Prepare to navigate the intricacies of cloud security, as these questions guide you through the realms of AWS services, policies, and procedures, ultimately culminating in the coveted AWS Certified Security Specialty designation. Let the exploration of security excellence within AWS begin!
Part 1: https://awslagi.com/aws-certified-security-specialty-scs-c02-exam-question-part-1
Part 2: https://awslagi.com/aws-certified-security-specialty-scs-c02-exam-question-part-2
Part 3: https://awslagi.com/aws-certified-security-specialty-scs-c02-exam-question-part-3
Part 4: https://awslagi.com/aws-certified-security-specialty-scs-c02-exam-question-part-4
Part 5: https://awslagi.com/aws-certified-security-specialty-scs-c02-exam-question-part-5
Part 6: https://awslagi.com/aws-certified-security-specialty-scs-c02-exam-question-part-6
Actual Exam Version:
51. The Security Engineer created a new AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key with the following key policy:
What are the effects of the key policy? (Choose two.)
A. The policy allows access for the AWS account 111122223333 to manage key access though IAM policies.
B. The policy allows all IAM users in account 111122223333 to have full access to the KMS key.
C. The policy allows the root user in account 111122223333 to have full access to the KMS key.
D. The policy allows the KMS service-linked role in account 111122223333 to have full access to the KMS key.
E. The policy allows all IAM roles in account 111122223333 to have full access to the KMS key
52. A company uses AWS Organization to manage 50 AWS accounts. The finance staff members log in as AWS IAM users in the FinanceDept AWS account. The staff members need to read the consolidated billing information in the MasterPayer AWS account. They should not be able to view any other resources in the MasterPayer AWS account. IAM access to billing has been enabled in the MasterPayer account.
Which of the following approaches grants the finance staff the permissions they require without granting any unnecessary permissions?
A. Create an IAM group for the finance users in the FinanceDept account, then attach the AWS managed ReadOnlyAccess IAM policy to the group.
B. Create an IAM group for the finance users in the MasterPayer account, then attach the AWS managed ReadOnlyAccess IAM policy to the group.
C. Create an AWS IAM role in the FinanceDept account with the ViewBilling permission, then grant the finance users in the MasterPayer account the permission to assume that role.
D. Create an AWS IAM role in the MasterPayer account with the ViewBilling permission, then grant the finance users in the FinanceDept account the permission to assume that role.
53. A Solutions Architect is designing a web application that uses Amazon CloudFront, an Elastic Load Balancing Application Load Balancer, and an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances. The load balancer and EC2 instances are in the US West (Oregon) region. It has been decided that encryption in transit is necessary by using a customer-branded domain name from the client to CloudFront and from CloudFront to the load balancer. Assuming that AWS Certificate Manager is used, how many certificates will need to be generated?
A. One in the US West (Oregon) region and one in the US East (Virginia) region.
B. Two in the US West (Oregon) region and none in the US East (Virginia) region.
C. One in the US West (Oregon) region and none in the US East (Virginia) region.
D. Two in the US East (Virginia) region and none in the US West (Oregon) region.
54. A Security Engineer has been asked to troubleshoot inbound connectivity to a web server. This single web server is not receiving inbound connections from the internet, whereas all other web servers are functioning properly. The architecture includes network ACLs, security groups, and a virtual security appliance. In addition, the Development team has implemented Application Load Balancers (ALBs) to distribute the load across all web servers. It is a requirement that traffic between the web servers and the internet flow through the virtual security appliance. The Security Engineer has verified the following: 1. The rule set in the Security Groups is correct 2. The rule set in the network ACLs is correct 3. The rule set in the virtual appliance is correct Which of the following are other valid items to troubleshoot in this scenario? (Choose two.)
A. Verify that the 0.0.0.0/0 route in the route table for the web server subnet points to a NAT gateway.
B. Verify which Security Group is applied to the particular web server’s elastic network interface (ENI).
C. Verify that the 0.0.0.0/0 route in the route table for the web server subnet points to the virtual security appliance.
D. Verify the registered targets in the ALB.
E. Verify that the 0.0.0.0/0 route in the public subnet points to a NAT gateway.
55. Which approach will generate automated security alerts should too many unauthorized AWS API requests be identified?
A. Create an Amazon CloudWatch metric filter that looks for API call error codes and then implement an alarm based on that metric’s rate.
