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What are the Top 10 AWS jobs you can get with an AWS certification in 2022 plus AWS Interview Questions
AWS certifications are becoming increasingly popular as the demand for AWS-skilled workers continues to grow. AWS certifications show that an individual has the necessary skills to work with AWS technologies, which can be beneficial for both job seekers and employers. AWS-certified individuals can often command higher salaries and are more likely to be hired for AWS-related positions. So, what are the top 10 AWS jobs that you can get with an AWS certification?
AWS solutions architects are responsible for designing, implementing, and managing AWS solutions. They work closely with other teams to ensure that AWS solutions are designed and implemented correctly.
AWS Architects, AWS Cloud Architects, and AWS solutions architects spend their time architecting, building, and maintaining highly available, cost-efficient, and scalable AWS cloud environments. They also make recommendations regarding AWS toolsets and keep up with the latest in cloud computing.
Professional AWS cloud architects deliver technical architectures and lead implementation efforts, ensuring new technologies are successfully integrated into customer environments. This role works directly with customers and engineers, providing both technical leadership and an interface with client-side stakeholders.
AWS sysops administrators are responsible for managing and operating AWS systems. They work closely with AWS developers to ensure that systems are running smoothly and efficiently.
A Cloud Systems Administrator, or AWS SysOps administrator, is responsible for the effective provisioning, installation/configuration, operation, and maintenance of virtual systems, software, and related infrastructures. They also maintain analytics software and build dashboards for reporting.
AWS devops engineers are responsible for designing and implementing automated processes for Amazon Web Services. They work closely with other teams to ensure that processes are efficient and effective.
AWS DevOps engineers design AWS cloud solutions that impact and improve the business. They also perform server maintenance and implement any debugging or patching that may be necessary. Among other DevOps things!
AWS cloud engineers are responsible for designing, implementing, and managing cloud-based solutions using AWS technologies. They work closely with other teams to ensure that solutions are designed and implemented correctly.
If you are looking for an all-in-one solution to help you prepare for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam, look no further than this AWS Cloud Practitioner CCP CLFC01 book below.
AWS network engineers are responsible for designing, implementing, and managing networking solutions using AWS technologies. They work closely with other teams to ensure that networking solutions are designed and implemented correctly.
Cloud network specialists, engineers, and architects help organizations successfully design, build, and maintain cloud-native and hybrid networking infrastructures, including integrating existing networks with AWS cloud resources.
AWS security engineers are responsible for ensuring the security of Amazon Web Services environments. They work closely with other teams to identify security risks and implement controls to mitigate those risks.
Cloud security engineers provide security for AWS systems, protect sensitive and confidential data, and ensure regulatory compliance by designing and implementing security controls according to the latest security best practices.
As a database administrator on Amazon Web Services (AWS), you’ll be responsible for setting up, maintaining, and securing databases hosted on the Amazon cloud platform. You’ll work closely with other teams to ensure that databases are properly configured and secured.
Support engineers are responsible for providing technical support to AWS customers. They work closely with customers to troubleshoot problems and provide resolution within agreed upon SLAs.
9. Sales Engineer:
Sales engineers are responsible for working with sales teams to generate new business opportunities through the use of AWS products and services .They must have a deep understanding of AWS products and how they can be used by potential customers to solve their business problems .
10. Cloud Developer
An AWS Developer builds software services and enterprise-level applications. Generally, previous experience working as a software developer and a working knowledge of the most common cloud orchestration tools is required to get and succeed at an AWS cloud developer job
Cloud consultants provide organizations with technical expertise and strategy in designing and deploying AWS cloud solutions or in consulting on specific issues such as performance, security, or data migration.
The field of cloud computing will continue to grow and even more different types of jobs will surface in the future.
AWS certified professionals are in high demand across a variety of industries. AWS certs can open the door to a number of AWS jobs, including cloud engineer, solutions architect, and DevOps engineer.
Through studying and practice, any of the listed jobs could becoming available to you if you pass your AWS certification exams. Educating yourself on AWS concepts plays a key role in furthering your career and receiving not only a higher salary, but a more engaging position.
