passed Security – Specialty 4/9/2020

The ACG course isn’t enough to pass the exam. Here’s what I did:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty 2020 course, including all updated sections up to the day before the exam. I appreciate the updates ACG is making. Answered all the section exam quizzes; kept at them until at least 90% correct, though I only had to re-do 2 of them.

Read "AWS Certified Security – Specialty" by Zeal Vora. Don’t believe the reviews on amazon.com about the language. Mr. Vora needed a better editor but he knows the tech inside out.

Took about 50% of the AWS Certified Security – Specialty course on LinuxAcademy. ACG is too sparse and exam focused; LinuxAcademy is too inclusive and at times doesn’t care about the exam. Mastered the flashcard deck that the instructor made. The practice exam and the flashcard deck helped inform me what parts of the LinuxAcademy course I should watch. When I scored a 46% on the Infrastructure Security portion of the LinuxAcademy practice exam, I started watching the Infrastructure Security section of the course.

Read the following:

Introduction to AWS Security Processes whitepaper – https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-security-whitepaper.pdf , up to page 80something and then I tore my eyeballs out.
GuardDuty FAQ
KMS FAQ
Config FAQ https://aws.amazon.com/config/faq/
Security Hub FAQ
AWS CloudWatch FAQ https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/faqs/
KMS Best Practices – https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-kms-best-practices.pdf
DDOS Best Practices – https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Security/DDoS_White_Paper.pdf

I could/should have read more but I just couldn’t stand it.

My Security Specialty exam history is below. Note that for all practice exams I gave myself a minute or so per question. On the certification exam, I took an average of about 2:30 per question. In the 20 or so minutes I had left over, I reviewed about 20 questions but ended up not changing any of my answers.

ACG Exam Simulation #1: 74%
Logging and Monitoring – 54%
IAM – 61.5%
IR – 71.4%
Data Protection – 81.3%
Infrastructure Security – 93.8%

AWS Practice Exam: 75%
Logging and Monitoring – 50%
IAM – 100%
IR – 33%
Data Protection – 66%
Infrastructure Security – 100%

ACG Exam Simulation #2 (late night): 69%
Logging and Monitoring – 69%
IAM – 69%
IR – 86%
Data Protection – 63%
Infrastructure Security – 69%

ACG Exam Simulation #3: 89%
Logging and Monitoring – 92%
IAM – 77%
IR – 86%
Data Protection – 88%
Infrastructure Security – 100%

LinuxAcademy Exam Simulation #1: 75%

Logging and Monitoring – 92%
IAM – 92%
IR – 92%
Data Protection – 69%
Infrastructure Security – 46%

AWS Certified Security – Specialty exam score: 863