy that allows “Principal”: {“AWS”: “arn:aws:iam::account-number:group/Dev”} is not a solution, because resource policies do not support IAM groups asprincipals3.Principals are entities that can perform actions on AWS resources, such as IAM users, roles, or AWSaccounts4.IAM groups are not principals, but collections of IAM users that share the same permissions5.

C.Removing the AWS Control Tower control (guardrail) that restricts access to Amazon SES is not a solution, because AWS Control Tower does not have any guardrails that restrict access to Amazon SES6.Guardrails are high-level rules that govern the overall behavior of an organization’s accounts7.AWS Control Tower provides a set of predefined guardrails that cover security, compliance, and operations domains8.

because these are the features that can address the CISO’s concerns about cryptographic wear-out and blast radius. Cryptographic wear-out is a phenomenon that occurs when a key is used too frequently or for too long, which increases the risk of compromise or degradation. Blast radius is a measure of how much damage a compromised key can cause to the encrypted data. S3 uses KMS to generate a unique data key for each individual object, which reduces both cryptographic wear-out and blast radius. The KMS encryption envelope digitally signs the master key during encryption, which prevents cryptographicwear-out by ensuring that only authorized parties can use the master key. The other options are either incorrect or irrelevant for addressing the CISO’s concerns.

To redesign the edge security to help mitigate the DDoS attack risk in the future, the engineer could do the following:

Move the static content to Amazon S3, and front this with an Amazon CloudFront distribution. This allows the engineer to use a global content delivery network that can cache static content at edge locations and reduce the load on the origin servers.

Use AWS WAF security rules to inspect the inbound traffic. This allows the engineer to use web application firewall rules that can filter malicious requests based on IP addresses, headers, body, or URI strings, and block them before they reach the web servers.

Use Amazon Route 53 to distribute traffic. This allows the engineer to use a scalable and highly available DNS service that can route traffic based on different policies, such as latency, geolocation, or health checks.

To resolve CloudTrail's failure to deliver events to S3, verifying the S3 bucket policy for CloudTrail's write permissions (A) and ensuring the existence of the specified S3 bucket (D) are critical initial steps. These actions ensure that CloudTrail has the necessary permissions and a valid destination for log file delivery, addressing common configuration issues that can interrupt event logging.

To mitigate a credential stuffing attack against a web-based application behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB), creating an AWS WAF web ACL with a custom rule to block requests containing the known malicious user agent string is an effective solution. This approach allows for precise targeting of the attack vector (the user agent string of the device emulator) without impacting legitimate users. AWS WAF provides the capability to inspect HTTP(S) requests and block those that match defined criteria, such as specific strings in the user agent header, thereby preventing malicious requests from reaching the application.

Understanding the Problem:

Logs are encrypted with a KMS-managed key (SSE-KMS), and the security engineer can read digest files but not the log files.

This indicates that the issue lies in permissions related to decryption.

KMS Key Policy:

The key policy for the KMS-managed key must explicitly allow the security engineer’s IAM user or role thekms:Decryptpermission.

Example Key Policy:

{

"Version": "2012-10-17",

"Statement": [

{

"Effect": "Allow",

"Principal": {

"AWS": "arn:aws:iam:::user/"

},

"Action": "kms:Decrypt",

"Resource": "*"

}

]

}

Verify the IAM Role/Policy:

Ensure that no conflicting IAM policy denies thekms:Decryptaction for the security engineer’s user or role.

Enable Access to Encrypted Logs:

Update the KMS key policy to include permissions for reading and decrypting CloudTrail logs.

AWS KMS Key Policy Documentation

Server-Side Encryption with KMS for CloudTrail

To ensure minimal latency and regional availability of secrets, encrypting secrets in us-east-1 with a customer-managed KMS key and then replicating them to us-west-1 for encryption with the same key is the optimal approach. This method leverages customer-managed KMS keys for enhanced control and ensures that secrets are available in both regions, adhering to disaster recovery principles and minimizing latency by using regional endpoints.

The steps that the Security Engineer should take to check for known vulnerabilities and limit the attack surface are:

B. Review the application security groups to ensure that only the necessary ports are open. This is a good practice to reduce the exposure of the EC2 instances to potential attacks from the Internet.Application security groups are a feature of Azure that allow you to group virtual machines and define network security policies based on those groups1.

