AWS Certified Security - SpecialtyPreview

The Security Engineer is managing a web application that processes highly sensitive personal information. The application runs on Amazon EC2. The application has strict compliance requirements, which instruct that all incoming traffic to the application is protected from common web exploits and that all outgoing traffic from the EC2 instances is restricted to specific whitelisted URLs.
Which architecture should the Security Engineer use to meet these requirements?

A company's database developer has just migrated an Amazon RDS database credential to be stored and managed by AWS Secrets Manager. The developer has also enabled rotation of the credential within the Secrets Manager console and set the rotation to change every 30 days.
After a short period of time, a number of existing applications have failed with authentication errors.
What is the MOST likely cause of the authentication errors?

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.)

Which of the following minimizes the potential attack surface for applications?

A water utility company uses a number of Amazon EC2 instances to manage updates to a fleet of 2,000 Internet of Things (IoT) field devices that monitor water quality. These devices each have unique access credentials.
An operational safety policy requires that access to specific credentials is independently auditable.
What is the MOST cost-effective way to manage the storage of credentials?

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 security team is responsible for reviewing AWS API call activity in the cloud environment for security violations. These events must be recorded and retained in a centralized location for both current and future AWS regions.
What is the SIMPLEST way to meet these requirements?

A Security Engineer received an AWS Abuse Notice listing EC2 instance IDs that are reportedly abusing other hosts.
Which action should the Engineer take based on this situation? (Choose three.)

An application outputs logs to a text file. The logs must be continuously monitored for security incidents.
Which design will meet the requirements with MINIMUM effort?

The Information Technology department has stopped using Classic Load Balancers and switched to Application Load Balancers to save costs. After the switch, some users on older devices are no longer able to connect to the website.
What is causing this situation?

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.)

During a recent internal investigation, it was discovered that all API logging was disabled in a production account, and the root user had created new API keys that appear to have been used several times.
What could have been done to detect and automatically remediate the incident?

A Security Engineer has created an Amazon CloudWatch event that invokes an AWS Lambda function daily. The Lambda function runs an Amazon Athena query that checks AWS CloudTrail logs in Amazon S3 to detect whether any IAM user accounts or credentials have been created in the past 30 days. The results of the
Athena query are created in the same S3 bucket. The Engineer runs a test execution of the Lambda function via the AWS Console, and the function runs successfully.
After several minutes, the Engineer finds that his Athena query has failed with the error message: Insufficient Permissions. The IAM permissions of the Security
Engineer and the Lambda function are shown below:

Security Engineer -

Lambda function execution role -

What is causing the error?

An organization policy states that all encryption keys must be automatically rotated every 12 months.
Which AWS Key Management Service (KMS) key type should be used to meet this requirement?

The Security Engineer for a mobile game has to implement a method to authenticate users so that they can save their progress. Because most of the users are part of the same OpenID-Connect compatible social media website, the Security Engineer would like to use that as the identity provider.
Which solution is the SIMPLEST way to allow the authentication of users using their social media identities?

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.)

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.)

During a recent security audit, it was discovered that multiple teams in a large organization have placed restricted data in multiple Amazon S3 buckets, and the data may have been exposed. The auditor has requested that the organization identify all possible objects that contain personally identifiable information (PII) and then determine whether this information has been accessed.
What solution will allow the Security team to complete this request?

An application has a requirement to be resilient across not only Availability Zones within the application's primary region but also be available within another region altogether.
Which of the following supports this requirement for AWS resources that are encrypted by AWS KMS?

A Security Engineer is trying to determine whether the encryption keys used in an AWS service are in compliance with certain regulatory standards.
Which of the following actions should the Engineer perform to get further guidance?

The Security team believes that a former employee may have gained unauthorized access to AWS resources sometime in the past 3 months by using an identified access key.
What approach would enable the Security team to find out what the former employee may have done within AWS?

A company wants to control access to its AWS resources by using identities and groups that are defined in its existing Microsoft Active Directory.
What must the company create in its AWS account to map permissions for AWS services to Active Directory user attributes?

A company has contracted with a third party to audit several AWS accounts. To enable the audit, cross-account IAM roles have been created in each account targeted for audit. The Auditor is having trouble accessing some of the accounts.
Which of the following may be causing this problem? (Choose three.)

Compliance requirements state that all communications between company on-premises hosts and EC2 instances be encrypted in transit. Hosts use custom proprietary protocols for their communication, and EC2 instances need to be fronted by a load balancer for increased availability.
Which of the following solutions will meet these requirements?