AWS Certified Security – Specialty — Question 130

A company's Developers plan to migrate their on-premises applications to Amazon EC2 instances running Amazon Linux AMIs. The applications are accessed by a group of partner companies. The Security Engineer needs to implement the following host-based security measures for these instances:
✑ Block traffic from documented known bad IP addresses.
✑ Detect known software vulnerabilities and CIS Benchmarks compliance.
Which solution addresses these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Launch the EC2 instances with an IAM role attached. Include a user data script that uses the AWS CLI to retrieve the list of bad IP addresses from AWS Secrets Manager, and uploads it as a threat list in Amazon GuardDuty. Use Amazon Inspector to scan the instances for known software vulnerabilities and CIS Benchmarks compliance.
• B. Launch the EC2 instances with an IAM role attached. Include a user data script that uses the AWS CLI to create NACLs blocking ingress traffic from the known bad IP addresses in the EC2 instance's subnets. Use AWS Systems Manager to scan the instances for known software vulnerabilities, and AWS Trusted Advisor to check instances for CIS Benchmarks compliance.
• C. Launch the EC2 instances with an IAM role attached. Include a user data script that uses the AWS CLI to create and attach security groups that only allow an allow listed source IP address range inbound. Use Amazon Inspector to scan the instances for known software vulnerabilities, and AWS Trusted Advisor to check instances for CIS Benchmarks compliance.
• D. Launch the EC2 instances with an IAM role attached. Include a user data script that creates a cron job to periodically retrieve the list of bad IP addresses from Amazon S3, and configures iptables on the instances blocking the list of bad IP addresses. Use Amazon Inspector to scan the instances for known software vulnerabilities and CIS Benchmarks compliance.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Option D is correct because it effectively blocks traffic from known bad IP addresses using iptables and scans for vulnerabilities and compliance with Amazon Inspector. Option A is incorrect as GuardDuty is not designed to utilize a user-uploaded threat list from Secrets Manager. Option B is wrong since it does not utilize iptables and relies on NACLs, which can be less flexible. Option C is also incorrect as it uses security groups instead of directly blocking specific bad IP addresses.