B. Configure AWS CloudTrail to stream event data to Amazon Kinesis. Configure an AWS Lambda function on the stream to alarm when the threshold has been exceeded.
C. Run an Amazon Athena SQL query against CloudTrail log files. Use Amazon QuickSight to create an operational dashboard.
D. Use the Amazon Personal Health Dashboard to monitor the account’s use of AWS services, and raise an alert if service error rates increase.
56. A company has multiple production AWS accounts. Each account has AWS CloudTrail configured to log to a single Amazon S3 bucket in a central account. Two of the production accounts have trails that are not logging anything to the S3 bucket. Which steps should be taken to troubleshoot the issue? (Choose three.)
A. Verify that the log file prefix is set to the name of the S3 bucket where the logs should go.
B. Verify that the S3 bucket policy allows access for CloudTrail from the production AWS account IDs.
C. Create a new CloudTrail configuration in the account, and configure it to log to the account’s S3 bucket.
D. Confirm in the CloudTrail Console that each trail is active and healthy.
E. Open the global CloudTrail configuration in the master account, and verify that the storage location is set to the correct S3 bucket.
F. Confirm in the CloudTrail Console that the S3 bucket name is set correctly.
57. Amazon CloudWatch Logs agent is successfully delivering logs to the CloudWatch Logs service. However, logs stop being delivered after the associated log stream has been active for a specific number of hours. What steps are necessary to identify the cause of this phenomenon? (Choose two.)
A. Ensure that file permissions for monitored files that allow the CloudWatch Logs agent to read the file have not been modified.
B. Verify that the OS Log rotation rules are compatible with the configuration requirements for agent streaming.
C. Configure an Amazon Kinesis producer to first put the logs into Amazon Kinesis Streams.
D. Create a CloudWatch Logs metric to isolate a value that changes at least once during the period before logging stops.
E. Use AWS CloudFormation to dynamically create and maintain the configuration file for the CloudWatch Logs agent.
58. A company has deployed a custom DNS server in AWS. The Security Engineer wants to ensure that Amazon EC2 instances cannot use the Amazon-provided DNS. How can the Security Engineer block access to the Amazon-provided DNS in the VPC?
A. Deny access to the Amazon DNS IP within all security groups.
B. Add a rule to all network access control lists that deny access to the Amazon DNS IP.
C. Add a route to all route tables that black holes traffic to the Amazon DNS IP.
D. Disable DNS resolution within the VPC configuration.
59. An employee accidentally exposed an AWS access key and secret access key during a public presentation. The company Security Engineer immediately disabled the key. How can the Engineer assess the impact of the key exposure and ensure that the credentials were not misused? (Choose two.)
A. Analyze AWS CloudTrail for activity.
B. Analyze Amazon CloudWatch Logs for activity.
C. Download and analyze the IAM Use report from AWS Trusted Advisor.
D. Analyze the resource inventory in AWS Config for IAM user activity.
E. Download and analyze a credential report from IAM.
60. Which of the following minimizes the potential attack surface for applications?
A. Use security groups to provide stateful firewalls for Amazon EC2 instances at the hypervisor level.
B. Use network ACLs to provide stateful firewalls at the VPC level to prevent access to any specific AWS resource.
C. Use AWS Direct Connect for secure trusted connections between EC2 instances within private subnets.
D. Design network security in a single layer within the perimeter network (also known as DMZ, demilitarized zone, and screened subnet) to facilitate quicker responses to threats.
61. A distributed web application is installed across several EC2 instances in public subnets residing in two Availability Zones. Apache logs show several intermittent brute-force attacks from hundreds of IP addresses at the layer 7 level over the past six months. What would be the BEST way to reduce the potential impact of these attacks in the future?
A.Use custom route tables to prevent malicious traffic from routing to the instances.
B. Update security groups to deny traffic from the originating source IP addresses.
C. Use network ACLs.
D. Install intrusion prevention software (IPS) on each instance.
62. A company plans to move most of its IT infrastructure to AWS. They want to leverage their existing on-premises Active Directory as an identity provider for AWS. Which combination of steps should a Security Engineer take to federate the company’s on-premises Active Directory with AWS? (Choose two.)