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AWS Azure Google Cloud Certifications Testimonials and Dumps
Do you want to become a Professional DevOps Engineer, a cloud Solutions Architect, a Cloud Engineer or a modern Developer or IT Professional, a versatile Product Manager, a hip Project Manager? Therefore Cloud skills and certifications can be just the thing you need to make the move into cloud or to level up and advance your career.
85% of hiring managers say cloud certifications make a candidate more attractive.
Build the skills that’ll drive your career into six figures.
In this blog, we are going to feed you with AWS Azure and GCP Cloud Certification testimonials and Frequently Asked Questions and Answers Dumps.
Went through the entire CloudAcademy course. Most of the info went out the other ear. Got a 67% on their final exam. Took the ExamPro free exam, got 69%.
Was going to take it last Saturday, but I bought TutorialDojo’s exams on Udemy. Did one Friday night, got a 50% and rescheduled it a week later to today Sunday.
Took 4 total TD exams. Got a 50%, 54%, 67%, and 64%. Even up until last night I hated the TD exams with a passion, I thought they were covering way too much stuff that didn’t even pop up in study guides I read. Their wording for some problems were also atrocious. But looking back, the bulk of my “studying” was going through their pretty well written explanations, and their links to the white papers allowed me to know what and where to read.
Not sure what score I got yet on the exam. As someone who always hated testing, I’m pretty proud of myself. I also had to take a dump really bad starting at around question 25. Thanks to TutorialsDojo Jon Bonso for completely destroying my confidence before the exam, forcing me to up my game. It’s better to walk in way over prepared than underprepared.
Just Passed My CCP exam today (within 2 weeks)
I would like to thank this community for recommendations about exam preparation. It was wayyyy easier than I expected (also way easier than TD practice exams scenario-based questions-a lot less wordy on real exam). I felt so unready before the exam that I rescheduled the exam twice. Quick tip: if you have limited time to prepare for this exam, I would recommend scheduling the exam beforehand so that you don’t procrastinate fully.
Resources:
If you are looking for an all-in-one solution to help you prepare for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam, look no further than this AWS Cloud Practitioner CCP CLFC01 book below.
-Stephane’s course on Udemy (I have seen people saying to skip hands-on videos but I found them extremely helpful to understand most of the concepts-so try to not skip those hands-on)
-Tutorials Dojo practice exams (I did only 3.5 practice tests out of 5 and already got 8-10 EXACTLY worded questions on my real exam)
-Very little to no experience (deployed my group’s app to cloud via Elastic beanstalk in college-had 0 clue at the time about what I was doing-had clear guidelines)
Preparation duration: -2 weeks (honestly watched videos for 12 days and then went over summary and practice tests on the last two days)
I used Stephane Maarek on Udemy. Purchased his course and the 6 Practice Exams. Also got Neal Davis’ 500 practice questions on Udemy. I took Stephane’s class over 2 days, then spent the next 2 weeks going over the tests (3~4 per day) till I was constantly getting over 80% – passed my exam with a 882.
What an adventure, I’ve never really gieven though to getting a cert until one day it just dawned on me that it’s one of the few resources that are globally accepted. So you can approach any company and basically prove you know what’s up on AWS 😀
Passed with two weeks of prep (after work and weekends)
This was just a nice structured presentation that also gives you the powerpoint slides plus cheatsheets and a nice overview of what is said in each video lecture.
Udemy – AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exams, created by Jon Bonso**, Tutorials Dojo**
These are some good prep exams, they ask the questions in a way that actually make you think about the related AWS Service. With only a few “Bullshit! That was asked in a confusing way” questions that popped up.
Pass AWS CCP. The score is beyond expected
I took CCP 2 days ago and got the pass notification right after submitting the answers. In about the next 3 hours I got an email from Credly for the badge. This morning I got an official email from AWS congratulating me on passing, the score is much higher than I expected. I took Stephane Maarek’s CCP course and his 6 demo exams, then Neal Davis’ 500 questions also. On all the demo exams, I took 1 fail and all passes with about 700-800. But in the real exam, I got 860. The questions in the real exam are kind of less verbose IMO, but I don’t truly agree with some people I see on this sub saying that they are easier. Just a little bit of sharing, now I’ll find something to continue ^^
Passed the exam! Spent 25 minutes answering all the questions. Another 10 to review. I might come back and update this post with my actual score.
