Free Practice Questions for Amazon Web Services SCS-C02 Exam

The reason is that this solution will meet the requirements of collecting, reviewing, and managing the evidence from both on-premises and AWS resources to demonstrate compliance with company policy. According to the web search results12, “AWS Audit Manager helps you continuously audit your AWS usage to simplify how you manage risk and compliance with regulations and industry standards. AWS Audit Manager makes it easier to evaluate whether your policies, procedures, and activities—also known as controls—are operating as intended.” The results1 also state that “In addition to the evidence that Audit Manager collects from your AWS environment, you can also upload and centrally manage evidence from your on-premises or multicloud environment.” Therefore, by creating an assessment in AWS Audit Manager, the security engineer can use a prebuilt or custom framework that contains the relevant controls for the company policy, upload manual evidence from the on-premises workloads, and add the evidence to the assessment. After Audit Manager collects the necessary evidence from the AWS resources, the security engineer can generate an assessment report that includes all the evidence from both sources.

The other options are incorrect because:

B. Install the Amazon CloudWatch agent on the on-premises workloads. Use AWS Config to deploy a conformance pack from a sample conformance pack template or a custom YAML template. Generate an assessment report after AWS Config identifies noncompliant workloads and resources. This option is not sufficient to meet the requirements, because it does not collect or manage the evidence from both sources. It only monitors and evaluates the configuration compliance of theworkloads and resources using AWS Config rules. According to the web search results3, “A conformance pack is a collection of AWS Config rules and remediation actions that can be easily deployed as a single entity in an account and a Region or across an organization in AWS Organizations.” However, a conformance pack does not provide a way to upload or include manual evidence from the on-premises workloads, nor does it generate an assessment report that contains all the evidence.

C. Set up the appropriate security standard in AWS Security Hub. Upload manual evidence from the on-premises workloads. Wait for Security Hub to collect the evidence from the AWS resources. Download the list of controls as a .csv file. This option is not optimal to meet the requirements, because it does not provide a comprehensive or audit-ready report that contains all the evidence. It only provides a list of controls and their compliance status in a .csv file format. According to the web search results4, “Security Hub provides you with a comprehensive view of your security state within AWS and helps you check your environment against security industry standards and best practices.” However, Security Hub does not provide a way to upload or include manual evidence from the on-premises workloads, nor does it generate an assessment report that contains all the evidence.

D. Install the Amazon CloudWatch agent on the on-premises workloads. Create a CloudWatch dashboard to monitor the on-premises workloads and the AWS resources. Run a query on the workloads and resources. Download the results. This option is not sufficient to meet the requirements, because it does not collect or manage the evidence from both sources. It only monitors and analyzes the metrics and logs of the workloads and resources using CloudWatch. According to the web search results, “Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers.” However, CloudWatch does not provide a way to upload or include manual evidence from the on-premises workloads, nor does it generate an assessment report that contains all the evidence.

Understand the Risk:

Unauthorized users could stop or delete CloudTrail logging, creating a gap in audit trails.

Create a Service Control Policy (SCP):

Define an SCP at the root organizational unit (OU) level. The SCP should explicitly denyStopLoggingandDeleteTrailactions.

Example SCP:

{

"Version": "2012-10-17",

"Statement": [

{

"Effect": "Deny",

"Action": [

"cloudtrail:StopLogging",

"cloudtrail:DeleteTrail"

],

"Resource": "*"

}

]

}

Attach the SCP:

Attach the SCP to the root OU in AWS Organizations. This ensures the policy is enforced across all accounts within the organization.

Test and Verify:

Attempt to stop or delete a CloudTrail trail to ensure the SCP prevents these actions.

AWS CloudTrail Security Best Practices

Service Control Policies Documentation

The correct answer is A. Revoke all versions of the signing profile assigned to the developer.

According to the AWS documentation1, AWS Signer is a fully managed code-signing service that helps you ensure the trust and integrity of your code. You can use Signer to sign code artifacts, such as Lambda deployment packages, with code-signing certificates that you control and manage.

A signing profile is a collection of settings that Signer uses to sign your code artifacts. A signing profile includes information such as the following:

The type of signature that you want to create (for example, a code-signing signature).

The signing algorithm that you want Signer to use to sign your code.

The code-signing certificate and its private key that you want Signer to use to sign your code.

You can create multiple versions of a signing profile, each with a different code-signing certificate. You can also revoke a version of a signing profile if you no longer want to use it for signing code artifacts.

In this case, the company wants to ensure that all the code that the developer wrote can no longer be deployed to the Lambda functions. One way to achieve this is to revoke all versions of the signing profile that was assigned to the developer. This will prevent Signer from using that signing profile to sign any new code artifacts, and also invalidate any existing signatures that were created with that signing profile. This way, the company can ensure that only trusted and authorized code can be deployed to the Lambda functions.

The other options are incorrect because:

B. Examining the developer’s IAM roles and removing all permissions that grant access to Signer may not be sufficient to prevent the deployment of the developer’s code. The developer may have already signed some code artifacts with a valid signing profile before leaving the company, and those signatures may still be accepted by Lambda unless the signing profile is revoked.

C. Re-encrypting all source code with a new AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key may not be effective or practical. AWS KMS is a service that lets you create and manage encryption keys for your data. However, Lambda does not require encryption keys for deploying code artifacts, only valid signatures from Signer. Therefore, re-encrypting the source code may not prevent the deployment of the developer’s code if it has already been signed with a valid signing profile. Moreover, re-encrypting all source code may be time-consuming and disruptive for other developers who are working on the same code base.

