AWS Certified Security Specialty · Free Practice Question Medium
Question 7
A company has meticulously strengthened its AWS Cloud security solution to detect and respond to the organization’s security requirements by using AWS Firewall Manager, Amazon Inspector, and AWS Shield Advanced services in its AWS accounts. The company has recently added the Amazon Macie data security service to discover and help protect sensitive data. The company wants to implement a solution (using data from these security services) that can initiate alerts if a DDoS attack happens on the company's AWS resources.
Which solution will implement this requirement?
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A
Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm that monitors Amazon Inspector logs for vulnerabilities related to an active DDoS event
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B
Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm that monitors AWS Firewall Manager CloudWatch metrics for an active DDoS event
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C
Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm that monitors AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) for an active DDoS event
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D
Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm that monitors AWS Shield Advanced CloudWatch metrics for an active DDoS event
Reveal correct answer
Correct answer: D
Explanation
Correct option:
Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm that monitors AWS Shield Advanced CloudWatch metrics for an active DDoS event
AWS Shield Advanced reports metrics to Amazon CloudWatch on an AWS resource more frequently during DDoS events than when no events are underway. Shield Advanced reports metrics once a minute during an event, and then once right after the event ends. While no events are underway, Shield Advanced reports metrics once a day, at a time assigned to the resource. This periodic report keeps the metrics active and available for use in custom CloudWatch alarms.
AWS Shield Advanced provides a few detection metrics and dimensions in the AWS/DDoSProtection namespace. DDoSDetected metric indicates whether a DDoS event is underway for a particular Amazon Resource Name (ARN).
This metric has a non-zero value during an event.
Detection metrics provided by AWS Shield Advanced:

Incorrect options:
Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm that monitors AWS Firewall Manager CloudWatch metrics for an active DDoS event - AWS Firewall Manager doesn't record metrics, so you can't create Amazon CloudWatch alarms specifically for Firewall Manager.
Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm that monitors Amazon Inspector logs for vulnerabilities related to an active DDoS event - Amazon Inspector automatically discovers workloads, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and AWS Lambda functions, and scans them for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. Amazon Inspector cannot be used for tracking an active DDoS event.
Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm that monitors AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) for an active DDoS event - This option acts as a distractor. AWS WAF is not being used as a security service in the given use case.
References:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/ddos-cloudwatch-metrics.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/monitoring-cloudwatch.html
Discussion
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