Background
– A year of experience working with AWS (e.g., EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, Route 53, and Amplify).
– Cloud development on AWS is not my strong suit. I just Google everything, so my knowledge is very spotty. Less so now since I studied for this exam.
Study stats
– Spent three weeks studying for the exam.
– Studied an hour to two every day.
– Solved 800-1000 practice questions.
– Took 450 screenshots of practice questions and technology/service descriptions as reference notes to quickly swift through on my phone and computer for review. Screenshots were of questions that I either didn’t know, knew but was iffy on, or those I believed I’d easily forget.
– Made 15-20 pages of notes. Chill. Nothing crazy. This is on A4 paper. Free-form note taking. With big diagrams. Around 60-80 words per page.
– I was getting low-to-mid 70%s on Neal Davis’s and Stephane Maarek’s practice exams. Highest score I got was an 80%.
– I got a 67(?)% on one of Stephane Maarek’s exams. The only sub-70% I ever got on any practice test. I got slightly anxious. But given how much harder Maarek’s exams are compared to the actual exam, the anxiety was undue.
– Finishing the practice exams on time was never a problem for me. I would finish all of them comfortably within 35 minutes.
– AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials on the AWS Training and Certification Portal
– AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Tests (Book) by Neal Davis
– 6 Practice Exams | AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C01 by Stephane Maarek*
– Certified Cloud Practitioner Course by Exam Pro (Paid Version)**
– One or two free practice exams found by a quick Google search
*Regarding Exam Pro: I went through about 40% of the video lectures. I went through all the videos in the first few sections but felt that watching the lectures was too slow and laborious even at 1.5-2x speed. (The creator, for the most part, reads off of the slides, adding brief comments here and there.) So, I decided to only watch the video lectures for sections I didn’t have a good grasp on. (I believe the video lectures provided in the course are just split versions of the full length course available for free on YouTube under the freeCodeCamp channel, here.) The online course provides five practice exams. I did not take any of them.
**Regarding Stephane Maarek: I only took his practice exams. I did not take his study guide course.
Notes
– My study regimen (i.e., an hour to two every day for three weeks) was overkill.
– The questions on the practice exams created by Neal Davis and Stephane Maarek were significantly harder than those on the actual exam. I believe I could’ve passed without touching any of these resources.
– I retook one or two practice exams out of the 10+ I’ve taken. I don’t think there’s a need to retake the exams as long as you are diligent about studying the questions and underlying concepts you got wrong. I reviewed all the questions I missed on every practice exam the day before.
What would I do differently?
– Focus on practice tests only. No video lectures.
– Focus on the technologies domain. You can intuit your way through questions in the other domains.
Lots of the comments here about networking / VPC questions being prevalent are true. Also so many damn Aurora questions, it was like a presales chat.
The questions are actually quite detailed; as some had already mentioned. So pay close attention to the minute details Some questions you definitely have to flag for re-review.
It is by far harder than the Developer Associate exam, despite it having a broader scope. The DVA-C02 exam was like doing a speedrun but this felt like finishing off Sigrun on GoW. Ya gotta take your time.
I took the TJ practice exams. It somewhat helped, but having intimate knowledge of VPC and DB concepts would help more.
Passed SAA-C03 – Feedback
Just passed the SAA-C03 exam (864) and wanted to provide some feedback since that was helpful for me when I was browsing here before the exam.
I come from an IT background and have a strong knowledge in the VPC portion so that section was a breeze for me in the preparation process (I had never used AWS before this so everything else was new, but the concepts were somewhat familiar considering my background). I started my preparation about a month ago, and used the Mareek class on Udemy. Once I finished the class and reviewed my notes I moved to Mareek’s 6 practice exams (on Udemy). I wasn’t doing extremely well on the PEs (I passed on 4/6 of the exams with 70s grades) I reviewed the exam questions after each exam and moved on to the next. I also purchased Tutorial Dojo’s 6 exams set but only ended up taking one out of 6 (which I passed).
