SCS-C02 Exam Dumps - Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Specialty Questions and Answers

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

The AWS documentation states that you can deploy the Lambda functions inside the VPC and attach a security group to the Lambda functions. You can then provide outbound rule access to the VPC CIDR range only and update the DB instance security group to allow traffic from the Lambda security group. This method is the most secure way to meet the requirements.

The correct answer is B and D. In the dedicated security account, create an Amazon S3 bucket. Configure S3 Object Lock in compliance mode and a retention period of 2 years on the S3 bucket. Set the bucket policy to allow the organization’s member accounts to write to the S3 bucket. Create an AWS CloudTrail trail for the organization. Configure logs to be delivered to the logging Amazon S3 bucket in the dedicated security account.

According to the AWS documentation, AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services.

To use CloudTrail with multiple AWS accounts and regions, you need to enable AWS Organizations with all features enabled. This allows you to centrally manage your accounts and apply policies across your organization. You can also use CloudTrail as a service principal for AWS Organizations, which lets you create an organization trail that applies to all accounts in your organization. An organization trail logs events for all AWS Regions and delivers the log files to an S3 bucket that you specify.

To create an organization trail, you need to use an administrator account, such as the organization’s management account or a delegated administrator account. You can then configure the trail to deliver logs to an S3 bucket in the dedicated security account. Thiswill ensure that all account activity across all member accounts and regions is logged and reported to the security account.

According to the AWS documentation, Amazon S3 is an object storage service that offers scalability, data availability, security, and performance. You can use S3 to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. You can also use S3 features such as lifecycle management, encryption, versioning, and replication to optimize your storage.

To use S3 with CloudTrail logs, you need to create an S3 bucket in the dedicated security account that will store the logs from the organization trail. You can then configure S3 Object Lock on the bucket to prevent objects from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely. You can also enable compliance mode on the bucket, which prevents any user, including the root user in your account, from deleting or modifying a locked object until it reaches its retention date.

To set a retention period of 2 years on the S3 bucket, you need to create a default retention configuration for the bucket that specifies a retention mode (either governance or compliance) and a retention period (either a number of days or a date). You can then set the bucket policy to allow the organization’s member accounts to write to the S3 bucket. This will ensure that all logs are retained in a secure storage location within the security account for 2 years and no changes or deletions are allowed.

Option A is incorrect because setting the bucket policy to allow the organization’s management account to write to the S3 bucket is not sufficient, as it will not grant access to the other member accounts in the organization.

Option C is incorrect because using an S3 Lifecycle configuration that expires objects after 2 years is not secure, as it will allow users to delete or modify objects before they expire.

Option E is incorrect because using Lambda and Kinesis Data Firehose to forward logs from one S3 bucket to another is not necessary, as CloudTrail can directly deliver logs to an S3 bucket in another account. It also introduces additional operational overhead and complexity.

The correct answer is B and E. To troubleshoot the issue, the security engineer should verify that the SQS resource policy does not explicitly deny access to the role used by the instances, and that the role attached to the instances contains policies that allow access to the queue. These actions will ensure that the instances have the necessary permissions to retrieve messages from Amazon SQS, while maintaining the principle of least privilege.

The other options are incorrect because they are either unnecessary or overly permissive. Option A is incorrect because configuring and assigning an MFA device to the role used by the instances is not required to access Amazon SQS. MFA is an optional security feature that adds an extra layer ofprotection on top of the user name and password1. Option C is incorrect because verifying that the access key attached to the role used by the instances is active is not relevant to the issue. Access keys are used to make programmatic requests to AWS services, not to retrieve messages from Amazon SQS2. Option D is incorrect because attaching the AmazonSQSFullAccess managed policy to the role used by the instances is overly permissive and violates the principle of least privilege. This policy grants full access to all Amazon SQS actions and resources, which may expose the instances to unnecessary risks3.

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 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.

Data stored in Amazon EBS volumes is redundantly stored in multiple physical locations as part of normal operation of those services and at no additional charge. However, Amazon EBS replication is stored within the same availability zone, not across multiple zones; therefore, it is highly recommended that you conduct regular snapshots to Amazon S3 for long-term data durability Option A is invalid because there is no lifecycle policy for EBS volumes Option C is invalid because there is no EBS volume replication Option D is invalid because EBS volume encryption will not ensure business continuity For information on security for Compute Resources, please visit the below URL:https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Security/Security_Compute_Services_Whitepaper.pdf

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.

The correct answer is C. Specify Amazon CloudWatch as the destination for the access logs. Export the CloudWatch logs to an Amazon S3 bucket. Use Amazon Athena to query the logs and to filter the logs by host.

According to the AWS documentation1, AWS WAF offers logging for the traffic that your web ACLs analyze. The logs include information such as the time that AWS WAF received the request from your protected AWS resource, detailed information about the request, and the action setting for the rule that the request matched. You can send yourlogs to an Amazon CloudWatch Logs log group, an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, or an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose.

To create a log analysis solution for the AWS WAF web ACLs, you can use Amazon Athena, which is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL2. You can use Athena to query and filter the AWS WAF logs by host or any other criteria. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

To use Athena with AWS WAF logs, you need to export the CloudWatch logs to an S3 bucket.You can do this by creating a subscription filter that sends your log events to a Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream, which then delivers the data to an S3 bucket3.Alternatively, you can use AWS DMS to migrate your CloudWatch logs to S34.

After you have exported your CloudWatch logs to S3, you can create a table in Athena that points to your S3 bucket and use the AWS service log format that matches your log schema5. For example, if you are using format for your AWS WAF logs, you can use the AWSSerDe serde. Then you can run SQL queries on your Athena table and filter the results by host or any other field in your log data.

Therefore, this solution meets the requirements of creating a log analysis solution for the AWS WAF web ACLs with the most operational efficiency. This solution does not require setting up any additional infrastructure or services, and it leverages the existing capabilities of CloudWatch, S3, and Athena.

The other options are incorrect because:

A. Specifying Amazon Redshift as the destination for the access logs is not possible, because AWS WAF does not support sending logs directly to Redshift. You would need to use an intermediate service such as Kinesis Data Firehose or AWS DMS to load the data from CloudWatch or S3 to Redshift.Deploying the Amazon Athena Redshift connector is not necessary, because you can query Redshift data directly from Athena without using a connector6. This solution would also incur additional costs and operational overhead of managing a Redshift cluster.

B. Specifying Amazon CloudWatch as the destination for the access logs is possible, but using Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights to design a query to filter the logs by host is not efficient or scalable.CloudWatch Logs Insights is a feature that enables you to interactively search and analyze your log data in CloudWatch Logs7.However, CloudWatch Logs Insights has somelimitations, such as a maximum query duration of 20 minutes, a maximum of 20 log groups per query, and a maximum retention period of 24 months8. These limitations may affect your ability to perform complex and long-running analysis on your AWS WAF logs.

D. Specifying Amazon CloudWatch as the destination for the access logs is possible, but using Amazon Redshift Spectrum to query the logs and filter them by host is not efficient or cost-effective.Redshift Spectrum is a feature of Amazon Redshift that enables you to run queries against exabytes of data in S3 without loading or transforming any data9. However, Redshift Spectrum requires a Redshift cluster to process the queries, which adds additional costs and operational overhead.Redshift Spectrum also charges you based on the number ofbytes scanned by each query, which can be expensive if you have large volumes of log data10.

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