D. Using Amazon CodeGuru to profile all the code that the Lambda functions use may not help with preventing the deployment of the developer’s code. Amazon CodeGuru is a service that provides intelligent recommendations to improve your code quality and identify an application’s most expensive lines of code. However, CodeGuru does not perform any security checks or validations on your code artifacts, nor does it interact with Signer or Lambda in any way. Therefore, using CodeGuru may not prevent unauthorized or untrusted code from being deployed to the Lambda functions.

Enable GuardDuty:

GuardDuty provides monitoring for EKS clusters by analyzing EKS audit logs.

Automatic Configuration:

No additional setup for the EKS deployment is needed. GuardDuty directly monitors API calls to detect suspicious or unauthenticated access.

Advantages:

Minimal Effort: No operational overhead for configuration.

Proactive Detection: Alerts for unauthorized or suspicious activity in near-real-time.

Amazon GuardDuty for EKS

EKS Audit Log Monitoring

Comprehensive Detailed Explanation with all AWS References

To ensure encryption for all data in transit between EC2 instances and EBS volumes,TLS encryptionmust be implemented. While EBS volume encryption secures data at rest, the requirement here is to secure datain transit.

TLS Encryption with ACM Certificates:

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) simplifies the process of deploying TLS encryption by managing certificates.

EC2 instances can use these certificates for secure data transmission to EBS.

AWS Secrets Manager is a service that helps you manage, retrieve, and rotate secrets such as database credentials, API keys, and other sensitive information. By configuring automatic rotation of credentials in AWS Secrets Manager, you can ensure that your secrets are changed regularly and securely, without requiring manual intervention or application downtime. You can also specify the rotation frequency and the rotation function that performs the logic of changing the credentials on the database and updating the secret in Secrets Manager1.

E. Configure the Java application to catch a connection failure and make a call to AWS Secrets Manager to retrieve updated credentials when the password is rotated. Grant permission to the instance role associated with the EC2 instance to access Secrets Manager.

By configuring the Java application to catch a connection failure and make a call to AWS Secrets Manager to retrieve updated credentials, you can avoid hard-coding the credentials in your application code or configuration files. This way, your application can dynamically obtain the latest credentials from Secrets Manager whenever the password is rotated, without needing to restart or redeploy the application. To enable this, you need to grant permission to the instance role associated with the EC2 instance to access Secrets Manager using IAM policies2. You can also usethe AWS SDK for Java to integrate your application with Secrets Manager3.

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.

The correct answer is B. Create an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Subscribe the third-party ticketing email system to the SNS topic. Create an Amazon EventBridge rule that includes an event pattern that matches High severity GuardDuty findings. Specify the SNS topic as the target for the Event-Bridge rule.

According to the AWS documentation1, you can use Amazon EventBridge to create rules that match events from GuardDuty and route them to targets such as Amazon SNS topics. You can use event patterns to filter events based on criteria such as severity, type, or resource. For example, you can create a rule that matches only High severity findings and sends them to an SNS topic that is subscribed by a third-party ticketing email system. This way, you can automate the creation of tickets for High severity findings and notify the security team.

The correct answer is B and D. In the dedicated security account, create an Amazon S3 bucket. Configure S3 Object Lock in compliance mode and a retention period of 2 years on the S3 bucket. Set the bucket policy to allow the organization’s member accounts to write to the S3 bucket. Create an AWS CloudTrail trail for the organization. Configure logs to be delivered to the logging Amazon S3 bucket in the dedicated security account.

According to the AWS documentation, AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services.

To use CloudTrail with multiple AWS accounts and regions, you need to enable AWS Organizations with all features enabled. This allows you to centrally manage your accounts and apply policies across your organization. You can also use CloudTrail as a service principal for AWS Organizations, which lets you create an organization trail that applies to all accounts in your organization. An organization trail logs events for all AWS Regions and delivers the log files to an S3 bucket that you specify.

To create an organization trail, you need to use an administrator account, such as the organization’s management account or a delegated administrator account. You can then configure the trail to deliver logs to an S3 bucket in the dedicated security account. Thiswill ensure that all account activity across all member accounts and regions is logged and reported to the security account.

According to the AWS documentation, Amazon S3 is an object storage service that offers scalability, data availability, security, and performance. You can use S3 to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. You can also use S3 features such as lifecycle management, encryption, versioning, and replication to optimize your storage.

To use S3 with CloudTrail logs, you need to create an S3 bucket in the dedicated security account that will store the logs from the organization trail. You can then configure S3 Object Lock on the bucket to prevent objects from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely. You can also enable compliance mode on the bucket, which prevents any user, including the root user in your account, from deleting or modifying a locked object until it reaches its retention date.

To set a retention period of 2 years on the S3 bucket, you need to create a default retention configuration for the bucket that specifies a retention mode (either governance or compliance) and a retention period (either a number of days or a date). You can then set the bucket policy to allow the organization’s member accounts to write to the S3 bucket. This will ensure that all logs are retained in a secure storage location within the security account for 2 years and no changes or deletions are allowed.

Option A is incorrect because setting the bucket policy to allow the organization’s management account to write to the S3 bucket is not sufficient, as it will not grant access to the other member accounts in the organization.

Option C is incorrect because using an S3 Lifecycle configuration that expires objects after 2 years is not secure, as it will allow users to delete or modify objects before they expire.

Option E is incorrect because using Lambda and Kinesis Data Firehose to forward logs from one S3 bucket to another is not necessary, as CloudTrail can directly deliver logs to an S3 bucket in another account. It also introduces additional operational overhead and complexity.