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

Access Advisor

The Access Advisor tab allows you to determine when your identities associated with the permissions accessed the different services relating to the policy. In the following screenshot, we can see that user Stuart has not accessed S3 using these permissions for 917 days. With that in mind, it would be a good idea to remove this level of permission for the user as we can safely assume that he is not using it. Leaving these excessive permissions causes a security risk, should his credentials be compromised:

This tab can help you easily identify any policies that are granting more permission than is actually being used, which can lead to a security risk. Removing unnecessary permissions is essential in helping to ensure you have a robust security posture.

With this, we have come to the end of our section on managing policies. Remember that since you are likely to accumulate and use a long list of policies over time, managing these policies efficiently becomes of...