D. Use Amazon Inspector to periodically scan the backend instances. This is a service that helps you to identify vulnerabilities and exposures in your EC2 instances and applications.Amazon Inspector can perform automated security assessments based on predefined or custom rules packages2.

Answer: C

Comprehensive Detailed Explanation with all AWS References

To monitor EC2 instances for software vulnerabilities without installing agents and to display findings in AWS Security Hub,Amazon Inspectoris the most appropriate solution.

Amazon Inspector Overview:

Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability management service that automatically scans Amazon EC2 instances and container images in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) for known vulnerabilities.

It does not require agent installation as it integrates directly with EC2 metadata and uses network-based scanning.

To restrict the contractor’s IAM account access to the EC2 console without providing access to any other AWS services, the security engineer should do the following:

Create an IAM permissions boundary policy that allows EC2 access. This is a policy that defines the maximum permissions that an IAM entity can have.

Associate the contractor’s IAM account with the IAM permissions boundary policy. This means that even if the contractor’s IAM account is assigned additional permissions based on IAM group membership, those permissions are limited by the permissions boundary policy.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

KMS grants are lightweight and efficient tools designed specifically for programmatic, temporary, or high-volume delegation of KMS key usage. They are ideal when access needs to be rotated or updated frequently—such as weekly changes in vendors.

KMS grants allow you to control access without changing the key policy itself. They can be easily created and revoked programmatically, which minimizes operational overhead compared to editing key or IAM policies.

This approach aligns with Identity and Access Management best practices in the AWS Certified Security – Specialty study guide for scalable cross-account key access management.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Amazon Inspector is an automated vulnerability management service that continuously scans Amazon EC2 instances for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. It uses a combination of the EC2 instance’s metadata and installed packages to detect CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures).

AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager automates the process of patching managed instances with both security-related and other types of updates. Together, these services provide detection and remediation capabilities, fulfilling both the detection and mitigation requirements.

This approach is directly aligned with AWS Security Specialty best practices for Infrastructure Security.

Enabling AWS CloudTrail with a trail applied to all regions and specifying a single S3 bucket for storage is the simplest method to record and retain API call activity for security analysis. This configuration ensures comprehensive coverage across all current and future AWS regions, centralizing log collection and simplification of log management.

The correct combination of steps that the security engineer should take to meet these requirements are A. Ensure that the Amazon CloudWatch agent is installed on all the EC2 instances that the Auto Scaling groups launch. Generate a CloudWatch agent configuration file to forward the required logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs., B. Set the log retention for desired log groups to 7 years., and C. Attach an IAM role to the launch configuration or launch template that the Auto Scaling groups use. Configure the role to provide the necessary permissions to forward logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

A. This answer is correct because it meets the requirement of ensuring that no logging data is lost for each instance during scaling activities. By installing the CloudWatch agent on all the EC2 instances, the security engineer can collect and send system logs and application logs to CloudWatch Logs, which is a service that stores and monitors log data. By generating a CloudWatch agent configuration file, the security engineer can specify which logs to forward and how often.

B. This answer is correct because it meets the requirement of keeping the logs for only the required period of 7 years. By setting the log retention for desired log groups, the security engineer can control how long CloudWatch Logs retains log events before deleting them. The security engineer can choose a predefined retention period of 7 years, or use a custom value.

C. This answer is correct because it meets the requirement of providing the necessary permissions to forward logs to CloudWatch Logs. By attaching an IAM role to the launch configuration or launch template that the Auto Scaling groups use, the security engineer can grant permissions to the EC2 instances that are launched by the Auto Scaling groups. By configuring the role to provide the necessary permissions, such as cloudwatch:PutLogEvents and cloudwatch:CreateLogStream, the security engineer can allow the EC2 instances to send log data to CloudWatch Logs.

To enable S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) for objects that are encrypted with SSE-KMS, the following steps are required:

Grant the IAM role the kms.Decrypt permission for the key in us-east-1 that encrypts source objects. This will allow the IAM role to decrypt the source objects before replicating them to the destination bucket. The kms.Decrypt permission must be granted in the key policy of the source KMS key or in an IAM policy attached to the IAM role.

Grant the IAM role the kms.Encrypt permission for the key in us-west-2 that encrypts objects that are in the destination S3 bucket. This will allow the IAM role to encrypt the replica objects with the destination KMS key before storing them in the destination bucket. The kms.Encrypt permission must be granted in the key policy of the destination KMS key or in an IAM policy attached to the IAM role.

