Ace the Amazon Web Services DOP-C02 Exam: Ultimate Preparation Guide

To implement a control that requires the use of IMDSv2 on all EC2 instances in the account, the DevOps engineer can use a permissions boundary. A permissions boundary is a policy that defines the maximum permissions that an IAM entity can have. The DevOps engineer can create a permissions boundary that prevents the ec2:RunInstance action if the ec2:MetadataHttpTokens condition key is not set to a value of required. This condition key enforces the use of IMDSv2 on EC2 instances. The DevOps engineer can attach the permissions boundary to the IAM role that was used to launch the instance. This way, any attempt to launch an EC2 instance without using IMDSv2 will be denied by the permissions boundary.

 Ensure that Amazon GuardDuty is Enabled:

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior.

It can detect port scans and generate findings for these events.

 Create an Amazon CloudWatch Alarm for Detected EC2 and Port Scan Findings:

Configure GuardDuty to monitor for port scans and other threats.

Create a CloudWatch alarm that triggers when GuardDuty detects port scan activities.

 Connect the Alarm to the SNS Topic:

The CloudWatch alarm should be configured to send notifications to the SNS topic subscribed by the security team.

This setup ensures that the security team receives near-real-time notifications when a port scan is detected on the EC2 instances.

Example configuration steps:

Enable GuardDuty and ensure it is monitoring the relevant AWS accounts.

Create a CloudWatch alarm:

{

"AlarmName": "GuardDutyPortScanAlarm",

"MetricName": "ThreatIntelIndicator",

"Namespace": "AWS/GuardDuty",

"Statistic": "Sum",

"Dimensions": [

{

"Name": "FindingType",

"Value": "Recon:EC2/Portscan"

}

],

"Period": 300,

"EvaluationPeriods": 1,

"Threshold": 1,

"ComparisonOperator": "GreaterThanOrEqualToThreshold",

"AlarmActions": ["arn:aws:sns:region:account-id:SecurityAlerts"]

}

References:

Amazon GuardDuty

Creating CloudWatch Alarms for GuardDuty Findings

The latency in processing and ingesting logs can be caused by several factors, such as the throughput of the Kinesis data stream, the concurrency of the Lambda function, and the configuration of the event source mapping. To reduce the latency, the following steps can be taken:

Create a data stream consumer with enhanced fan-out. Set the Lambda function that processes the logs as the consumer. This will allow the Lambda function toreceive records from the data stream with dedicated throughput of up to 2 MB per second per shard, independent of other consumers1. This will reduce the contention and delay in accessing the data stream.

Increase the ParallelizationFactor setting in the Lambda event source mapping. This will allow the Lambda service to invoke more instances of the function concurrently to process the records from the data stream2. This will increase the processing capacity and reduce the backlog of records in the data stream.

Configure reserved concurrency for the Lambda function that processes the logs. This will ensure that the function has enough concurrency available to handle the increased load from the data stream3. This will prevent the function from being throttled by the account-level concurrency limit.

The other options are not effective or may have negative impacts on the latency. Option D is not suitable because increasing the batch size in the Kinesis data stream will increase the amount of data that the Lambda function has to process in each invocation, which may increase the execution time and latency4. Option E is not advisable because turning off the ReportBatchItemFailures setting in the Lambda event source mapping will prevent the Lambda service from retrying the failed records, which may result in data loss. Option F is not necessary because increasing the number of shards in the Kinesis data stream will increase the throughput of the data stream, but it will not affect the processing speed of the Lambda function, which is the bottleneck in this scenario.

References:

1: Using AWS Lambda with Amazon Kinesis Data Streams - AWS Lambda

2: AWS Lambda event source mappings - AWS Lambda

3: Managing concurrency for a Lambda function - AWS Lambda

4: AWS Lambda function scaling - AWS Lambda

: AWS Lambda event source mappings - AWS Lambda

: Scaling Amazon Kinesis Data Streams with AWS CloudFormation - Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/org-aggregator-delegated-admin/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/services-that-can-integrate-config.html

To restore the functionality of the Auto Scaling group after the AMI was deleted, the DevOps engineer needs to create a new AMI and update the Auto Scaling group to use it. The DevOps engineer can create a new AMI by copying the most recent public AMI of the operating system that the EC2 instances use. This will ensure that the new AMI has the same operating system as the custom AMI that was deleted. The DevOps engineer can then create a new launch template that uses the new AMI and update the Auto Scaling group to use the new launch template. This will allow the Auto Scaling group to launch new instances with the new AMI.

Step 1: Storing Docker Images in Amazon ECRDocker images can be large, and storing them in a centralized, scalable location can greatly reduce build times. Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a fully managed container registry that stores, manages, and deploys Docker container images.

Action:Store the Docker images in an ECR repository.

Why:Storing Docker images in ECR ensures that Docker images can be reused across multiple builds, improving build performance by avoiding the need to rebuild the images from scratch.

To meet the requirements, the DevOps team needs to configure a monitoring solution for the VPC flow logs that can detect anomalies in network traffic over time and initiate a response to the anomaly. The DevOps team can use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest and process streaming data from CloudWatch Logs. The DevOps team can subscribe the log group to a Kinesis data stream, which will deliver log events from CloudWatch Logs to Kinesis Data Streams in near real-time. The DevOps team can then create an AWS Lambda function to detect log anomalies using machine learning or statistical methods. The Lambda function can be set as a processor for the data stream, which means that it will process each record from the stream before sending it to downstream applications or destinations. The Lambda function can also write to the default Amazon EventBridge event bus if it detects an anomaly, which will allow other AWS services or custom applications to respond to the anomaly event.

To meet the new guideline for application deployment, the company can use a combination of AWS CodePipeline and AWS CloudTrail. A manual approval action in CodePipeline allows the security team to review and approve changes before they are deployed. This action can be configured to pause the pipeline until approval is granted, ensuring that no changes move to production without the necessary sign-off. Additionally, by creating an AWS CloudTrail trail, all actions taken withinCodePipeline, including approvals, are recorded and delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket. This provides an audit trail that can be retained for compliance and review purposes.

References:

AWS CodePipeline’s manual approval action provides a way to ensure that a member of the security team can review and approve changes before they are deployed1.

AWS CloudTrail integration with CodePipeline allows for the recording and retention of all pipeline actions, including approvals, which can be stored in Amazon S3 for record-keeping2.

The CfCT solution is designed for the exact purpose stated in the question. It extends the capabilities of AWS Control Tower by providing you with a way to automate resource provisioning and apply custom configurations across all AWS accounts created in the Control Tower environment. This enables the company to implement additional account customizations when new accounts are provisioned via the Control Tower Account Factory. The CloudFormation templates and SCPs can be added to a CodeCommit repository and will be automatically deployed to new accounts when they are created. This provides a highly automated solution that does not require manual intervention to deploy resources and SCPs to new accounts.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/inspector/latest/user/scanning-ec2.html