A. Create IAM roles with permissions corresponding to each Active Directory group.
B. Create IAM groups with permissions corresponding to each Active Directory group.
C. Configure Amazon Cloud Directory to support a SAML provider.
D. Configure Active Directory to add relying party trust between Active Directory and AWS.
E. Configure Amazon Cognito to add relying party trust between Active Directory and AWS.
63. A security alert has been raised for an Amazon EC2 instance in a customer account that is exhibiting strange behavior. The Security Engineer must first isolate the EC2 instance and then use tools for further investigation. What should the Security Engineer use to isolate and research this event? (Choose three.)
A. AWS CloudTrail
B. Amazon Athena
C. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)
D. VPC Flow Logs
E. AWS Firewall Manager
F. Security groups
64. A financial institution has the following security requirements: Cloud-based users must be contained in a separate authentication domain. Cloud-based users cannot access on-premises systems. As part of standing up a cloud environment, the financial institution is creating a number of Amazon managed databases and Amazon EC2 instances. An Active Directory service exists on-premises that has all the administrator accounts, and these must be able to access the databases and instances. How would the organization manage its resources in the MOST secure manner? (Choose two.)
A.Configure an AWS Managed Microsoft AD to manage the cloud resources.
B. Configure an additional on-premises Active Directory service to manage the cloud resources.
C. Establish a one-way trust relationship from the existing Active Directory to the new Active Directory service.
D. Establish a one-way trust relationship from the new Active Directory to the existing Active Directory service.
E. Establish a two-way trust between the new and existing Active Directory services.
65. An organization wants to be alerted when an unauthorized Amazon EC2 instance in its VPC performs a network port scan against other instances in the VPC. When the Security team performs its own internal tests in a separate account by using pre-approved third-party scanners from the AWS Marketplace, the Security team also then receives multiple Amazon GuardDuty events from Amazon CloudWatch alerting on its test activities. How can the Security team suppress alerts about authorized security tests while still receiving alerts about unauthorized activity?
A. Use a filter in AWS CloudTrail to exclude the IP addresses of the Security team’s EC2 instances.
B. Add the Elastic IP addresses of the Security team’s EC2 instances to a trusted IP list in Amazon GuardDuty.
C. Install the Amazon Inspector agent on the EC2 instances that the Security team uses.
D. Grant the Security team’s EC2 instances a role with permissions to call Amazon GuardDuty API operations.
66. An organization is moving non-business-critical applications to AWS while maintaining a mission critical application in an on-premises data center. An on-premises application must share limited confidential information with the applications in AWS. The internet performance is unpredictable. Which configuration will ensure continued connectivity between sites MOST securely?
A. VPN and a cached storage gateway
B. AWS Snowball Edge
C. VPN Gateway over AWS Direct Connect
D. AWS Direct Connect
67. An application has been built with Amazon EC2 instances that retrieve messages from Amazon SQS. Recently, IAM changes were made and the instances can no longer retrieve messages. What actions should be taken to troubleshoot the issue while maintaining least privilege. (Select two.)
A. Configure and assign an MFA device to the role used by the instances.
B. Verify that the SQS resource policy does not explicitly deny access to the role used by the instances
C. Verify that the access key attached to the role used by the instances is active.
D. Attach the AmazonSQSFullAccess managed policy to the role used by the instances.
E. Verify that the role attached to the instances contains policies that allow access to the queue.
68. A company has a forensic logging use case whereby several hundred applications running on Docker on EC2 need to send logs to a central location. The Security Engineer must create a logging solution that is able to perform real-time analytics on the log files, grants the ability to replay events, and persists data. Which AWS Services, together, can satisfy this use case? (Select two.)
A. Amazon Elasticsearch
B. Amazon Kinesis
C. Amazon SQS
D. Amazon CloudWatch
E. Amazon Athena
69. Which of the following is the most efficient way to automate the encryption of AWS CloudTrail logs using a Customer Master Key (CMK) in AWS KMS?
A. Use the KMS direct encrypt function on the log data every time a CloudTrail log is generated.
B. Use the default Amazon S3 server-side encryption with S3-managed keys to encrypt and decrypt the CloudTrail logs.
C. Configure CloudTrail to use server-side encryption using KMS-managed keys to encrypt and decrypt CloudTrail logs.
D. Use encrypted API endpoints so that all AWS API calls generate encrypted CloudTrail log entries using the TLS certificate from the encrypted API call.
