SAP-C02 Practice Exam 2 — 20 Questions

Question 1

A company uses AWS Control Tower to manage a multi-account environment. The security team needs to ensure that all accounts have AWS CloudTrail enabled and that logs are delivered to a central S3 bucket. What is the BEST way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Use the AWS CloudTrail setup provided by Control Tower, which automatically enables a trail for all accounts in the organization.. AWS Control Tower provides an integrated CloudTrail setup that automatically creates and manages a central trail for all accounts in the organization. This trail is deployed using AWS CloudFormation StackSets and delivers logs to a centralized S3 bucket, ensuring compliance without manual intervention or custom automation. This is the best approach because it is native, fully managed, and aligns with Control Tower's governance model.

Answer

Use an AWS Lambda function that runs periodically to enable CloudTrail in accounts where it is disabled.

Answer

Create an AWS Config rule in each account to enable CloudTrail if it is disabled.

Answer

Use an SCP to require CloudTrail to be enabled in each account.

Question 2

Refer to the exhibit. An IAM role trust policy is shown. A user from account 123456789012 tries to assume this role but receives an 'AccessDenied' error. The user has MFA enabled and is passing the MFA token. What is the MOST likely reason for the failure?

Accepted Answer

The user is not passing the MFA serial number and token code in the assume-role API call.. Option C is correct because the IAM role trust policy includes a condition that checks for the presence of both `aws:MultiFactorAuthPresent` and `aws:MultiFactorAuthAge`. Even though the user has MFA enabled and is passing the MFA token, the `aws:MultiFactorAuthSerialNumber` and `aws:MultiFactorAuthTokenCode` parameters must be explicitly included in the `sts:AssumeRole` API call. Without these, the condition evaluates to false, resulting in an 'AccessDenied' error.

Answer

The condition uses 'BoolIfExists' instead of 'Bool' which causes the policy to fail when the key is present.

Answer

The role requires MFA, but the user's MFA device is not configured correctly.

Answer

The principal is set to the root account, which does not allow IAM users to assume the role.

Question 3

A company uses AWS Organizations with multiple OUs. The finance team needs to have read-only access to billing data across all accounts. The security team wants to ensure that no IAM user can modify billing preferences. Which policy should be attached to the root OU to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

An SCP that denies the effect of actions that modify billing preferences.. Option D is correct because a Service Control Policy (SCP) attached to the root OU can deny the effect of actions that modify billing preferences across all accounts in the organization. SCPs are the only mechanism that can restrict permissions for all principals (including the root user) in member accounts, and by using a Deny effect on specific billing modification actions, the security team ensures no IAM user or role can alter billing settings. This approach does not require enumerating every allowed read-only action, which avoids the risk of missing future read-only actions.

Answer

An SCP that allows only read-only billing actions.

Answer

An SCP that denies all billing-related actions except read-only.

Answer

An IAM policy attached to the root OU that denies billing modifications.

Question 4

A multinational corporation is implementing a multi-account AWS strategy using AWS Organizations. The security team requires that all newly created accounts in the organization automatically have an Amazon GuardDuty detector enabled in all enabled Regions. Which solution meets this requirement with the LEAST operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS CloudFormation StackSets with a stack that includes an AWS::GuardDuty::Detector resource, and apply it to the organization root OU.. Option A is correct because AWS CloudFormation StackSets can be applied to the organization root OU, automatically deploying an AWS::GuardDuty::Detector resource to every account in the organization as new accounts are created. This approach requires no manual intervention per account, and StackSets handle the lifecycle of the detector across all enabled Regions with minimal operational overhead.

Answer

Use AWS Service Catalog to publish a GuardDuty product and require account owners to launch it.

Answer

Use an SCP that denies guardduty:DeleteDetector and guardduty:UpdateDetector actions, then have each account administrator manually enable GuardDuty.

Answer

Use AWS Config rules to detect accounts without GuardDuty enabled and trigger a Lambda function to enable it.

Question 5

A company is migrating to a multi-account AWS environment using AWS Control Tower. The security team must ensure that all accounts have AWS Config enabled and that logs are delivered to a central S3 bucket. Which THREE steps should the security team take?