Overall the practice exams ended up being a lot harder than the real exam which had mostly the regular/base topics: a LOT of S3 stuff and storage in general, a decent amount of migration questions, only a couple questions on VPCs and no ML/AI stuff.
Sharing the study guide that I followed when I prepared for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 exam. I passed this test and thought of sharing a real exam experience in taking this challenging test.
First off: my background – I have 8 years of development.experience and been doing AWS for several project, both personally and at work. Studied for a total of 2 months. Focused on the official Exam Guide, and carefully studied the Task Statements and related AWS services.
SAA-C03 Exam Prep
For my exam prep, I bought the adrian cantrill video course, tutorialsdojo (TD) video course and practice exams. Adrian’s course is just right and highly educational but like others has said, the content is long and cover more than just the exam. Did all of the hands-on labs too and played around some machine learning services in my AWS account.
TD video course is short and a good overall summary of the topics items you’ve just learned. One TD lesson covers multiple topics so the content is highly concise. After I completed doing Adrian’s video course, I used TD’s video course as a refresher, did a couple of their hands-on labs then head on to their practice exams.
For the TD practice exams, I took the exam in chronologically and didn’t jumped back and forth until I completed all tests. I first tried all of the 7 timed-mode tests, and review every wrong ones I got on every attempt., then the 6 review-mode tests and the section/topic-based tests. I took the final-test mode roughly 3 times and this is by far one of the helpful feature of the website IMO. The final-test mode generates a unique set from all TD question bank, so every attempt is challenging for me. I also noticed that the course progress doesn’t move if I failed a specific test, so I used to retake the test that I failed.
The Actual SAA-C03 Exam
The actual AWS exam is almost the same with the ones in the TD tests where:
All of the questions are scenario-based
There are two (or more) valid solutions in the question, e.g:
Need SSL: options are ACM and self-signed URL
Need to store DB credentials: options are SSM Parameter Store and Secrets Manager
The scenarios are long-winded and asks for:
MOST Operationally efficient solution
MOST cost-effective
LEAST amount overhead
Overall, I enjoyed the exam and felt fully prepared while taking the test, thanks to Adrian and TD, but it doesn’t mean the whole darn thing is easy. You really need to put some elbow grease and keep your head lights on when preparing for this exam. Good luck to all and I hope my study guide helped out anyone who is struggling.
Another Passed SAA-C03?
Just another thread about passing the general exam? I passed SAA-C03 yesterday, would like to share my experience on how I earned the examination.
Background:
– graduate with networking background
– working experience on on-premise infrastructure automation, mainly using ansible, python, zabbix and etc.
– cloud experience, short period like 3-6 months with practice
– provisioned cloud application using terraform in azure and aws
cantrill course is depth and lot of practical knowledge, like email alias and etc.. check in to know more
tutorialdojo practice exam help me filter the answer and guide me on correct answer. If I am wrong in specific topic, I rewatch cantrill video. However, there is some topics that not covered by cantrill but the guideline/review in practice exam will provide pretty much detail. I did all the other mode before the timed-based, after that get average 850 in timed-based exam, while scoring the final practice exam with 63/65. However, real examination is harder compared to practice exam in my opinion.
udemy course and practice exam, I go through some of them but I think the practice exam is quite hard compared to tutorialdojo.
lab – just get hand dirty and they will make your knowledge deep dive in your brain, my advice is try not only to do copy and paste lab but really read the description for each parameter in aws portal
Advice:
you need to know some general exam topics like how to:
– s3 private access
– ec2 availability
– kinesis product including firehose, data stream, blabla
– iam
My next target will be AWS SAP and CKA, still searching suitable material for AWS SAP but proposed mainly using acloudguru sandbox and homelab to learn the subject, practice with acantrill lab in github.
Good luck anyone!