70. An organization is using AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, and Amazon CloudWatch to send alerts when new access keys are created. However, the alerts are no longer appearing in the Security Operations mailbox. Which of the following actions would resolve this issue?
A. In CloudTrail, verify that the trail logging bucket has a log prefix configured.
B. In Amazon SNS, determine whether the “Account spend limit” has been reached for this alert.
C. In SNS, ensure that the subscription used by these alerts has not been deleted.
D. In CloudWatch, verify that the alarm threshold “consecutive periods” value is equal to, or greater than 1.
71. A Security Engineer must add additional protection to a legacy web application by adding the following HTTP security headers: -Content Security-Policy -X-Frame-Options -X-XSS-Protection The Engineer does not have access to the source code of the legacy web application. Which of the following approaches would meet this requirement?
A. Configure an Amazon Route 53 routing policy to send all web traffic that does not include the required headers to a black hole.
B. Implement an AWS Lambda@Edge origin response function that inserts the required headers.
C. Migrate the legacy application to an Amazon S3 static website and front it with an Amazon CloudFront distribution.
D. Construct an AWS WAF rule to replace existing HTTP headers with the required security headers by using regular expressions.
72. During a security event, it is discovered that some Amazon EC2 instances have not been sending Amazon CloudWatch logs. Which steps can the Security Engineer take to troubleshoot this issue? (Select two.)
A. Connect to the EC2 instances that are not sending the appropriate logs and verify that the CloudWatch Logs agent is running.
B. Log in to the AWS account and select CloudWatch Logs. Check for any monitored EC2 instances that are in the “Alerting” state and restart them using the EC2 console.
C. Verify that the EC2 instances have a route to the public AWS API endpoints.
D. Connect to the EC2 instances that are not sending logs. Use the command prompt to verify that the right permissions have been set for the Amazon SNS topic.
E. Verify that the network access control lists and security groups of the EC2 instances have the access to send logs over SNMP.
73. A Security Engineer discovers that developers have been adding rules to security groups that allow SSH and RDP traffic from 0.0.0.0/0 instead of the organization firewall IP. What is the most efficient way to remediate the risk of this activity?
A. Delete the internet gateway associated with the VPC.
B. Use network access control lists to block source IP addresses matching 0.0.0.0/0.
C. Use a host-based firewall to prevent access from all but the organization’s firewall IP.
D. Use AWS Config rules to detect 0.0.0.0/0 and invoke an AWS Lambda function to update the security group with the organization’s firewall IP.
74. In response to the past DDoS attack experiences, a Security Engineer has set up an Amazon CloudFront distribution for an Amazon S3 bucket. There is concern that some users may bypass the CloudFront distribution and access the S3 bucket directly. What must be done to prevent users from accessing the S3 objects directly by using URLs?
A. Change the S3 bucket/object permission so that only the bucket owner has access.
B. Set up a CloudFront origin access identity (OAI), and change the S3 bucket/object permission so that only the OAI has access.
C. Create IAM roles for CloudFront, and change the S3 bucket/object permission so that only the IAM role has access.
D. Redirect S3 bucket access to the corresponding CloudFront distribution.
75. A company plans to move most of its IT infrastructure to AWS. The company wants to leverage its existing on-premises Active Directory as an identity provider for AWS. Which steps should be taken to authenticate to AWS services using the company’s on-premises Active Directory? (Choose three).
A. Create IAM roles with permissions corresponding to each Active Directory group.
B. Create IAM groups with permissions corresponding to each Active Directory group.
C. Create a SAML provider with IAM.
D. Create a SAML provider with Amazon Cloud Directory.
E. Configure AWS as a trusted relying party for the Active Directory
F. Configure IAM as a trusted relying party for Amazon Cloud Directory.
76. A Security Analyst attempted to troubleshoot the monitoring of suspicious security group changes. The Analyst was told that there is an Amazon CloudWatch alarm in place for these AWS CloudTrail log events. The Analyst tested the monitoring setup by making a configuration change to the security group but did not receive any alerts. Which of the following troubleshooting steps should the Analyst perform?
