AWS Certified Security – Specialty — Question 137
A company's web application is hosted on Amazon EC2 instances running behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in an Auto Scaling group. An AWS WAF web ACL is associated with the ALB. AWS CloudTrail is enabled, and stores logs in Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
The Operations team has observed some EC2 instances reboot at random. After rebooting, all access logs on the instances have been deleted. During an investigation, the Operations team found that each reboot happened just after a PHP error occurred on the new-user-creation.php file. The Operations team needs to view log information to determine if the company is being attacked.
Which set of actions will identify the suspect attacker's IP address for future occurrences?
Answer options
- A. Configure VPC Flow Logs on the subnet where the ALB is located, and stream the data CloudWatch. Search for the new-user-creation.php occurrences in CloudWatch.
- B. Configure the CloudWatch agent on the ALB. Configure the agent to send application logs to CloudWatch. Update the instance role to allow CloudWatch Logs access. Export the logs to CloudWatch. Search for the new-user-creation.php occurrences in CloudWatch.
- C. Configure the ALB to export access logs to an Amazon Elasticsearch Service cluster, and use the service to search for the new-user-creation.php occurrences.
- D. Configure the web ACL to send logs to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, which delivers the logs to an S3 bucket. Use Amazon Athena to query the logs and find the new-user-creation.php occurrences.
Correct answer: D
Explanation
The correct action is to modify the web ACL to send logs to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, enabling log delivery to an S3 bucket and allowing the use of Amazon Athena for querying. This method provides a robust and scalable way to analyze log data for potential attacks. The other options either do not capture the necessary logs or involve configurations that do not directly address identifying the attacker's IP address.