Pass the Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Specialty SCS-C02 Questions and answers with Dumpstech

Amazon EventBridge can directly monitor CloudTrail events, including root login attempts. By creating an EventBridge rule to trigger on a root sign-in event (ConsoleLogin with userIdentity.type as Root), you can immediately send alerts to SNS, fulfilling the requirement for real-time notifications.

This solution is low-maintenance and efficient, following best practices in real-time security event monitoring under the Logging and Monitoring domain.

To allow a Lambda function in one AWS account to access a KMS customer managed key in another AWS account, the following steps are required:

Configure the key policy for the customer managed key in the production account to allow access to the IAM role of the Lambda function in the development account. A key policy is a resource-based policy that defines who can use or manage a KMS key. To grant cross-account access to a KMS key, you must specify the AWS account ID and the IAM role ARN of the external principal in the key policy statement. For more information, see Allowing users in other accounts to use a KMS key.

Configure the IAM role for the Lambda function in the development account by attaching an IAM policy that allows access to the customer managed key in the production account. An IAM policy is an identity-based policy that defines what actions an IAM entity can perform on which resources. To allow an IAM role to use a KMS key in another account, you must specify the KMS key ARN and the kms:Encrypt action (or any other action that requires access to the KMS key) in the IAM policy statement. For more information, see Using IAM policies with AWS KMS.

This solution will meet the requirements of allowing secure access to a KMS customermanaged key across AWS accounts.

The other options are incorrect because they either do not grant cross-account access to the KMS key (A, C), or do not use a valid policy type for KMS keys (D).

Verified References:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/key-policy-modifying-external-accounts.html

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/iam-policies.html

Verify File Permissions:

Ensure that the log files being monitored by the CloudWatch Logs agent are still accessible.

Check permissions to confirm that the agent's process can read the files.

Check Log Rotation Rules:

Operating systems may rotate logs periodically, causing the monitored file path to change.

Update the CloudWatch Logs agent configuration to handle rotated log files (e.g., wildcards or new file paths).

Diagnose with Agent Logs:

Review the agent logs in/var/log/amazon/or equivalent to identify potential issues.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Agent Setup

Handling Log Rotation

The combination of solutions that will meet the requirements are:

A. Create a local individual break glass IAM user for the security team. Create a trail in AWS CloudTrail that has Amazon CloudWatch Logs turned on. Use Amazon EventBridge to monitor local user activities. This is a valid solution because it allows the security team to access the workload AWS account and instances using a local IAM user that does not depend on SAML federation.It also enables logging and monitoring of the break glass user activities using AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, and Amazon EventBridge123.

E. Configure AWS Systems Manager Session Manager for Amazon EC2. Configure an AWS CloudTrail filter based on Session Manager. Send the results to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. This is a valid solution because it allows the security team to access the workload instances without opening any inbound ports or managing SSH keys or bastion hosts.It also enables logging and notification of the breakglass user activities using AWS CloudTrail, Session Manager, and Amazon SNS456.

The other options are incorrect because:

B.Creating a break glass EC2 key pair for the AWS account and providing it to the security team is not a valid solution, because it requires opening inbound ports on the instances and managing SSH keys, which increases the security risk and complexity7.

C.Creating a break glass IAM role for the account and allowing security team members to perform the AssumeRoleWithSAML operation is not a valid solution, because it still dependson SAML federation, which might not work in case of SAML errors8.

D.Creating a local individual break glass IAM user on the operating system level of each workload instance and configuring unrestricted security groups on theinstances to grant access to the break glass IAM users is not a valid solution,because it requires opening inbound ports on the instances and managing multiple local users, which increases the security risk and complexity9.

The correct answer is C. Change the Resource element to “arn:aws:s3:::DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET/*”.

The reason is that the Resource element in the bucket policy specifies which objects in the bucket are affected by the policy. In this case, the policy only applies to the bucket itself, not the objects inside it. Therefore, the Lambda function cannot access the objects with the s3:GetObject permission. To fix this, the Resource element should include a wildcard (*) to match all objects in the bucket. This way, the policy grants the Lambda function permission to read any object in the bucket.

The other options are incorrect for the following reasons:

A. Removing the Condition element would not help, because it only restricts access based on the source IP address of the request. The Principal element should not be changed to the Lambda function ARN, because it specifies who is allowed or denied access by the policy. The policy should allow access to any principal ("*") and rely on IAM roles or policies to control access to the Lambda function.

B. Changing the Action element to include s3:GetBucket* would not help, because it would grant additional permissions that are not needed by the Lambda function, such as s3:GetBucketAcl or s3:GetBucketPolicy. The s3:GetObject* permission is sufficient for reading objects in the bucket.

D. Changing the Resource element to the Lambda function ARN would not make sense, because it would mean that the policy applies to the Lambda function itself, not the bucket or its objects. The Principal element should not be changed to s3.amazonaws.com, because it would grant access to any AWS service that uses S3, not just Lambda.

To ensure minimal latency and regional availability of secrets, encrypting secrets in us-east-1 with a customer-managed KMS key and then replicating them to us-west-1 for encryption with the same key is the optimal approach. This method leverages customer-managed KMS keys for enhanced control and ensures that secrets are available in both regions, adhering to disaster recovery principles and minimizing latency by using regional endpoints.

The most scalable and lowest-latency solution for end-to-end TLS is to configure a Network Load Balancer (NLB) with a TCP listener. This configuration allows TLS traffic to be passed through directly to the containerized applications running on ECS, preserving full encryption between the client and the container without TLS termination at the load balancer.

NLBs are optimized for handling sudden spikes in traffic (volatile traffic patterns), and passing through TLS traffic ensures the encryption is maintained from source to container.

This is a key practice under Infrastructure Security as highlighted in the AWS Certified Security – Specialty content where preserving encryption and handling scale is crucial.

To address the issue of an Amazon EC2 instance receiving suspicious requests over an open TCP port, the most effective solution is to update the Network Access Control List (NACL) associated with the subnet where the EC2 instance resides. By adding a deny rule for the specific TCP port and source IP addresses involved in the suspicious activity, the security team can effectively block unwanted traffic at the subnet level. NACLs act as a stateless firewall for controlling traffic in and out of subnets, allowing for broad-based traffic filtering. This measure ensures that only legitimate traffic can reach the EC2 instance, thereby enhancing security without affecting the application's availability to other users. It's a more granular and immediate way to block specific traffic compared to modifying security group rules, which are stateful and apply at the instance level.