A. Ensure that CloudTrail and S3 bucket access logging is enabled for the Analyst’s AWS account.
B. Verify that a metric filter was created and then mapped to an alarm. Check the alarm notification action.
C. Check the CloudWatch dashboards to ensure that there is a metric configured with an appropriate dimension for security group changes.
D. Verify that the Analyst’s account is mapped to an IAM policy that includes permissions for cloudwatch: GetMetricStatistics and Cloudwatch: ListMetrics.
77. Example.com hosts its internal document repository on Amazon EC2 instances. The application runs on EC2 instances and previously stored the documents on encrypted Amazon EBS volumes. To optimize the application for scale, example.com has moved the files to Amazon S3. The security team has mandated that all the files are securely deleted from the EBS volume, and it must certify that the data is unreadable before releasing the underlying disks. Which of the following methods will ensure that the data is unreadable by anyone else?
A. Change the volume encryption on the EBS volume to use a different encryption mechanism. Then, release the EBS volumes back to AWS.
B. Release the volumes back to AWS. AWS immediately wipes the disk after it is deprovisioned.
C. Delete the encryption key used to encrypt the EBS volume. Then, release the EBS volumes back to AWS.
D. Delete the data by using the operating system delete commands. Run Quick Format on the drive and then release the EBS volumes back to AWS.
78. A Systems Administrator has written the following Amazon S3 bucket policy designed to allow access to an S3 bucket for only an authorized AWS IAM user from the IP address range 10.10.10.0/24:
When trying to download an object from the S3 bucket from 10.10.10.40, the IAM user receives an access denied message. What does the Administrator need to change to grant access to the user?
A. Change the “Resource” from “arn: aws:s3:::Bucket” to “arn:aws:s3:::Bucket/*”.
B. Change the “Principal” from “*” to {AWS:”arn:aws:iam: : account-number: user/username”}
C. Change the “Version” from “2012-10-17” to the last revised date of the policy
D. Change the “Action” from [“s3:*”] to [“s3:GetObject”, “s3:ListBucket”]
79. The Security Engineer has discovered that a new application that deals with highly sensitive data is storing Amazon S3 objects with the following key pattern, which itself contains highly sensitive data. Pattern: “randomID_datestamp_PII.csv” Example: “1234567_12302017_000-00-0000 csv” The bucket where these objects are being stored is using server-side encryption (SSE). Which solution is the most secure and cost-effective option to protect the sensitive data?
A. Remove the sensitive data from the object name, and store the sensitive data using S3 user defined metadata.
B. Add an S3 bucket policy that denies the action s3:GetObject
C. Use a random and unique S3 object key, and create an S3 metadata index in Amazon DynamoDB using client-side encrypted attributes.
D. Store all sensitive objects in Binary Large Objects (BLOBS) in an encrypted Amazon RDS instance.
80. AWS CloudTrail is being used to monitor API calls in an organization. An audit revealed that CloudTrail is failing to deliver events to Amazon S3 as expected. What initial actions should be taken to allow delivery of CloudTrail events to S3? (Select two.)
A. Verify that the S3 bucket policy allow CloudTrail to write objects.
B. Verify that the IAM role used by CloudTrail has access to write to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
C. Remove any lifecycle policies on the S3 bucket that are archiving objects to Amazon Glacier.
D. Verify that the S3 bucket defined in CloudTrail exists.
E. Verify that the log file prefix defined in CloudTrail exists in the S3 bucket.
81. Due to new compliance requirements, a Security Engineer must enable encryption with customer provided keys on corporate data that is stored in DynamoDB. The company wants to retain full control of the encryption keys. Which DynamoDB feature should the Engineer use to achieve compliance?
A. Use AWS Certificate Manager to request a certificate. Use that certificate to encrypt data prior to uploading it to DynamoDB.
B. Enable S3 server-side encryption with the customer-provided keys. Upload the data to Amazon S3, and then use S3Copy to move all data to DynamoDB
C. Create a KMS master key. Generate per-record data keys and use them to encrypt data prior to uploading it to DynamoDS. Dispose of the cleartext and encrypted data keys after encryption without storing.
D. Use the DynamoDB Java encryption client to encrypt data prior to uploading it to DynamoDB.
82. A Security Engineer must design a system that can detect whether a file on an Amazon EC2 host has been modified. The system must then alert the Security Engineer of the modification. What is the MOST efficient way to meet these requirements?