This solution will remediate the issue of encrypted objects not being replicated to the destination bucket.

The other options are incorrect because they either do not grant the necessary permissions for CRR (A, C, D), or do not use a valid encryption method for CRR (E).

Verified References:

AWS WAF Geo Match Condition:

Use AWS WAF to create a web access control list (web ACL).

Add a geo match condition to block traffic originating from the specified countries.

Associate Web ACL with CloudFront:

Attach the web ACL to the CloudFront distribution.

Requests from blocked countries will be denied at the CloudFront edge locations, ensuring compliance with data regulation policies.

Advantages of Using AWS WAF:

Cost-effective: Only pay for WAF rules, which are more economical than alternative solutions.

Scalable: Automatically handles global traffic without additional configuration.

Alternative Options:

Using CloudFront's geo-restriction feature (Option C) is also possible but lacks the flexibility and granularity of WAF rules.

AWS WAF Geo Match Conditions

Using AWS WAF with CloudFront

Utilizing AWS Config with a custom AWS Config rule (ec2-managedinstance-applications-required) enables detection of EC2 instances lacking the required software across all accounts in an organization. By creating an Amazon EventBridge rule that triggers on AWS Config events, and configuring it to invoke an AWS Lambda function, automated actions can be taken to ensure compliance. The Lambda function can leverage AWS Systems Manager Run Command to install the necessary software on non-compliant instances. This approach ensures continuous compliance and automated remediation, aligning with best practices for cloud security and management.

To securely store the API key, the security team should do the following:

Create a secret in AWS Secrets Manager in the security account to store the API key using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) for encryption. This allows the security team to encrypt and manage the API key centrally, and to configure automatic rotation schedules for it.

Grant access to the IAM role used by the Lambda function so that the function can retrieve the key from Secrets Manager and call the API. This allows the security team to avoid storing the API key with the source code, and to use IAM policies to control access to the secret.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

A. New patch baseline with 0-day approval ensures that critical security patches are available immediately for deployment without delay, which is crucial in response to imminent threats.

B. Patch Now operation in Patch Manager allows for immediate patch deployment across all instances, and storing logs in Amazon S3 provides centralized evidence and audit trails for compliance and verification.

Together, these actions support rapid response, immediate patch deployment, and auditability, aligning with Infrastructure Security and Incident Response best practices.

The correct answer is C. Create rule sets in AWS CloudFormation Guard. Run validation checks for CloudFormation templates as a phase of the CI/CD process.

This answer is correct because AWS CloudFormation Guard is a tool that helps you implement policy-as-code for your CloudFormation templates. You can use Guard to write rules that define your security policies, such as requiring encryption for EBS volumes, and then validate your templates against those rules before deploying them.You can integrate Guard into your CI/CD pipeline as a step that runs the validation checks and prevents the deploymentof any non-compliant templates12.

The other options are incorrect because:

A. Turning on AWS Trusted Advisor and configuring security notifications as webhooks in the preferences section of the CI/CD pipeline is not a solution, because AWS Trusted Advisor is not a policy-as-code tool, but a service that provides recommendations to help you follow AWS best practices.Trusted Advisor does not allow you to define your own security policies or validate your CloudFormationtemplates against them3.

B. Turning on AWS Config and using the prebuilt or customized rules is not a solution, because AWS Config is not a policy-as-code tool, but a service that monitors and records the configuration changes of your AWS resources.AWS Config does not allow you to validate your CloudFormation templates before deploying them, but onlyevaluates the compliance of your resources after they are created4.

D. Creating rule sets as SCPs and integrating them as a part of validation control in a phase of the CI/CD process is not a solution, because SCPs are not policy-as-code tools, but policies that you can use to manage permissions in your AWS Organizations.SCPs do not allow you to validate your CloudFormation templates, but only restrict the actions that users and roles can perform in your accounts5.

Centralize Access Management with IAM Roles:

Create roles in the testing and production accounts with permissions specific to resources in those accounts.

Add a policy that allowssts:AssumeRolefor trusted accounts.

Establish Trust Between Accounts:

Update the trust policies of the roles in the testing and production accounts to allow the roles in the development account to assume them.

