Sat Exam Today – Security Specialty – HooWah!!!

Hey guys and girls, 

Sat the exam today, was quite a tough one, was fairly certain I failed until I got the result saying I had passed. This was my second seating, failed the exam when it was in Beta.

Sat in one of those remotely proctored exams. Was very frustrating for me as my mouth moves as if I’m reading out the questions (but without saying any words out loud); I was warned twice not to do this, a third time resulting in termination of the exam, was quite hard to control this subconscious action from happening, especially on complex questions.

Areas to make sure you know well for the exam:

• CloudWatch/CloudTrail/Cloudwatch Events ; all flows in and out from these services.

• S3 buckets – specifically permissions and encryption around it.

• KMS All of it!

• Policies – practice till you’re sick of practicing and then practice more.

The bulk of the exam revolved around the above.

Make sure you know what the following can do and how they integrate with the above(where applicable): Kinesis/Macie/SSM Parameter Stores/Secrets Manager/Lost Keys/Cognito/Active Directory/Load Balancers (all types)/WAF/DDoS/Config/Lambda-uses/Vault-Locks/Organizations/VPC Flow Logs/Cloudfront/Athena.

Didn’t really use the videos from here much, have worked with AWS only in the last 2 months – massive help! Found the AWS white papers SUPER useful in actually understanding the solution/service and how they want you to configure it. It’s a pain in the butt reading as they’re quite long, but well worth it!

What I found quite useful was the exam simulator here because it highlighted deficiencies in my knowledge which only became apparent after going through the simulation; good reality check on what your weaknesses are.

Just a shout out to say thank you to all the good conversations/discussions and feedback on the exam here, very much helped! You’re all awesome!

Adios Amigos!