SCS-C02 Exam Dumps - AWS Certified Security - Specialty

Service Control Policies (SCPs) are applied at the AWS Organizations level to manage what permissions are available across accounts. SCPs do not grant permissions themselves but restrict them.

In this case, the existing SCP denies resource sharing with external accounts across the organization. To allow an exception for the marketing team, the correct solution is to edit the existing SCP and apply a Condition that excludes the marketing team’s account. This is typically done using the StringNotEquals condition with the aws:PrincipalAccount or aws:PrincipalOrgID key.

By using a condition statement, you can tailor the SCP to deny access only to accounts other than the marketing account. This method ensures granular control without having to restructure the Organizational Unit (OU) or write an entirely separate policy.

Reference from AWS Certified Security - Specialty Official Guide:

This scenario is covered under the Identity and Access Management domain, where SCP exceptions and conditions are used to precisely control permission inheritance across accounts in an organization.

The correct answer is B. Modify the network ACL that is associated with the CIDR range to allow outbound traffic to ephemeral ports.

This answer is correct because network ACLs are stateless, which means that they do not automatically allow return traffic for inbound connections. Therefore, the network ACL that is associated with the CIDR range of the new application must have outbound rules that allow traffic to ephemeral ports, which are the temporary ports used by the vendors’ machines to communicate with the application servers.Ephemeral ports are typically in the range of 1024-655351. If the network ACL does not have such rules, the vendors will not be able to connect to the application.

The other options are incorrect because:

A. Modifying the security group that is associated with the EC2 instances to have the same outbound rules as inbound rules is not a solution, because security groups are stateful, which means that they automatically allow return traffic for inbound connections.Therefore, there is no need to add outbound rules to the security group for the vendors to access the application2.

C. Modifying the inbound rules on the internet gateway to allow the required ports is not a solution, because internet gateways do not have inbound or outbound rules. Internet gateways are VPC components that enable communication between instances in a VPC and the internet.They do not filter traffic based on ports or protocols3.

D. Modifying the network ACL that is associated with the CIDR range to have the same outbound rules as inbound rules is not a solution, because it does not address the issue of ephemeral ports.The outbound rules of the network ACL must matchthe ephemeral port range of the vendors’ machines, not necessarily the inbound rules of the network ACL4.

The correct answer is D. Enable CloudTrail to monitor data events for read and write operations to S3 buckets.

According to the AWS documentation1, CloudTrail data events are the resource operations performed on or within a resource. These are also known as data plane operations. Data events are often high-volume activities. For example, Amazon S3 object-level API activity (such as GetObject, DeleteObject, and PutObject) is a data event.

By default, trails do not log data events. To record CloudTrail data events, you must explicitly add the supported resources or resource types for which you want to collect activity.For more information, see Logging data events in the Amazon S3 User Guide2.

In this case, the security team wants EventBridge to watch for the s3:PutObjectAcl API invocation logs from CloudTrail.This API uses the acl subresource to set the access control list (ACL) permissions for a new or existing object in an S3 bucket3. This is a data event that affects the S3 object resource type. Therefore, the security team must enable CloudTrail to monitor data events for read and write operations to S3 buckets in order to invoke an EventBridge event for this API call.

The other options are incorrect because:

A. Modifying the EventBridge event pattern by selecting Amazon S3 and All Events as the event type will not capture the s3:PutObjectAcl API call, because this is a data event and not a management event. Management events provide information about management operations that are performed on resources in your AWS account.These are also known as control plane operations4.

B. Modifying the EventBridge event pattern by selecting Amazon S3 and Bucket Level Operations as the event type will not capture the s3:PutObjectAcl API call, because this is a data event that affects the S3 object resource type and not the S3 bucket resource type.Bucket level operations are management events that affect the configuration or metadata of an S3 bucket5.

C. Enabling CloudTrail Insights to identify unusual API activity will not help the security team monitor new S3 objects or changes to any S3 bucket policy or setting that result in public access.CloudTrail Insights helps AWS users identify andrespond to unusual activity associated with API calls and API error rates by continuously analyzing CloudTrail management events6. It does not analyze data events or generate EventBridge events.

To ensure that database credentials are stored securely and rotated periodically, the security engineer should do the following:

Use AWS Secrets Manager to store database credentials. This allows the security engineer to encrypt and manage secrets centrally, and to configure automatic rotation schedules for them.

Use IAM roles for ECS tasks to restrict access to database credentials to specific containers only. This allows the security engineer to grant fine-grained permissions to ECS tasks based on their roles, and to avoid sharing credentials as plaintext with other teammates.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Overview.Encryption.html

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/ebs-automatic-encryption/

To implement encryption at rest for both the EC2 instances and the Aurora DB cluster, the following steps are required:

For the EC2 instances, modify the EBS default encryption settings in the target AWS Region to enable encryption. This will ensure that any new EBS volumes created in that Region are encrypted by default using an AWS managed key. Alternatively, you can specify a customer managed key when creating new EBS volumes.For more information, see Amazon EBS encryption.

Use an Auto Scaling group instance refresh to replace the existing EC2 instances with new ones that have encrypted EBS volumes attached. An instance refresh is a feature that helps you update all instances in an Auto Scaling group in a rolling fashion without the need to manage the instance replacement process manually. For more information, see Replacing Auto Scaling instances based on an instance refresh.

For the Aurora DB cluster, create a new AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) encrypted DB cluster from a snapshot of the existing DB cluster. You can use either an AWS managed key or a customer managed key to encrypt the new DB cluster. You cannot enable or disable encryption for an existing DB cluster, so you have to create a new one from a snapshot.For more information, see Encrypting Amazon Aurora resources.

The other options are incorrect because they either do not enable encryption at rest for the resources (B, D), or they use the wrong service for encryption (E).

Verified References:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSEncryption.html

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/asg-instance-refresh.html

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Overview.Encryption.html