Passed SAA
I wanted to give my personal experience. I have a background in IT, but I have never worked in AWS previous to 5 weeks ago. I got my Cloud Practitioner in a week and SAA after another 4 weeks of studying (2-4 hours a day). I used Cantril’s Course and Tutorials Dojo Practice Exams. I highly, highly recommend this combo. I don’t think I would have passed without the practice exams, as they are quite difficult. In my opinion, they are much more difficult than the actual exam. They really hit the mark on what kind of content you will see. I got a 777, and that’s with getting 70-80%’s on the practice exams. I probably could have done better, but I had a really rough night of sleep and I came down with a cold. I was really on the struggle bus halfway through the test.
I only had a couple of questions on ML / AI, so make sure you know the differences between them all. Lot’s of S3 and EC2. You really need to know these in and out.
My company is offering stipend’s for each certification, so I’m going straight to developer next.
Recently passed SAA-C03
Just passed my SAA-C03 yesterday with 961 points. My first time doing AWS certification. I used Cantrill’s course. Went through the course materials twice, and took around 6 months to study, but that’s mostly due to my busy schedule. I found his materials very detailed and probably go beyond what you’d need for the actual exam.
I also used Stephane’s practice exams on Udemy. I’d say it’s instrumental in my passing doing these to get used to the type of questions in the actual exams and review missing knowledge. Would not have passed otherwise.
Just a heads-up, there are a few things popped up that I did not see in the course materials or practice exams:
* Lake Formation: question about pooling data from RDS and S3, as well as controlling access.
* S3 Requester Pays: question about minimizing S3 data cost when sharing with a partner.
* Pinpoint journey: question about customer replying to SMS sent-out and then storing their feedback.
Not sure if they are graded or Amazon testing out new parts.
Cheers.
Another SAP-C01-Pass
Received my notification this morning that I passed 811.
Prep Time: 10 weeks 2hrs a day
Materials: Neil Davis videos/practice exam Jon Bonso practice exams White papers Misc YouTube videos Some hands on
Prof Experience: 4 years AWS using main services as architect
AWS Certs: CCP-SSA-DVA-SAP(now)
Thoughts: Exam was way more familiar to me than the Developer Exam. I use very little AWS developer tools but mainly use core AWS services. Neil’s videos were very straightforward, easy to digest, and on point. I was able to watch most of the videos on a plane flight to Vegas.
After video series I started to hit his section based exams, main exam, notes, and followed up with some hands on. I was getting destroyed on some of the exams early on and had to rewatch and research the topics, writing notes. There is a lot of nuance and fine details on the topics, you’ll see this when you take the practice exam. These little details matter.
Bonso’s exam were nothing less than awesome as per usual. Same difficulty and quality as Neil Davis. Followed the same routine with section based followed by final exam. I believe Neil said to aim for 80’s on his final exams to sit for the exam. I’d agree because that’s where I was hitting a week before the exam (mid 80’s). Both Neil and Jon exams were on par with exam difficulty if not a shade more difficult.
The exam itself was very straightforward. My experience is the questions were not overly verbose and were straight to the point as compared to the practice exams I took. I was able to quickly narrow down the questions and make a selection. Flagged 8 questions along the way and had 30min to review all my answers. Unlike some people, I didn’t feel like it was a brain melter and actually enjoyed the challenge. Maybe I’m a sadist who knows.
Advice: Follow Neil’s plan, bone up on weak areas and be confident. These questions have a pattern based upon the domain. Doing the practice exams enough will allow you to see the pattern and then research will confirm your suspicions. You can pass this exam!
Passed the certified developer associate this week.
Primary study was Stephane Maarek’s course on Udemy.
I also used the Practice Exams by Stephane Maarek and Abhishek Singh.
I used Stephane’s course and practice exams for the Solutions Architect Associate as well, and find his course does a good job preparing you to pass the exams.
The practice exams were more challenging than the actual exam, so they are a good gauge to see if you are ready for the exam.
Haven’t decided if I’ll do another associate level certification next or try for the solutions architect professional.
I cleared Developer associate exam yesterday. I scored 873. Actual Exam Exp: More questions were focused on mainly on Lambda, API, Dynamodb, cloudfront, cognito(must know proper difference between user pool and identity pool) 3 questions I found were just for redis vs memecached (so maybe you can focus more here also to know exact use case& difference.) other topic were cloudformation, beanstalk, sts, ec2. Exam was mix of too easy and too tough for me. some questions were one liner and somewhere too long.
