Amazon Web Services SCS-C02 - AWS Certified Security - Specialty

To troubleshoot the issue of an EC2 instance failing to start and transitioning to a terminated state when it has an EBS volume encrypted with an AWS KMS customer managed key, a security engineer should take the following steps:

C. Verify that the KMS key that is associated with the EBS volume is in the Enabled state. If the key is not enabled, it will not function properly and could cause the EC2 instance to fail.

D. Verify that the EC2 role that is associated with the instance profile has the correct IAM instance policy to launch an EC2 instance with the EBS volume. If the instance does not have the necessary permissions, it may not be able to mount the volume and could cause the instance to fail.

Therefore, options C and D are the correct answers.

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:

http://docs.IAM.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancine/latest/classic/elb-https-load-balancers.htmll

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

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Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The requirement is to remediate both existing and future noncompliant S3 buckets across multiple accounts and Regions in an AWS Organizations structure.

AWS Config Aggregator with organization-wide aggregation ensures that all accounts and Regions are continuously monitored for compliance.

By integrating a Lambda function with AWS Config rules, you can automatically remediate noncompliant resources (e.g., by applying encryption settings or blocking public access).

This solution provides both visibility and automated enforcement across the entire organization.

Options using SCPs (B and D) only prevent future actions and do not remediate existing noncompliant resources. Furthermore, scoping the aggregator to only some accounts/Regions (as in C and D) fails to meet the requirement for organization-wide remediation.

This approach aligns with Data Protection and Governance best practices in the AWS Certified Security – Specialty guidelines.

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.

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 combination of AWS solutions that will meet these requirements is A. AWS Site-to-Site VPN and B. AWS Direct Connect.

A. AWS Site-to-Site VPN is a service that allows you to securely connect your on-premises data center to your AWS VPC over the internet using IPsec encryption. This solution meets the requirement of encrypting the data in transit between the on-premises data center and AWS.

B. AWS Direct Connect is a service that allows you to establish a dedicated network connection between your on-premises data center and your AWS VPC. This solution meets the requirement of reducing network latency between the on-premises data center and AWS.

C. AWS VPN CloudHub is a service that allows you to connect multiple VPN connections from different locations to the same virtual private gateway in your AWS VPC. This solution is not relevant for this scenario, as there is only one on-premises data center involved.

D. VPC peering is a service that allows you to connect two or more VPCs in the same or different regions using private IP addresses. This solution does not meet the requirement of connecting an on-premises data center to AWS, as it only works for VPCs.

E. NAT gateway is a service that allows you to enable internet access for instances in a private subnet in your AWS VPC. This solution does not meet the requirement of connecting an on-premises data center to AWS, as it only works for outbound traffic from your VPC.

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:

http://docs.IAM.amazon.com/IAMcloudtrail/latest/userguide/cloudtrail-user-guide.html

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

https://IAM.amazon.com/config/

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:

http://docs.IAM.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id credentials_getting-report.html

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

To protect the sensitive data against any data breach and minimize management overhead, the security engineer should recommend the following solution:

Enable Amazon RDS encryption to encrypt the database and snapshots. This allows the security engineer to use AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to encrypt data at rest for the database and any backups or replicas.

Enable Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) encryption on Amazon EC2 instances. This allows the security engineer to use AWS KMS to encrypt data at rest for the EC2 instances and any snapshots or volumes.

Store the database credentials in AWS Secrets Manager with automatic rotation. This allows the security engineer to encrypt and manage secrets centrally, and to configure automatic rotation schedules for them.

Set up TLS for the connection to the RDS hosted database. This allows the security engineer to encrypt data in transit between the EC2 instances and the database.

"When you create an Amazon GuardDuty filter, you choose specific filter criteria, name the filter and can enable the auto-archiving of findings that the filter matches. This allows you to further tune GuardDuty to your unique environment, without degrading the ability to identify threats. With auto-archive set, all findings are still generated by GuardDuty, so you have a complete and immutable history of all suspicious activity."