Question

Difficulty: MediumSecurity Monitoring and Threat Detection

A healthcare technology provider manages patient portals across multiple AWS regions. To satisfy regulatory compliance, the provider must identify unauthorized configuration changes to security groups and detect whether any EC2 instances are communicating with known malicious IP addresses. The provider requires a solution that centralizes these security findings and automates threat detection without impacting application performance. Which combination of actions should the solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

  1. Enable Amazon GuardDuty in the target regions to analyze VPC Flow Logs and DNS query logs for identifying communications with malicious IP addresses.Answer
  2. Enable AWS Config to continuously monitor and record configuration changes of VPC security groups to track compliance.Answer
  3. C
    Deploy AWS Shield Standard at the subnet level to monitor and filter Layer 7 traffic for unauthorized configuration modifications and malicious IP patterns.
  4. D
    Configure stateless Network ACLs on all subnets to automatically track outbound connections statefully and block threat traffic dynamically.
  5. E
    Store third-party security scanner API tokens as plain String parameters in Systems Manager Parameter Store to authorize the threat monitoring service.

Answer

The solutions architect should recommend enabling Amazon GuardDuty to analyze VPC Flow Logs and DNS query logs, and enabling AWS Config to monitor and record changes to VPC security groups.
To detect unauthorized changes to security groups, AWS Config is the appropriate tool because it continuously monitors and records configuration details. To detect traffic to known malicious IPs without affecting performance, Amazon GuardDuty is the correct tool because it analyzes metadata from sources like VPC Flow Logs and DNS logs in an isolated plane.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Address the requirement for configuration auditing.
AWS Config is configured to track security groups.
AWS Config tracks configuration history and compliance status of AWS resources, which directly satisfies the requirement to identify unauthorized security group changes.
2
Address the threat detection requirement for malicious IP communication.
Amazon GuardDuty is enabled to monitor VPC Flow Logs and DNS query logs.
Amazon GuardDuty analyzes logs in the background without affecting performance, matching traffic patterns against known threat feeds to identify communication with malicious hosts.

Key Concept

Continuous security monitoring using AWS Config for resource changes and Amazon GuardDuty for intelligent, out-of-band threat detection.
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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