Resources: The main resources I used was udemy. Course of Stéphane Maarek and practice exams of Neal Davis and Stéphane Maarek. These exams proved really good and they even helped me in focusing the area which I lacked. And they are up to the level to actual exam, I found 3-4 exact same questions in actual exam(This might be just luck ! ). so I feel, the course of stephane is more than sufficient and you can trust it. I have achieved solution architect associate previously so I knew basic things, so I took around 2 weeks for preparation and revised the Stephen’s course as much as possible. Parallelly I gave the mentioned exams as well, which guided me where to focus more.
Thanks to all of you and feel free to comment/DM me, if you think I can help you in anyway for achieving the same.
Another Passed Associate Developer Exam (DVA-C01)
Already had passed the Associate Architect Exam (SA-C03) 3 months ago, so I got much more relaxed to the exam, I did the exam with Pearson Vue at home with no problems. Used Adrian Cantrill for the course together with the TD exams.
Studied 2 weeks a 1-2 hours since there is a big overlap with the associate architect couse, even tho the exam has a different approach, more focused on the Serverless side of AWS. Lots of DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, KMS, CloudFormation, SAM, SSO, Cognito (User Pool and Identity Pool), and IAM role/credentials best practices.
I do think in terms of difficulty it was a bit easier than the Associate Architect, maybe it is made up on my mind as it was my second exam so I went in a bit more relaxed.
Next step is going for the Associate Sys-Ops, I will use Adrian Cantrill and Stephane Mareek courses as it is been said that its the most difficult associate exam.
Passed the SCS-C01 Security Specialty
Passed the SCS-C01 Security Specialty
Mixture of Tutorial Dojo practice exams, A Cloud Guru course, Neal Davis course & exams helped a lot. Some unexpected questions caught me off guard but with educated guessing, due to the material I studied I was able to overcome them. It’s important to understand:
KMS Keys
AWS Owned Keys
AWS Managed KMS keys
Customer Managed Keys
asymmetrical
symmetrical
Imported key material
What services can use AWS Managed Keys
KMS Rotation Policies
Depending on the key matters the rotation that can be applied (if possible)
Key Policies
Grants (temporary access)
Cross-account grants
Permanent Policys
How permissions are distributed depending on the assigned principle
IAM Policy format
Principles (supported principles)
Conditions
Actions
Allow to a service (ARN or public AWS URL)
Roles
Secrets Management
Credential Rotation
Secure String types
Parameter Store
AWS Secrets Manager
Route 53
DNSSEC
DNS Logging
Network
AWS Network Firewall
AWS WAF (some questions try to trick you into thinking AWS Shield is needed instead)
AWS Shield
Security Groups (Stateful)
NACL (Stateless)
Ephemeral Ports
VPC FlowLogs
AWS Config
Rules
Remediation (custom or AWS managed)
AWS CloudTrail
AWS Organization Trails
Multi-Region Trails
Centralized S3 Bucket for multi-account log aggregation
AWS GuardDuty vs AWS Macie vs AWS Inspector vs AWS Detective vs AWS Security Hub
It gets more in depth, I’m willing to help anyone out that has questions. If you don’t mind joining my Discord to discuss amongst others to help each other out will be great. A study group community. Thanks. I had to repost because of a typo 🙁
Exam guide book by Kam Agahian and group of authors – this just got released and has all you need in a concise manual, it also included 3 practice exams, this is a must buy for future reference and covers ALL current exam topics including container networking, SD-WAN etc.
Stephane Maarek’s Udemy course – it is mostly up-to-date with the main exam topics including TGW, network firewall etc. To the point lectures with lots of hands-on demos which gives you just what you need, highly recommended as well!
Tutorial Dojos practice tests to drive it home – this helped me get an idea of the question wording, so I could train myself to read fast, pick out key words, compare similar answers and build confidence in my knowledge.
Crammed daily for 4 weeks (after work, I have a full time job + family) and went in and nailed it. I do have networking background (15+ years) and I am currently working as a cloud security engineer and I’m working with AWS daily, especially EKS, TGW, GWLB etc.
