Exam 8: AWS Certified Security - Specialty (SCS-C01)

A company is operating an open-source software platform that is internet facing. The legacy software platform no longer receives security updates. The software platform operates using Amazon Route 53 weighted load balancing to send traffic to two Amazon EC2 instances that connect to an Amazon RDS cluster. A recent report suggests this software platform is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks, with samples of attacks provided. The company's Security Engineer must secure this system against SQL injection attacks within 24 hours. The Security Engineer's solution must involve the least amount of effort and maintain normal operations during implementation. What should the Security Engineer do to meet these requirements?

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 Developer's laptop was stolen. The laptop was not encrypted, and it contained the SSH key used to access multiple Amazon EC2 instances. A Security Engineer has verified that the key has not been used, and has blocked port 22 to all EC2 instances while developing a response plan. How can the Security Engineer further protect currently running instances?

A Website currently runs on Amazon EC2, with mostly static content on the site. Recently, the site was subjected to a DDoS attack, and a Security Engineer was tasked with redesigning the edge security to help mitigate this risk in the future. What are some ways the Engineer could achieve this? (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 company needs to migrate several applications to AWS. This will require storing more than 5,000 credentials. To meet compliance requirements, the company will use its existing password management system for key rotation, auditing, and integration with third-party secrets containers. The company has a limited budget and is seeking the most cost-effective solution that is still secure. How should the company accomplish this at the LOWEST cost?

A Security Administrator is restricting the capabilities of company root user accounts. The company uses AWS Organizations and has enabled it for all feature sets, including consolidates billing. The top-level account is used for billing and administrative purposes, not for operational AWS resource purposes. How can the Administrator restrict usage of member root user accounts across the organization?

A security engineer needs to build a solution to turn AWS CloudTrail back on in multiple AWS Regions in case it is ever turned off. What is the MOST efficient way to implement this solution?

A company has a web-based application using Amazon CloudFront and running on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The ALB is terminating TLS and balancing load across ECS service tasks. A security engineer needs to design a solution to ensure that application content is accessible only through CloudFront and that it is never accessible directly. How should the security engineer build the MOST secure solution?

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?

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.)

An ecommerce website was down for 1 hour following a DDoS attack. Users were unable to connect to the website during the attack period. The ecommerce company's security team is worried about future potential attacks and wants to prepare for such events. The company needs to minimize downtime in its response to similar attacks in the future. Which steps would help achieve this? (Choose two.)

For compliance reasons, a Security Engineer must produce a weekly report that lists any instance that does not have the latest approved patches applied. The Engineer must also ensure that no system goes more than 30 days without the latest approved updates being applied. What would be the MOST efficient way to achieve these goals?

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 company manages multiple AWS accounts using AWS Organizations. The company's security team notices that some member accounts are not sending AWS CloudTrail logs to a centralized Amazon S3 logging bucket. The security team wants to ensure there is at least one trail configured for all existing accounts and for any account that is created in the future. Which set of actions should the security team implement to accomplish this?

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 requires that SSH commands used to access its AWS instance be traceable to the user who executed each command. How should a Security Engineer accomplish this?

A company has enabled Amazon GuardDuty in all Regions as part of its security monitoring strategy. In one of the VPCs, the company hosts an Amazon EC2 instance working as an FTP server that is contacted by a high number of clients from multiple locations. This is identified by GuardDuty as a brute force attack due to the high number of connections that happen every hour. The finding has been flagged as a false positive. However, GuardDuty keeps raising the issue. A Security Engineer has been asked to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. The Engineer needs to ensure that changes do not compromise the visibility of potential anomalous behavior. How can the Security Engineer address the issue?

A Systems Engineer has been tasked with configuring outbound mail through Simple Email Service (SES) and requires compliance with current TLS standards. The mail application should be configured to connect to which of the following endpoints and corresponding ports?

A security engineer is setting up a new AWS account. The engineer has been asked to continuously monitor the company's AWS account using automated compliance checks based on AWS best practices and Center for Internet Security (CIS) AWS Foundations Benchmarks. How can the security engineer accomplish this using AWS services?