A. Install antivirus software and ensure that signatures are up-to-date. Configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms to send alerts for security events.
B. Install host-based IDS software to check for file integrity. Export the logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs for monitoring and alerting.
C. Export system log files to Amazon S3. Parse the log files using an AWS Lambda function that will send alerts of any unauthorized system login attempts through Amazon SNS.
D. Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to detect file system changes. If a change is detected, automatically terminate and recreate the instance from the most recent AMI. Use Amazon SNS to send notification of the event.
83. A company has multiple VPCs in their account that are peered, as shown in the diagram. A Security Engineer wants to perform penetration tests of the Amazon EC2 instances in all three VPCs. How can this be accomplished? (Choose two.)
A. Deploy a pre-authorized scanning engine from the AWS Marketplace into VPC B, and use it to scan instances in all three VPCs. Do not complete the penetration test request form.
B. Deploy a pre-authorized scanning engine from the Marketplace into each VPC, and scan instances in each VPC from the scanning engine in that VPC. Do not complete the penetration test request form.
C. Create a VPN connection from the data center to VPC A. Use an on-premises scanning engine to scan the instances in all three VPCs. Complete the penetration test request form for all three VPCs.
D. Create a VPN connection from the data center to each of the three VPCs. Use an on-premises scanning engine to scan the instances in each VPC. Do not complete the penetration test request form.
E. Create a VPN connection from the data center to each of the three VPCs. Use an on-premises scanning engine to scan the instances in each VPC. Complete the penetration test request form for all three VPCs.
84. The Security Engineer is managing a traditional three-tier web application that is running on Amazon EC2 instances. The application has become the target of increasing numbers of malicious attacks from the Internet. What steps should the Security Engineer take to check for known vulnerabilities and limit the attack surface? (Choose two.)
A. Use AWS Certificate Manager to encrypt all traffic between the client and application servers.
B. Review the application security groups to ensure that only the necessary ports are open.
C. Use Elastic Load Balancing to offload Secure Sockets Layer encryption.
D. Use Amazon Inspector to periodically scan the backend instances.
E. Use AWS Key Management Services to encrypt all the traffic between the client and application servers.
85. For compliance reasons, an organization limits the use of resources to three specific AWS regions. It wants to be alerted when any resources are launched in unapproved regions. Which of the following approaches will provide alerts on any resources launched in an unapproved region?
A. Develop an alerting mechanism based on processing AWS CloudTrail logs.
B. Monitor Amazon S3 Event Notifications for objects stored in buckets in unapproved regions.
C. Analyze Amazon CloudWatch Logs for activities in unapproved regions.
D. Use AWS Trusted Advisor to alert on all resources being created.
86. A company runs an application on AWS that needs to be accessed only by employees. Most employees work from the office, but others work remotely or travel. How can the Security Engineer protect this workload so that only employees can access it?
A. Add each employee’s home IP address to the security group for the application so that only those users can access the workload.
B. Create a virtual gateway for VPN connectivity for each employee, and restrict access to the workload from within the VPC.
C. Use a VPN appliance from the AWS Marketplace for users to connect to, and restrict workload access to traffic from that appliance.
D. Route all traffic to the workload through AWS WAF. Add each employee’s home IP address into an AWS WAF rule, and block all other traffic.
87. A Systems Engineer is troubleshooting the connectivity of a test environment that includes a virtual security appliance deployed inline. In addition to using the virtual security appliance, the Development team wants to use security groups and network ACLs to accomplish various security requirements in the environment. What configuration is necessary to allow the virtual security appliance to route the traffic?
A. Disable network ACLs.
B. Configure the security appliance’s elastic network interface for promiscuous mode.
C. Disable the Network Source/Destination check on the security appliance’s elastic network interface
D. Place the security appliance in the public subnet with the internet gateway
88. A Security Architect is evaluating managed solutions for storage of encryption keys. The requirements are: -Storage is accessible by using only VPCs. -Service has tamper-evident controls. -Access logging is enabled. -Storage has high availability. Which of the following services meets these requirements?