Accepted Answer

Use an SCP to prevent disabling of AWS Config in any account.. Option B is correct because AWS Control Tower uses Service Control Policies (SCPs) to enforce guardrails. An SCP can be applied to the root or OUs to prevent any account from disabling AWS Config, ensuring compliance across the multi-account environment without requiring per-account manual intervention.

Answer

Manually create an S3 bucket in each account to store Config logs.

Answer

Create an IAM role in each account to allow the management account to access Config logs.

Question 6

A company uses AWS Organizations with a multi-account strategy. The DevOps team wants to allow developers to launch EC2 instances only in specific Regions and only with approved AMIs. Which AWS service should be used to enforce these controls across all accounts?

Accepted Answer

AWS Organizations Service Control Policies (SCPs). AWS Organizations Service Control Policies (SCPs) are the correct choice because they allow you to centrally define and enforce permission guardrails across all accounts in your organization. SCPs can restrict EC2 actions to specific Regions using the `aws:RequestedRegion` condition key and limit AMI usage by denying launch actions unless the AMI ID matches an approved list, ensuring compliance without requiring per-account configuration.

Answer

AWS Config rules with auto-remediation

Answer

AWS Service Catalog with a portfolio of approved AMIs

Answer

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies in each account

Question 7

A multinational corporation is migrating its on-premises Active Directory (AD) to AWS Managed Microsoft AD. The company has a hub-and-spoke VPC topology with a central transit gateway. The AD domain controllers must be deployed in two different AWS Regions for disaster recovery. The corporate security policy requires that all AD traffic between Regions must traverse the transit gateway and be inspected by a third-party firewall appliance deployed in the inspection VPC. Which architecture meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Deploy AD in two Regions, attach both VPCs to a transit gateway in the primary Region, and use a transit gateway inter-Region peering attachment. Configure route tables to force traffic through the inspection VPC in the primary Region.. Option D is correct because it uses a transit gateway in the primary Region with an inter-Region peering attachment to the secondary Region, allowing AD traffic to be routed through the inspection VPC in the primary Region for firewall inspection. This meets the security policy requirement that all cross-Region AD traffic must traverse the transit gateway and be inspected by the third-party firewall appliance.

Answer

Deploy AD in two Regions and use a VPN connection between the VPCs to replicate data.

Answer

Deploy a single AD domain in one Region and use AD replication over a VPC peering connection to a second Region.

Answer

Deploy AD in two Regions, attach both VPCs to the transit gateway, and enable cross-Region transit gateway peering. Use route tables to direct AD traffic through the inspection VPC.

Question 8

A company is using AWS Organizations with consolidated billing. The finance team wants to track costs by business unit. Each business unit has its own AWS account. The team needs a solution that allows them to generate cost reports filtered by business unit without additional overhead. Which action should be taken?

Accepted Answer

Apply tags to resources and enable cost allocation tags in Billing and Cost Management.. Option C is correct because applying tags to resources and enabling cost allocation tags in AWS Billing and Cost Management allows the finance team to categorize costs by business unit without additional overhead. Each business unit's AWS account can have resources tagged with a key like 'BusinessUnit', and once cost allocation tags are activated, Cost Explorer and cost reports can filter and group by these tags, providing automated cost tracking across accounts in AWS Organizations.

Answer

Use Cost Explorer to filter by linked account, which automatically groups by business unit.

Answer

Use AWS Budgets to create budgets per account and manually aggregate.

Answer

Create a separate payer account for each business unit.

Question 9

A company has a management account in AWS Organizations and several member accounts. The security team wants to ensure that any IAM user created in any member account must have a password policy that enforces a minimum length of 14 characters. The team wants a preventive control that is enforced automatically. Which approach should be used?

Accepted Answer

Use an SCP to deny the iam:UpdateAccountPasswordPolicy action and deploy a password policy using CloudFormation StackSets.. Option B is correct because an SCP can deny the iam:UpdateAccountPasswordPolicy action, preventing member accounts from altering the password policy, while CloudFormation StackSets can deploy a compliant password policy across all member accounts automatically. This combination provides a preventive control that enforces the minimum 14-character requirement without relying on user action or reactive detection.

