Passed! – AWS Security Specialty – 7th Nov 2019

Passed! – AWS Security Specialty – 7th Nov 2019

Hello Gurus!,

I’ve been preparing for this for almost 4 Months, a little bit on and off but very committed in the last 2 months, I finished the exam with 2 or 3 minutes to spare so there wasn’t much time to revise anything I flagged, so I just ended it, I was confident in passing though so that was alright, however i should have taken more care to time management as I spent a lot of thinking time on some questions which compromised the whole management thing

The path i took was as follows:

• ACG Security Specialty Course – Re-watched the Summaries multiple times

• I write notes on paper while watching the course ( call me old fashioned ), i just feel it sticks better in my head

• Did alot of tries on ACG Exam Simulator till i hit 90%+ , as many have mentioned in the course, the Exam Simulator is amazing as not only it shows the wrong answers it also explains everything & provides links for it

• I Did the Practice exam using the free voucher from my previous CAA exam and got 80%

• I’ve referred to a post by Faye for 3 Cert Quiz Exams & another 24 Question Quiz – link here

• Went through most of the white papers ( did not fully cover DDOS though, I will in the coming days )

• Re-read KMS multiple times, checked FAQ for KMS as well made sure to check examples mentioned there by AWS

• Read FAQs for AWS Config, ELBs, WAF, CloudWatch & CloudTrail

What was in the exam ?

Lots of KMS, Key Rotation, SSM Parameter store access to EC2, IAM Policies, External access to S3 buckets, AWS Config, Lambda, CloudTrail & CloudWatch, Trusted Advisor & Inspector

Make sure to understand those well as when to use what, sometimes two answers work but the choice is made from the question context .. i.e “easiest” way or with “Least management over-head”

Make sure to read through ADFS Trust with AWS, understand it thoroughly, double check all scenarios from AWS Documentation and make sure to let them sink-in

Scenarios of On-Premises data center connection to AWS with which best approach i.e “VPN with Direct Connect”, actually a recall a question that combined both AD Trust for Company users & a secure VPN tunnel

Encryption questions like “the user got an error while trying to access those files which are encrypted using KMS on the S3 Bucket” the IAM policy is shown & you are asked to select what should be changed to fix the problem

What to choose for DDOS mitigation ? Shield ? WAF ? Guard Duty ? , i vaguely recall it but a question or two on this came up

Also a question came on CloudFront, Custom SSL Certs & OAI

All in all it was a nice journey, I hope this would be helpful for others soon to take the exam

CAP here I come 😊