For those not from a networking background – it would definitely take longer to prep.
What an exciting journey. I think AZ-900 is the hardest probably because it is my first Microsoft certification. Afterwards, the others are fair enough. AI-900 is the easiest.
I generally used Microsoft Virtual Training Day, Cloud Ready Skills, Measureup and John Savill’s videos. Having built a fundamental knowledge of the Cloud, I am planning to do AWS CCP next. Wish me luck!
Passed Azure Fundamentals
Learning Material
Hi all,
I passed my Azure fundamentals exam a couple of days ago, with a score of 900/1000. Been meaning to take the exam for a few months but I kept putting it off for various reasons. The exam was a lot easier than I thought and easier than the official Microsoft practice exams.
Study materials;
A Cloud Guru AZ-900 fundamentals course with practice exams
I am pretty proud of this one. Databases are an area of IT where I haven’t spent a lot of time, and what time I have spent has been with SQL or MySQL with old school relational databases. NoSQL was kinda breaking my brain for a while.
Study Materials:
Microsoft Virtual Training Day, got the voucher for the free exam. I know several people on here said that was enough for them to pass the test, but that most certainly was not enough for me.
Exampro.co DP-900 course and practice test. They include virtual flashcards which I really liked.
Whizlabs.com practice tests. I also used the course to fill in gaps in my testing.
Passed AI-900! Tips & Resources Included!!
Azure AI Fundamentals AI-900 Exam Prep
Achievement Celebration
Huge thanks to this subreddit for helping me kick start my Azure journey. I have over 2 decades of experience in IT and this is my 3rd Azure certification as I already have AZ-900 and DP-900.
Here’s the order in which I passed my AWS and Azure certifications:
SAA>DVA>SOA>DOP>SAP>CLF|AZ-900>DP-900>AI-900
I have no plans to take this certification now but had to as the free voucher is expiring in a couple of days. So I started preparing on Friday and took the exam on Sunday. But give it more time if you can.
Here’s my study plan for AZ-900 and DP-900 exams:
finish a popular video course aimed at the cert
watch John Savill’s study/exam cram
take multiple practice exams scoring in 90s
This is what I used for AI-900:
Alan Rodrigues’ video course (includes 2 practice exams) 👌
John Savill’s study cram 💪
practice exams by Scott Duffy and in 28Minutes Official 👍
knowledge checks in AI modules from MS learn docs 🙌
I also found the below notes to be extremely useful as a refresher. It can be played multiple times throughout your preparation as the exam cram part is just around 20 minutes.
Just be clear on the topics explained by the above video and you’ll pass AI-900. I advise you to watch this video at the start, middle and end of your preparation. All the best in your exam
Just passed AZ-104
Achievement Celebration
I recommend to study networking as almost all of the questions are related to this topic. Also, AAD is a big one. Lots of load balancers, VNET, NSGs.
Received very little of this:
Containers
Storage
Monitoring
I passed with a 710 but a pass is a pass haha.
Used tutorial dojos but the closest questions I found where in the Udemy testing exams.
Regards,
Passed GCP Professional Cloud Architect
Google Professional Cloud Architect Practice Exam 2022
First of all, I would like to start with the fact that I already have around 1 year of experience with GCP in depth, where I was working on GKE, IAM, storage and so on. I also obtained GCP Associate Cloud Engineer certification back in June as well, which helps with the preparation.
I started with Dan Sullivan’s Udemy course for Professional Cloud Architect and did some refresher on the topics I was not familiar with such as BigTable, BigQuery, DataFlow and all that. His videos on the case studies helps a lot to understand what each case study scenario requires for designing the best cost-effective architecture.
In order to understand the services in depth, I also went through the GCP documentation for each service at least once. It’s quite useful for knowing the syntax of the GCP commands and some miscellaneous information.
As for practice exam, I definitely recommend Whizlabs. It helped me prepare for the areas I was weak at and helped me grasp the topics a lot faster than reading through the documentation. It will also help you understand what kind of questions will appear for the exam.
I used TutorialsDojo (Jon Bonso) for preparation for Associate Cloud Engineer before and I can attest that Whizlabs is not that good. However, Whizlabs still helps a lot in tackling the tough questions that you will come across during the examination.
