Question

Difficulty: MediumIdentity and Access Management (IAM)

A financial services company is setting up daily administrative access to their AWS infrastructure for a new operations team. To comply with security audits, they must ensure individual accountability and adhere to the principle of least privilege. Which of the following security practices should the company implement? (Select TWO.)

  1. Create individual IAM users for each team member and assign permissions by placing them in an IAM group with appropriate policies.Answer
  2. Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for each individual user account and the AWS account root user.Answer
  3. C
    Perform daily administrative tasks using the AWS account root user credentials to avoid configuration delays.
  4. D
    Share a single administrative IAM user account with multiple access keys to simplify credential rotation.
  5. E
    Open an AWS Support case to have AWS configure and manage individual user access keys.

Answer

Create individual IAM users for each team member, manage their permissions using IAM groups, and enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) on all accounts.
Establishing individual IAM users and organizing them into groups ensures that user activity is auditable and permissions adhere to the principle of least privilege. Requiring MFA for all users, including the root user, enforces a strong secondary layer of access validation to protect resources from credential leakage.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the requirement for individual accountability and permission control.
Determine that shared credentials must be avoided and that permissions must be managed centrally and specifically for roles.
Creating individual IAM users ensures that all actions can be audited to a specific person, while IAM groups allow efficient distribution of minimum necessary permissions.
2
Evaluate identity authentication security measures.
Determine that Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) should be enforced for all administrative and root accounts.
MFA is the primary AWS recommendation to safeguard credentials from being compromised.

Key Concept

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Security Best Practices
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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