A. Amazon S3 with default encryption
B. AWS CloudHSM
C. Amazon DynamoDB with server-side encryption
D. AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store
89. An AWS account includes two S3 buckets: bucket1 and bucket2. The bucket2 does not have a policy defined, but bucket1 has the following bucket policy:
In addition, the same account has an IAM User named “alice”, with the following IAM policy.
Which buckets can user “alice” access?
A. Bucket1 only
B. Bucket2 only
C. Both bucket1 and bucket2
D. Neither bucket1 nor bucket2
90. An organization has three applications running on AWS, each accessing the same data on Amazon S3. The data on Amazon S3 is server-side encrypted by using an AWS KMS Customer Master Key (CMK). What is the recommended method to ensure that each application has its own programmatic access control permissions on the KMS CMK?
A. Change the key policy permissions associated with the KMS CMK for each application when it must access the data in Amazon S3.
B. Have each application assume an IAM role that provides permissions to use the AWS Certificate Manager CMK.
C. Have each application use a grant on the KMS CMK to add or remove specific access controls on the KMS CMK.
D. Have each application use an IAM policy in a user context to have specific access permissions on the KMS CMK.
91. The Security Engineer is given the following requirements for an application that is running on Amazon EC2 and managed by using AWS CloudFormation templates with EC2 Auto Scaling groups: -Have the EC2 instances bootstrapped to connect to a backend database. -Ensure that the database credentials are handled securely. -Ensure that retrievals of database credentials are logged.
Which of the following is the MOST efficient way to meet these requirements?
A. Pass databases credentials to EC2 by using CloudFormation stack parameters with the property set to true. Ensure that the instance is configured to log to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
B. Store database passwords in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store by using SecureString parameters. Set the IAM role for the EC2 instance profile to allow access to the parameters.
C. Create an AWS Lambda that ingests the database password and persists it to Amazon S3 with server-side encryption. Have the EC2 instances retrieve the S3 object on startup, and log all script invocations to syslog.
D. Write a script that is passed in as UserData so that it is executed upon launch of the EC2 instance. Ensure that the instance is configured to log to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
92. A company has two AWS accounts, each containing one VPC. The first VPC has a VPN connection with its corporate network. The second VPC, without a VPN, hosts an Amazon Aurora database cluster in private subnets. Developers manage the Aurora database from a bastion host in a public subnet as shown in the image.
A security review has flagged this architecture as vulnerable, and a Security Engineer has been asked to make this design more secure. The company has a short deadline and a second VPN connection to the Aurora account is not possible. How can a Security Engineer securely set up the bastion host?
A. Move the bastion host to the VPC with VPN connectivity. Create a VPC peering relationship between the bastion host VPC and Aurora VPC.
B. Create a SSH port forwarding tunnel on the Developer’s workstation to the bastion host to ensure that only authorized SSH clients can access the bastion host.
C. Move the bastion host to the VPC with VPN connectivity. Create a cross-account trust relationship between the bastion VPC and Aurora VPC, and update the Aurora security group for the relationship.
D. Create an AWS Direct Connect connection between the corporate network and the Aurora account, and adjust the Aurora security group for this connection.
93. An organization operates a web application that serves users globally. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. There is an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the load balancer, and the organization uses AWS WAF. The application is currently experiencing a volumetric attack whereby the attacker is exploiting a bug in a popular mobile game. The application is being flooded with HTTP requests from all over the world with the User-Agent set to the following string: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ExampleCorp; ExampleGame/1.22; Mobile/1.0) What mitigation can be applied to block attacks resulting from this bug while continuing to service legitimate requests?
A. Create a rule in AWS WAF rules with conditions that block requests based on the presence of ExampleGame/1.22 in the User-Agent header
B. Create a geographic restriction on the CloudFront distribution to prevent access to the application from most geographic regions
C. Create a rate-based rule in AWS WAF to limit the total number of requests that the web application services.
D. Create an IP-based blacklist in AWS WAF to block the IP addresses that are originating from requests that contain ExampleGame/1.22 in the User-Agent header.
94. Some highly sensitive analytics workloads are to be moved to Amazon EC2 hosts. Threat modeling has found that a risk exists where a subnet could be maliciously or accidentally exposed to the internet. Which of the following mitigations should be recommended?
A. Use AWS Config to detect whether an Internet Gateway is added and use an AWS Lambda function to provide auto-remediation.