Example Trust Policy:

{

"Version": "2012-10-17",

"Statement": [

{

"Effect": "Allow",

"Principal": {

"AWS": "arn:aws:iam:::role/"

},

"Action": "sts:AssumeRole"

}

]

}

Role Switching for Access:

Developers in the development account can use the AWS Management Console or CLI to assume the roles in the testing or production accounts.

Advantages of This Solution:

Scalability: No need to create individual credentials for each developer in every account.

Security: Credentials are dynamically assumed and not shared across accounts.

Ease of Management: Centralized role management simplifies permissions and reduces administrative overhead.

Cross-Account Access in AWS

Using Roles to Delegate Permissions

IAM Policies and Trust Relationships

the kms:ViaService condition key can be used to restrict a CMK to work with only a specific AWS service6. By configuring the CMKkey policy to allow KMS actions only when the kms:ViaService condition matches the Amazon S3 service name, you can ensure that only Amazon S3 can use the CMK7. The other options are either incorrect or insufficient for constraining a CMK to work with only Amazon S3.

Source/destination checking "You must disable source/destination checks if the instance runs services such as network address translation, routing, or firewalls."

The correct answer is C. Disable the Network Source/Destination check on the security appliance’s elastic network interface.

This answer is correct because disabling the Network Source/Destination check allows the virtual security appliance to route traffic that is not addressed to or from itself. By default, this check is enabled on all EC2 instances, and it prevents them from forwarding traffic that does not match their own IP or MAC addresses.However, for a virtual security appliance that acts as a router or a firewall, this check needs to be disabled, otherwise it will drop the traffic that it is supposed to route12.

The other options are incorrect because:

A. Disabling network ACLs is not a solution, because network ACLs are optional layers of security for the subnets in a VPC.They can be used to allow or deny traffic based on IP addresses and ports, but they donot affect the routing behavior of the virtual security appliance3.

B. Configuring the security appliance’s elastic network interface for promiscuous mode is not a solution, because promiscuous mode is a mode for a network interface that causes it to pass all traffic it receives to the CPU, rather than passing only the frames that it is programmed to receive.Promiscuous mode is normally used for packet sniffing or monitoring, but it does not enable the network interface to route traffic4.

D. Placing the security appliance in the public subnet with the internet gateway is not a solution, because it does not address the routing issue of the virtual security appliance.Thesecurity appliance can be placed in either a public or a private subnet, depending on the network design and security requirements, but it still needs to have the Network Source/Destination check disabled to route traffic properly5.

To securely and cost-effectively retain log data archives for several years, the company should do the following:

Archive the data to Amazon S3 Glacier and apply a Vault Lock policy. This allows the company to use a low-cost storage class that is designed for long-term archival of data that is rarely accessed. It also allows the company to enforce compliance controls on their S3 Glacier vault by locking a vault access policy that cannot be changed.

Open the AWS Systems Manager console at In the navigation pane, choose Session Manager. Choose the Preferences tab, and then choose Edit. Select the check box next to Enable under S3 logging. (Recommended) Select the check box next to Allow only encrypted S3 buckets. With this option turned on, log data is encrypted using the server-side encryption key specified for the bucket. If you don 't want to encrypt the log data that is sent to Amazon S3, clear the check box. You must also clear the check box if encryption isn't allowed on the S3 bucket.

To rotate database credentials every 30 days, the most secure and efficient solution is to store the database credentials in AWS Secrets Manager and configure automatic credential rotation for every 30 days. Secrets Manager can handle the rotation of the credentials in both the secret and the database, and it can use AWS KMS to encrypt the credentials. Option B is incorrect because it requires creating a custom Lambda function to rotate the credentials, which is more effort than using Secrets Manager. Option C is incorrect because it stores the database credentials in an environment file or a configuration file, which is less secure than using Secrets Manager. Option D is incorrect because it combines the drawbacks of option B and option C. Verified References:

To ensure that Security Hub can evaluate their resources for CIS AWS Foundations compliance, the security engineer should do the following:

Ensure that AWS Config is enabled in the account. This is a service that enables continuous assessment and audit of your AWS resources for compliance.

Ensure that the required AWS Config rules have been created for the CIS compliance evaluation. These are rules that represent your desired configuration settings for specific AWS resources or for an entire AWS account.

