Amazon SCS-C02 Practice Test - Questions Answers, Page 31

To receive near-real-time notifications of AWS account root user sign-ins, the most effective solutions involve the use of AWS CloudTrail logs, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, and Amazon EventBridge.

Solution C involves configuring AWS CloudTrail to send logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and then setting up a CloudWatch Logs metric filter to detect successful root account logins. When such logins are detected, a CloudWatch alarm can be configured to trigger and notify an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic, which in turn can send notifications to the required endpoints. This solution provides an efficient way to monitor and alert on root account usage without requiring custom parsing or handling of log data.

Solution E uses Amazon EventBridge to monitor for specific AWS API calls, such as SignIn events that indicate a successful root account login. By configuring an EventBridge rule to trigger on these events, notifications can be sent directly to an SNS topic, which then distributes the alerts to the necessary endpoints. This approach leverages native AWS event patterns and provides a streamlined mechanism for detecting and alerting on root account activity.

Both solutions offer automation, scalability, and the ability to integrate with other AWS services, ensuring that stakeholders are promptly alerted to critical security events involving the root user.

To set up AWS Security Hub for centralized security monitoring across all accounts in an AWS Organization with the least operational overhead, the best actions to take are:

Solution A: Configure a finding aggregation Region for Security Hub. This allows Security Hub to aggregate findings from multiple regions into a single designated region, simplifying monitoring and analysis. By centralizing findings, the security team can have a unified view of security alerts and compliance statuses across all accounts and regions, enhancing the efficiency of security operations.

Solution C: Turn on the option to automatically enable accounts for Security Hub within the AWS Organization. This ensures that as new accounts are created and added to the organization, they are automatically enrolled in Security Hub, and their findings are included in the centralized monitoring. This automation reduces the manual effort required to manage account enrollment and ensures comprehensive coverage of security monitoring across the organization.

These actions collectively ensure that Security Hub is effectively configured to manage security findings across all accounts and regions, providing a comprehensive and automated approach to security monitoring with minimal manual intervention.

Implementing S3 Object Lock in compliance mode on the primary Region and configuring S3 replication to a secondary Region ensures the immutability of S3 objects, preventing them from being deleted or altered. This setup meets the requirement of protecting critical data from permanent deletion, even by users with administrative access. The replicated objects in the secondary Region inherit the Object Lock from the primary, ensuring consistent protection across Regions and aligning with disaster recovery requirements.

The most cost-effective way to correct a typo in a vault lock policy during the 24-hour initiation period is to call the abort-vault-lock operation. This action stops the vault lock process, allowing the security engineer to correct the policy and re-initiate the vault lock with the corrected policy. This approach avoids the need for data transfer or creating a new vault, thus minimizing costs and operational overhead.

Utilizing CloudFront signed cookies is the simplest and most effective way to protect HLS video content for paying subscribers. Signed cookies provide access control for multiple files, such as video chunks in HLS streaming, without the need to generate a signed URL for each video chunk. This method simplifies the process for long video events with thousands of chunks, enhancing user experience while ensuring content protection.

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.

For increased security while ensuring functionality, adjusting NACL3 to allow inbound traffic on port 5432 from the CIDR blocks of the application instance subnets, and allowing outbound traffic on ephemeral ports (1024-65536) back to those subnets creates a secure path for database access. Removing default allow-all rules enhances security by implementing the principle of least privilege, ensuring that only necessary traffic is permitted.

The correct answer is C. The GuardDuty integration with Security Hub was never activated in the AWS account where the finding was generated.

The reason is that Security Hub does not automatically receive findings from GuardDuty unless the integration is activated in each AWS account. According to the AWS documentation1, ''The Amazon GuardDuty integration with Security Hub enables you to send findings from GuardDuty to Security Hub. Security Hub can then include those findings in its analysis of your security posture.'' However, this integration is not enabled by default and requires manual activation in each AWS account. The documentation1 also states that ''You must activate the integration in each AWS account that you want to send findings from GuardDuty to Security Hub.''

Therefore, even though the company has configured the security tooling account as the delegated administrator for GuardDuty and Security Hub, and has enabled these services for existing and new AWS accounts, it still needs to activate the GuardDuty integration with Security Hub in each account. Otherwise, the findings from GuardDuty will not be sent to Security Hub and will not be visible in the delegated administrator account.

The other options are incorrect because:

A) VPC flow logs are not required for GuardDuty to generate DNS findings. GuardDuty uses VPC flow logs as one of the data sources for network connection findings, but not for DNS findings. According to the AWS documentation2, ''GuardDuty uses VPC Flow Logs as a data source for network connection findings.''

B) The VPC DHCP option configured for a custom OpenDNS resolver does not affect GuardDuty's ability to generate DNS findings. GuardDuty uses DNS logs as one of the data sources for DNS findings, regardless of the DNS resolver used by the VPC. According to the AWS documentation2, ''GuardDuty uses DNS logs as a data source for DNS activity findings.''

D) Cross-Region aggregation in Security Hub is not relevant for this scenario, since the company operates out of a single AWS Region. Cross-Region aggregation in Security Hub allows you to aggregate security findings from multiple Regions into a single Region, where you can view and manage them. However, this feature is not needed if the company only uses one Region. According to the AWS documentation3, ''Cross-Region aggregation enables you to aggregate security findings from multiple Regions into a single Region.''

The correct answer is A and B. The principal's identity-based policy grants access to put objects into the S3 bucket with no conditions, and the principal's identity-based policy overrides the condition because the identity-based policy contains an explicit allow.

The reason is that when evaluating access requests, AWS uses a combination of resource-based policies (such as bucket policies) and identity-based policies (such as IAM user policies) to determine whether to allow or deny the action. According to the AWS documentation1, ''If an explicit allow exists in either the resource-based policy or the identity-based policy, then AWS allows access to the resource.'' Therefore, even if the bucket policy has a condition that checks the tag values, it will not be effective if the principal's identity-based policy has an explicit allow for the PutObject action without any conditions. The explicit allow in the identity-based policy will override the condition in the bucket policy and grant access to the principal.

The other options are incorrect because:

C) The S3 bucket's resource policy does not deny access to put objects. This is not a factor that causes the PutObject operation to succeed when the tag values are different. The bucket policy can either allow or deny access based on conditions, but it cannot prevent an explicit allow in the identity-based policy from taking effect.

D) The S3 bucket's resource policy cannot allow actions to the principal. This is not true. The bucket policy can allow actions to specific principals by using the Principal element in the policy statement. According to the AWS documentation2, ''The Principal element specifies the user (IAM user, federated user, or assumed-role user), AWS account, AWS service, or other principal entity that is allowed or denied access to a resource.''

E) The bucket policy does not apply to principals in the same zone of trust. This is not true. The bucket policy applies to any principal that is specified in the Principal element, regardless of whether they are in the same zone of trust or not. A zone of trust is a logical boundary that defines who can access a resource and under what conditions. According to the AWS documentation3, ''A zone of trust can be as small as a single resource (for example, an Amazon S3 object) or as large as an entire AWS account.''