B. Within the Amazon VPC configuration, mark the VPC as private and disable Elastic IP addresses.
C. Use IPv6 addressing exclusively on the EC2 hosts, as this prevents the hosts from being accessed from the internet.
D. Move the workload to a Dedicated Host, as this provides additional network security controls and monitoring.
95. A Developer who is following AWS best practices for secure code development requires an application to encrypt sensitive data to be stored at rest, locally in the application, using AWS KMS. What is the simplest and MOST secure way to decrypt this data when required?
A. Request KMS to provide the stored unencrypted data key and then use the retrieved data key to decrypt the data.
B. Keep the plaintext data key stored in Amazon DynamoDB protected with IAM policies. Query DynamoDB to retrieve the data key to decrypt the data
C. Use the Encrypt API to store an encrypted version of the data key with another customer managed key. Decrypt the data key and use it to decrypt the data when required.
D. Store the encrypted data key alongside the encrypted data. Use the Decrypt API to retrieve the data key to decrypt the data when required.
96. A Security Administrator at a university is configuring a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances. The EC2 instances are shared among students, and non-root SSH access is allowed. The Administrator is concerned about students attacking other AWS account resources by using the EC2 instance metadata service. What can the Administrator do to protect against this potential attack?
A. Disable the EC2 instance metadata service.
B. Log all student SSH interactive session activity.
C. Implement ip tables-based restrictions on the instances.
D. Install the Amazon Inspector agent on the instances.
97. An organization receives an alert that indicates that an EC2 instance behind an ELB Classic Load Balancer has been compromised. What techniques will limit lateral movement and allow evidence gathering?
A. Remove the instance from the load balancer and terminate it.
B. Remove the instance from the load balancer, and shut down access to the instance by tightening the security group.
C. Reboot the instance and check for any Amazon CloudWatch alarms.
D. Stop the instance and make a snapshot of the root EBS volume.
98. A Development team has asked for help configuring the IAM roles and policies in a new AWS account. The team using the account expects to have hundreds of master keys and therefore does not want to manage access control for customer master keys (CMKs). Which of the following will allow the team to manage AWS KMS permissions in IAM without the complexity of editing individual key policies?
A. The account’s CMK key policy must allow the account’s IAM roles to perform KMS EnableKey.
B. Newly created CMKs must have a key policy that allows the root principal to perform all actions.
C. Newly created CMKs must allow the root principal to perform the kms CreateGrant API operation.
D. Newly created CMKs must mirror the IAM policy of the KMS key administrator.
99. An Amazon EC2 instance is part of an EC2 Auto Scaling group that is behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). It is suspected that the EC2 instance has been compromised. Which steps should be taken to investigate the suspected compromise? (Choose three.)
A. Detach the elastic network interface from the EC2 instance.
B. Initiate an Amazon Elastic Block Store volume snapshot of all volumes on the EC2 instance.
C. Disable any Amazon Route 53 health checks associated with the EC2 instance.
D. De-register the EC2 instance from the ALB and detach it from the Auto Scaling group.
E. Attach a security group that has restrictive ingress and egress rules to the EC2 instance.
F. Add a rule to an AWS WAF to block access to the EC2 instance.
100. A company has five AWS accounts and wants to use AWS CloudTrail to log API calls. The log files must be stored in an Amazon S3 bucket that resides in a new account specifically built for centralized services with a unique top-level prefix for each trail. The configuration must also enable detection of any modification to the logs. Which of the following steps will implement these requirements? (Choose three.)
A. Create a new S3 bucket in a separate AWS account for centralized storage of CloudTrail logs, and enable “Log File Validation” on all trails.
B. Use an existing S3 bucket in one of the accounts, apply a bucket policy to the new centralized S3 bucket that permits the CloudTrail service to use the “s3: PutObject” action and the “s3 GetBucketACL” action, and specify the appropriate resource ARNs for the CloudTrail trails.
C. Apply a bucket policy to the new centralized S3 bucket that permits the CloudTrail service to use the “s3 PutObject” action and the “s3 GelBucketACL” action, and specify the appropriate resource ARNs for the CloudTrail trails.
D. Use unique log file prefixes for trails in each AWS account.
E. Configure CloudTrail in the centralized account to log all accounts to the new centralized S3 bucket.
F. Enable encryption of the log files by using AWS Key Management Service
