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

Security standards

As mentioned previously, these security checks assess your accounts continuously against the security standards enabled—for example, the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark. For each check, a severity level is given, as well as remediation instructions should you experience a failure on these checks. The following screenshot shows an example of the checks that are undertaken, in addition to the defined severity of each check:

As you can see, if someone was actively using the root account, this would be considered a CRITICAL severity level, and would be highlighted as a security risk. Also, you have the option to disable the checks that you do not want to include, should you need or ever want to do so.

So far, we've seen how Security Hub can help us identify security incidents through insights, findings, and security standards. But you'd be right in thinking that mere identification is not enough and remediation is important.