The IAM Documentation mentions the following

To determine whether a log file was modified, deleted, or unchanged after CloudTrail delivered it you can use CloudTrail log file integrity validation. This feature is built using industry standard algorithms: SHA-256 for hashing and SHA-256 with RSA for digital signing. This makes it computationally infeasible to modify, delete or forge CloudTrail log files without detection. You can use the IAM CLI to validate the files in the location where CloudTrail delivered them

Validated log files are invaluable in security and forensic investigations. For example, a validated log file enables you to assert positively that the log file itself has not changed, or that particular user credentials performed specific API activity. The CloudTrail log file integrity validation process also lets you know if a log file has been deleted or changed, or assert positively that no log files were delivered to your account during a given period of time.

Options B.C and D is invalid because you need to check for log File Integrity Validation for cloudtrail logs

For more information on Cloudtrail log file validation, please visit the below URL:

The correct answer is: Use CloudTrail Log File Integrity Validation.

omit your Feedback/Queries to our Expert

To set up AWS Security Hub for centralized security monitoring across all accounts in an AWS Organization with the least operational overhead, the best actions to take are:

Solution A: Configure a finding aggregation Region for Security Hub. This allows Security Hub to aggregate findings from multiple regions into a single designated region, simplifying monitoring and analysis. By centralizing findings, the security team can have a unified view of security alerts and compliance statuses across all accounts and regions, enhancing the efficiency of security operations.

Solution C: Turn on the option to automatically enable accounts for Security Hub within the AWS Organization. This ensures that as new accounts are created and added to the organization, they are automatically enrolled in Security Hub, and their findings are included in the centralized monitoring. This automation reduces the manual effort required to manage account enrollment and ensures comprehensive coverage of security monitoring across the organization.

These actions collectively ensure that Security Hub is effectively configured to manage security findings across all accounts and regions, providing a comprehensive and automated approach to security monitoring with minimal manual intervention.

To minimize downtime in response to DDoS attacks, the company should do the following:

Subscribe to AWS Shield Advanced and reach out to AWS Support in the event of an attack. This provides access to 24x7 support from the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT), as well as advanced detection and mitigation capabilities for network and application layer attacks.

Use AWS WAF to create rules to respond to such attacks. This allows the company to filter web requests based on IP addresses, headers, body, or URI strings, and block malicious requests before they reach the web applications.

The correct answer is A. Configure an S3 Lifecycle rule on the S3 bucket to delete objects after 45 days.

The reason is that this is the simplest and most effective way to enforce the data retention policy.According to theAWS documentation1, “To manage your objects so that they are stored cost effectively throughout their lifecycle, configure their Amazon S3 Lifecycle. An S3 Lifecycle configuration is a set of rules that define actions that Amazon S3 applies to a group of objects.There are two types of actions: Transition actionsand Expiration actions.” The documentation1also states that “Expiration actions define when objects expire. Amazon S3 deletes expired objects on your behalf.” Therefore, by configuring an S3 Lifecycle rule on the S3 bucket to delete objects after 45 days, the security engineer can ensure that the data is removed from the S3 bucket according to the company’s policy.

The other options are incorrect because:

B. Create an AWS Lambda function to check the last-modified date of the S3 objects and delete objects that are older than 45 days. Create an S3 event notification to invoke the Lambda function for each PutObject operation. This option is not optimal because it requires deploying and maintaining a Lambda function, which adds complexity and cost. Moreover, it does not guarantee that the data is deleted exactly after 45 days, since the Lambda function is triggered only when a new object is put into the S3 bucket. If there are no new objects for a long period of time, the Lambda function will not run and the data will not be deleted.

C. Create an AWS Lambda function to check the last-modified date of the S3 objects and delete objects that are older than 45 days. Create an Amazon EventBridge rule to invoke the Lambda function each month. This option is not optimal because it requires deploying and maintaining a Lambda function, which adds complexity and cost. Moreover, it does not guarantee that the data is deleted exactly after 45 days, since the Lambda function is triggered only once a month. If the data is older than 45 days but less than a month, it will not be deleted until the next month.

D. Configure S3 Intelligent-Tiering on the S3 bucket to automatically transition objects to another storage class. This option is not sufficient to enforce the data retention policy, because it does not delete the data from the S3 bucket. It only moves the data to a less expensive storage class based on access patterns.According to the AWS documentation2, “S3 Intelligent-Tiering optimizes storage costs by automatically moving data between two access tiers, frequent access and infrequent access, when access patterns change.” However, this feature does not expire or delete the data after a certain period of time.

