AWS Certified Security - Specialty

To determine what the former employee may have done within AWS, the most direct approach would be to use the AWS CloudTrail console to search for user activity. AWS CloudTrail records AWS API calls and events for your account and provides visibility into user activities. With CloudTrail, you can look up API call history for the past 90 days without any prior setup, enabling you to quickly identify the actions taken by specific users or access keys. This makes it the most efficient tool for investigating recent user activity within AWS.

To correct the vault lock policy, abort the current in-progress lock using the abort-vault-lock operation, make the necessary updates to the policy to correct the typo, and then call the initiate-vault-lock operation again to establish the updated policy. This approach avoids any unnecessary data transfer or the complexity of managing new vaults or buckets, making it the most cost-effective solution.

To control access to AWS resources using identities and groups defined in an existing Microsoft Active Directory, the company must create AWS IAM roles. IAM roles allow the company to assign permissions for AWS services based on attributes from Active Directory users, enabling seamless integration and access management without creating individual IAM users or groups within AWS. This approach leverages federated access, which is ideal for integrating external identity providers like Active Directory.

Several factors could cause the Auditor to experience difficulties accessing some AWS accounts. If the external ID used by the Auditor is missing or incorrect, it could prevent successful role assumption in the accounts, leading to access issues. Additionally, the Auditor must have the sts:AssumeRole permission for the role in the destination account to assume the role and access the resources. Finally, ensuring that the role ARN used by the Auditor is accurate is critical, as any discrepancy in this identifier can prevent role assumption and access. Therefore, these are the most likely causes of the problem.

To meet the compliance requirements of ensuring all communications between on-premises hosts and EC2 instances are encrypted in transit while using custom proprietary protocols, the chosen solution must provide end-to-end encryption without termination at the load balancer. A Classic Load Balancer with a TCP listener routes traffic without decrypting it, allowing the TLS connection to be terminated directly on the EC2 instances. This setup supports custom protocols and maintains encryption throughout the transmission, ensuring both compliance and increased availability through load balancing.