Book Image

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Exam Guide

By : Stuart Scott
Book Image

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Exam Guide

By: Stuart Scott

Overview of this book

AWS Certified Security – Specialty is a certification exam to validate your expertise in advanced cloud security. With an ever-increasing demand for AWS security skills in the cloud market, this certification can help you advance in your career. This book helps you prepare for the exam and gain certification by guiding you through building complex security solutions. From understanding the AWS shared responsibility model and identity and access management to implementing access management best practices, you'll gradually build on your skills. The book will also delve into securing instances and the principles of securing VPC infrastructure. Covering security threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks such as the DDoS attack, you'll discover how to mitigate these at different layers. You'll then cover compliance and learn how to use AWS to audit and govern infrastructure, as well as to focus on monitoring your environment by implementing logging mechanisms and tracking data. Later, you'll explore how to implement data encryption as you get hands-on with securing a live environment. Finally, you'll discover security best practices that will assist you in making critical decisions relating to cost, security,and deployment complexity. By the end of this AWS security book, you'll have the skills to pass the exam and design secure AWS solutions.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Exam and Preparation
3
Section 2: Security Responsibility and Access Management
8
Section 3: Security - a Layered Approach
15
Section 4: Monitoring, Logging, and Auditing
18
Section 5: Best Practices and Automation
21
Section 6: Encryption and Data Security

Understanding DDoS and its attack patterns

As mentioned previously, DDoS attacks are extremely common worldwide. To begin, the initiator of a DDoS attack will focus on a specific target, being a single host, network, or service to compromise, and this target will likely be a key component of an organization's infrastructure. During the attack, an attempt will be made to severely disrupt the performance of the target using a massive amount of inbound requests from a number of different distributed sources within the same time period. 

This creates two problems, as follows:  

  • The additional traffic load is designed to flood the target and prevent authentic and legitimate inbound requests from reaching that target and being processed as real requests.
  • The performance of the target is hindered, affecting the usability of the infrastructure and its associated resources. For example, should a DDoS attack be made against a web server running a website, anyone using the site...