A Consulting Company Was Hired to Assess Security Vulnerabilities Within

question 434

Multiple Choice

A consulting company was hired to assess security vulnerabilities within a client company's application and propose a plan to remediate all identified issues. The architecture is identified as follows: Amazon S3 storage for content, an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer with attached Amazon EBS storage, and an Amazon RDS MySQL database. There are also several AWS Lambda functions that communicate directly with the RDS database using connection string statements in the code. The consultants identified the top security threat as follows: the application is not meeting its requirement to have encryption at rest. What solution will address this issue with the LEAST operational overhead and will provide monitoring for potential future violations?

• A) Enable SSE encryption on the S3 buckets and RDS database. Enable OS-based encryption of data on EBS volumes. Configure Amazon Inspector agents on EC2 instances to report on insecure encryption ciphers. Set up AWS Config rules to periodically check for non-encrypted S3 objects.
• B) Configure the application to encrypt each file prior to storing on Amazon S3. Enable OS-based encryption of data on EBS volumes. Encrypt data on write to RDS. Run cron jobs on each instance to check for unencrypted data and notify via Amazon SNS. Use S3 Events to call an AWS Lambda function and verify if the file is encrypted.
• C) Enable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) on the load balancer, ensure that AWS Lambda is using SSL to communicate to the RDS database, and enable S3 encryption. Configure the application to force SSL for incoming connections and configure RDS to only grant access if the session is encrypted. Configure Amazon Inspector agents on EC2 instances to report on insecure encryption ciphers.
• D) Enable SSE encryption on the S3 buckets, EBS volumes, and the RDS database. Store RDS credentials in EC2 Parameter Store. Enable a policy on the S3 bucket to deny unencrypted puts. Set up AWS Config rules to periodically check for non-encrypted S3 objects and EBS volumes, and to ensure that RDS storage is encrypted.

Understand and apply the concept of contribution margin (CM) ratio in decision making.

Calculate sales units required to maintain net operating income when certain cost parameters change.

Understand the concept of operating leverage and its impact on profits with a change in sales volume.

Analyze the effect of sales mix on break-even and target profit points.

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Definitions:

Investing Activity

Transactions involving the purchase or sale of long-term assets and other investments, part of a company's cash flow statement.

Statement Of Cash Flows

A financial statement that shows the cash inflows and outflows for a company over a period of time.

Noncurrent Assets

Long-term assets that are not expected to be converted into cash within one year, such as property, plant, and equipment.

Treasury Stock

Represents shares that were once part of the outstanding shares but were bought back by the company. These shares don't have voting rights or dividend rights.