Answer

Use AWS Service Catalog to provide a password policy product and require account owners to launch it.

Answer

Use an SCP to deny the iam:CreateUser action unless the request includes a condition that the password policy meets the requirement.

Answer

Use AWS Config rules to detect accounts without the required password policy and auto-remediate with a Lambda function.

Question 10

A company uses AWS Organizations and has a requirement that all root user activities in member accounts must be immediately reported to the security team. Which combination of actions should be taken to meet this requirement? (Choose the best answer.)

Accepted Answer

Enable AWS CloudTrail in all accounts with a trail that logs management events and delivers to a centralized S3 bucket. Use Amazon CloudWatch Events to create a rule that matches root user API calls and sends notifications via Amazon SNS.. Option B is correct because it combines AWS CloudTrail logging of management events across all accounts into a centralized S3 bucket with Amazon CloudWatch Events (now Amazon EventBridge) to detect root user API calls in real time. This setup ensures immediate notification via Amazon SNS, meeting the requirement for instant reporting without manual polling or batch processing.

Answer

Enable AWS CloudTrail and use Amazon Athena to query logs periodically and send a report.

Answer

Use AWS Config rules to detect root user activities and trigger an AWS Lambda function to send an email.

Answer

Use AWS Trusted Advisor to check for root user usage and generate a weekly report.

Question 11

A company is using AWS Organizations with multiple organizational units (OUs). The security team needs to enforce that all newly created S3 buckets in the production OU have versioning enabled and are encrypted with AWS KMS. Which solution meets these requirements with minimal operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Apply a service control policy (SCP) at the production OU level that denies s3:CreateBucket unless versioning and KMS encryption are specified in the request.. A service control policy (SCP) at the OU level can deny the s3:CreateBucket action unless the request includes both the x-amz-bucket-object-locked-enabled-for-bucket-creation header (for versioning) and the x-amz-server-side-encryption-aws-kms-key-id header (for KMS encryption). This enforces compliance at the API level with no ongoing overhead, as the SCP is evaluated before the bucket is created, preventing noncompliant buckets from existing at all.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor bucket creation and send alerts to the security team.

Answer

Create an IAM policy that requires versioning and KMS encryption when creating buckets, and attach it to all users.

Answer

Use AWS Config rules to detect noncompliant buckets and auto-remediate with Lambda.

Question 12

A financial services company is designing a multi-account strategy using AWS Control Tower. The company has strict data residency requirements: customer data must remain in the country of origin. The company operates in three countries: US, UK, and Germany. Each country has a set of accounts for production, development, and testing. The company needs to ensure that IAM roles in UK accounts cannot access resources in German accounts, and vice versa. Which architecture should be used?

Accepted Answer

Create separate OUs for each country (US, UK, Germany) under Control Tower. Apply SCPs at each country OU that deny access to resources in other country OUs.. Option D is correct because AWS Control Tower allows you to create separate Organizational Units (OUs) for each country, and Service Control Policies (SCPs) can be applied at the OU level to explicitly deny access to resources in other country OUs. This enforces data residency by preventing IAM roles in UK accounts from accessing German resources, and vice versa, using a deny-all-cross-region or deny-all-cross-account approach scoped to the specific country OUs.

Answer

Create one OU per account type (Prod, Dev, Test) and use SCPs to restrict access to resources based on tags.

Answer

Create a single OU for all accounts and use IAM permissions boundaries to restrict access.

Answer

Use AWS Resource Access Manager to share resources only within the same country and use IAM policies to restrict cross-country access.

Question 13

A company is designing a new application on AWS that requires a highly available and scalable web tier. The web servers must be stateless and scale automatically based on CPU utilization. Which TWO actions should the company take to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Configure an Auto Scaling group with a launch template that includes a user data script to bootstrap the web server. Option A is correct because a launch template with user data allows the Auto Scaling group to bootstrap web server software automatically when new instances launch, ensuring they are stateless and ready to serve traffic. Option B is correct because attaching an Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributes incoming traffic across the Auto Scaling group's instances, enabling horizontal scaling and high availability. Together, these actions support stateless web servers that scale based on CPU utilization via Auto Scaling policies.