This answer is correct because ensuring that the security groups allow bidirectional communication between the Lambda function and the EC2 instance will resolve the error. The error indicates that the Lambda function cannot connect to the database, which might be due to firewall rules blocking the traffic. By allowing outbound connections from the Lambda function and inbound connections to the EC2 instance, the security engineer can enable the rotation function to access and update the database credentials.

For a company using AWS Organizations that requires centralized management and automatic activation of Amazon GuardDuty across all current and future AWS accounts, setting up a delegated administrator account for GuardDuty is the optimal solution. By enabling GuardDuty in a new account and designating it as the delegated administrator, the company can centrally manage GuardDuty findings and automatically enroll new AWS accounts into GuardDuty as they are created within the organization. This approach ensures consistent threat detection and continuous monitoring across all accounts, aligning with best security practices.

Comprehensive Detailed Explanation with all AWS References

To achieve centralized visibility of security findings from Amazon GuardDuty detectors in multiple AWS accounts under an AWS Organization, the best approach is to integrate GuardDuty withAWS Security Hub.

AWS Security Hub Overview:

Security Hub provides a unified view of security alerts and compliance checks across AWS accounts.

It supports integration with GuardDuty to automatically ingest and display findings in a centralized manner.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Amazon GuardDuty provides intelligent threat detection and continuous monitoring for malicious or unauthorized behavior to protect AWS accounts and workloads. It satisfies the requirement for monitoring endpoints for anomalous network traffic.

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) simplifies the process of provisioning, managing, and deploying SSL/TLS certificates. Configuring ELB with ACM ensures encryption in transit.

AWS KMS with S3 bucket policy using x-amz-server-side-encryption ensures that S3 objects are encrypted at rest using managed keys. Denying uploads that do not use SSE with a bucket policy enforces encryption at rest.

These three actions together satisfy the stated security requirements with minimal operational overhead.

Understand the Issue:

KMS grants are created using theCreateGrantoperation.

The grant might not propagate immediately for use, leading toAccessDeniedExceptionerrors.

Use Grant Tokens for Immediate Access:

When a grant is created, AWS KMS provides a grant token in the response.

This grant token can be used immediately, even before the grant is fully propagated.

Implement Solution:

Pass the grant token returned byCreateGrantto the users.

Ensure users include the grant token in their requests to encrypt data.

AWS KMS Grant Tokens Documentation

Troubleshooting KMS AccessDenied Errors

The correct answer is D.

To stop the data exfiltration from the compromised EC2 instances, the security engineer needs to implement a solution that can deny access to any S3 bucket that is outside thecompany’s organization. The solution should also allow the EC2 instances to access the required S3 buckets within the company’s organization for the analysis process.

Option A is incorrect because updating the policy on the S3 gateway endpoint will not affect the access to S3 buckets that are outside the company’s organization. The S3 gateway endpoint only applies to S3 buckets that are in the same AWS Region as the VPC. The compromised EC2 instances can still access S3 buckets in other Regions or other AWS accounts through the internet gateway or NAT device.

Option B is incorrect because updating the policy on the instance profile role will not prevent the compromised EC2 instances from using other credentials or methods to access S3 buckets outside the company’s organization. The instance profile role only applies to requests that are made using the credentials of that role. The compromised EC2 instances can still use other IAM users, roles, or access keys to access S3 buckets outside the company’s organization.

Option C is incorrect because adding a network ACL rule to block outgoing connections on port 443 will also block legitimate connections to S3 buckets within the company’s organization. The network ACL rule will prevent the EC2 instances from accessing any S3 bucket through HTTPS, regardless of whether it is inside or outside the company’s organization.

Option D is correct because applying an SCP on the AWS account will effectively deny access to any S3 bucket that is outside the company’s organization. The SCP will apply to all IAM users, roles, and resources in the AWS account, regardless of how they access S3. The SCP will use the aws:ResourceOrgID and aws:PrincipalOrgID condition keys to check whether the S3 bucket and the principal belong to the same organization as the AWS account. If they do not match, the SCP will deny the S3 actions.

these are the solutions that can securely rotate the secrets for the production RDS database using Secrets Manager. Secrets Manager is a service that helps you manage secrets such as database credentials, API keys, and passwords. You can use Secrets Manager to rotate secrets automatically by using a Lambda function that runs on a schedule. The Lambda function needs to have access to both the RDS instance and the Secrets Manager service. Option B places the RDS instance in a private subnet and the Lambda function in the same VPC in another private subnet. The private subnet with the Lambda function needs to use a NAT gateway to access Secrets Manager over the internet. Option E places the RDS instance and the Lambda function in the same private subnet and configures a Secrets Manager interface endpoint, which is a private connection between the VPC and Secrets Manager. The other options are either insecure or incorrect for rotating secrets using Secrets Manager.