Answer

Configure lifecycle hooks in the Auto Scaling group to drain connections

Answer

Use a single large EC2 instance (e.g., c5n.18xlarge) to handle all traffic

Answer

Use a Network Load Balancer to distribute traffic to web servers

Question 14

A company wants to migrate a monolithic application to AWS and redesign it using microservices. The application uses a MySQL database. The company wants to minimize operational overhead and enable each microservice to have its own database. Which AWS service should the company use to implement the database layer?

Accepted Answer

Amazon RDS for MySQL. Amazon RDS for MySQL is the correct choice because it provides a managed MySQL database service that minimizes operational overhead through automated backups, patching, and scaling. Each microservice can have its own RDS instance, enabling database-per-service isolation while offloading administrative tasks like replication and failover to AWS.

Answer

Amazon DynamoDB

Answer

Amazon Redshift

Answer

Amazon Aurora

Question 15

A company is designing a new application that will be deployed on Amazon ECS with Fargate launch type. The application needs to store configuration data, including database connection strings, that must be encrypted at rest. The company wants to follow best practices for managing secrets. Which solution should the company use?

Accepted Answer

Store the secrets in AWS Secrets Manager and reference them in the ECS task definition.. AWS Secrets Manager is the recommended service for storing sensitive configuration data like database connection strings because it provides built-in encryption at rest using AWS KMS, automatic secret rotation, and fine-grained access control. ECS task definitions can reference Secrets Manager secrets directly using the 'secrets' parameter, which injects the secret value into the container at runtime without exposing it in plaintext. This approach follows AWS best practices for managing secrets by avoiding hard-coded values and leveraging a dedicated secrets management service.

Answer

Store the configuration data in an S3 bucket with server-side encryption (SSE-S3) and download it at container startup.

Answer

Store the secrets in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store (SecureString) and reference them in the ECS task definition.

Answer

Store the configuration data in environment variables in the ECS task definition.

Question 16

A company is migrating a monolithic application to microservices on Amazon ECS with Fargate. The application has variable traffic patterns, with high traffic during business hours and low traffic at night. They want to optimize costs while maintaining performance. Which scaling strategy should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Use target tracking scaling with a schedule to increase minimum capacity during business hours.. Option A is correct because combining target tracking scaling with a scheduled action allows the application to dynamically adjust capacity based on actual demand while ensuring a higher baseline during peak business hours. This hybrid approach optimizes costs by scaling down at night and maintains performance by preventing cold starts or lag during traffic spikes, which is ideal for variable patterns on ECS Fargate.

Answer

Use step scaling policies based on memory utilization.

Answer

Use scheduled scaling to increase capacity during business hours.

Answer

Use simple scaling policies based on CPU utilization.

Question 17

A company is designing a serverless application using AWS Lambda functions. The application processes events from an Amazon SQS queue. The company wants to ensure that the Lambda function can scale to handle a sudden increase in messages without losing any messages. The Lambda function must process each message at least once. Which configuration should the company use?

Accepted Answer

Configure the SQS queue as a Lambda event source with a reserved concurrency of 1000 for the Lambda function.. Option A is correct because configuring the SQS queue as a Lambda event source with a reserved concurrency of 1000 ensures that Lambda can scale up to 1000 concurrent executions to handle a sudden burst of messages. The SQS event source uses long polling and synchronously invokes Lambda, which processes messages in batches and automatically deletes them from the queue only upon successful completion, guaranteeing at-least-once processing. Reserved concurrency prevents throttling and ensures that the function has sufficient capacity to scale without losing messages.

Answer

Configure the SQS queue to invoke the Lambda function asynchronously and set the Lambda function timeout to 5 minutes.

Answer

Set the SQS queue visibility timeout to 30 seconds and the Lambda batch size to 100. Configure a dead-letter queue for failed messages.

Answer

Use an SQS FIFO queue with a Lambda function that has a reserved concurrency of 1.

Question 18

Drag and drop the steps to deploy a serverless application using AWS SAM in the correct order.

Question 19

Drag and drop the steps to set up a cross-region VPC peering connection in the correct order.

Question 20

Drag and drop the steps to set up AWS CloudTrail for logging API activity in the correct order.