You can use IAM CloudTrail to get a history of IAM API calls and related events for your account. This history includes calls made with the IAM Management Console, IAM Command Line Interface, IAM SDKs, and other IAM services.

Options A,B and D are invalid becau56se you need to ensure that you use the services of CloudTrail, IAM Config, IAM Credential Reports

For more information on Cloudtrail, please visit the below URL:

IAM Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit and evaluate the configurations of your IAM resources. Config continuously monitors and records your IAM resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. With Config, you can review changes in configurations and relationships between IAM resources, dive into detailed resource configuration histories, and determine your overall compliance against the configurations specified in your internal guidelines. This enables you to simplify compliance auditing, security analysis, char management and operational troubleshooting.

For more information on the config service, please visit the below URL

You can generate and download a credential report that lists all users in your account and the status of their various credentials, including passwords, access keys, and MFA devices. You can get a credential report from the IAM Management Console, the IAM SDKs and Command Line Tools, or the IAM API.

For more information on Credentials Report, please visit the below URL:

credentials_getting-report.html

The correct answer is: CloudTrail, IAM Config, IAM Credential Reports Submit your Feedback/Queries to our Experts

To enforce end-to-end encryption in transit, the company should do the following:

Update the web application configuration on the web servers to use HTTPS instead of HTTP when connecting to DynamoDB. This ensures that the data is encrypted when it travels from the web servers to the data store.

Update the CloudFront distribution to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS. This ensures that the viewers always use HTTPS when they access the website through CloudFront.

Update the ALB to listen using HTTPS using the public ACM TLS certificate. Update the CloudFront distribution to connect to the HTTPS listener. This ensures that the data is encrypted when it travels from CloudFront to the ALB and from the ALB to the web servers.

You can establish a private connection between your VPC and Secrets Manager by creating an interface VPC endpoint. Interface endpoints are powered by AWS PrivateLink, a technology that enables you to privately access Secrets Manager APIs without an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection.

The correct answer is D. Configure a Secrets Manager interface VPC endpoint. Include the Lambda function’s private subnet during the configuration process.

A Secrets Manager interface VPC endpoint is a private connection between the VPC and Secrets Manager that does not require an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection1. By configuring a Secrets Manager interface VPC endpoint, the security engineer can enable the custom Lambda function to communicate with Secrets Manager without sending or receiving network traffic through the internet.The security engineer must include the Lambda function’s private subnet during the configuration process to allow the function to use the endpoint2.

The other options are incorrect for the following reasons:

A.An egress-only internet gateway is a VPC component that allows outbound communication over IPv6 from instances in the VPC to the internet, and prevents the internet from initiating an IPv6 connection with the instances3. However, this option does not meet the requirement that the VPC must not send or receive network traffic through the internet.Moreover, an egress-only internet gateway is for use with IPv6 traffic only, and Secrets Manager does not support IPv6 addresses2.

B.A NAT gateway is a VPC component that enables instances in a private subnet to connect to the internet or other AWS services, but prevents the internet from initiating connections with those instances4. However, this option does not meet therequirement that the VPC must not send or receive network traffic through the internet.Additionally, a NAT gateway requires an elasticIP address, which is a public IPv4 address4.

C.A VPC peering connection is a networking connection between two VPCs that enables you to route traffic between them using private IPv4 addresses or IPv6 addresses5. However, this option does not work because Secrets Manager does not have a default VPC that can be peered with.Furthermore, a VPC peering connection does not provide a private connection to Secrets Manager APIs without an internetgateway or other devices2.

Using Amazon EventBridge to create a rule for ACM Certificate Approaching Expiration events and configuring an SNS topic as the target provides an operationally efficient way to monitor and alert on certificate expirations. This method leverages AWS's native capabilities for event monitoring and notifications, reducing the need for custom implementations and ensuring timely alerts.