One thing to note is that, there wasn’t even a single question that was similar to the ones from Whizlabs practice tests. I am saying this from the perspective of the content of the questions. I got totally different scenarios for both case study and non case study questions. Many questions focused on App Engine, Data analytics and networking. There were some Kubernetes questions based on Anthos, and cluster networking. I got a tough question regarding storage as well.
I initially thought I would fail, but I pushed on and started tackling the multiple-choices based on process of elimination using the keywords in the questions. 50 questions in 2 hours is a tough one, especially due to the lengthy questions and multiple choices. I do not know how this compares to AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam in toughness. But some people do say GCP professional is tougher than AWS.
All in all, I still recommend this certification to people who are working with GCP. It’s a tough one to crack and could be useful for future prospects. It’s a bummer that it’s only valid for 2 years.
Passed GCP: Cloud Digital Leader
Hi everyone,
First, thanks for all the posts people share. It helps me prep for my own exam. I passed the GCP: Cloud Digital Leader exam today and wanted to share a few things about my experience.
Preparation
I have access to ACloudGuru (AGU)and Udemy through work. I started one of the Udemy courses first, but it was clear the course was going beyond the scope of the Cloud Digital Leader certification. I switched over AGU and enjoyed the content a lot more. The videos were short and the instructor hit all the topics on the Google exam requirements sheet.
AGU also has three – 50 question practices test. The practice tests are harder than the actual exam (and the practice tests aren’t that hard).
I don’t know if someone could pass the test if they just watched the videos on Google Cloud’s certification site, especially if you had no experience with GCP.
Overall, I would say I spent 20 hrs preparing for the exam. I have my CISSP and I’m working on my CCSP. After taking the test, I realized I way over prepared.
Exam Center
It was my first time at this testing center and I wasn’t happy with the experience. A few of the issues I had are:
– My personal items (phone, keys) were placed in an unlocked filing cabinet
– My desk are was dirty. There were eraser shreds (or something similar) and I had to move the keyboard and mouse and brush all the debris out of my work space
– The laminated sheet they gave me looked like someone had spilled Kool-Aid on it
– They only offered earplugs, instead of noise cancelling headphones
Exam
My recommendation for the exam is to know the Digital Transformation piece as well as you know all the GCP services and what they do.
I wish you all luck on your future exams. Onto GCP: Associate Cloud Engineer.
Passed the Google Cloud: Associate Cloud Engineer
Hey all, I was able to pass the Google Cloud: Associate Cloud Engineer exam in 27 days.
I studied about 3-5 hours every single day.
I created this note to share with the resources I used to pass the exam.
Happy studying!
GCP ACE Exam Aced
Hi folks,
I am glad to share with you that I have cleared by GCP ACE exam today and would like to share my preparation with you:
1)I completed these courses from Coursera:
1.1 Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals – Core Infrastructure
1.2 Essential Cloud Infrastructure: Foundation
1.3 Essential Cloud Infrastructure: Core Services
1.4 Elastic Google Cloud Infrastructure: Scaling and Automation
Post these courses, I did couple of QwikLab courses as listed in orderly manner:
2 Getting Started: Create and Manage Cloud Resources (Qwiklabs Quest)
2.1 A Tour of Qwiklabs and Google Cloud
2.2 Creating a Virtual Machine
2.2 Compute Engine: Qwik Start – Windows
2.3 Getting Started with Cloud Shell and gcloud
2.4 Kubernetes Engine: Qwik Start
2.5 Set Up Network and HTTP Load Balancers
2.6 Create and Manage Cloud Resources: Challenge Lab
3 Set up and Configure a Cloud Environment in Google Cloud (Qwiklabs Quest)
3.1 Cloud IAM: Qwik Start
3.2 Introduction to SQL for BigQuery and Cloud SQL
3.3 Multiple VPC Networks
3.4 Cloud Monitoring: Qwik Start
3.5 Deployment Manager – Full Production [ACE]
3.6 Managing Deployments Using Kubernetes Engine
3.7 Set Up and Configure a Cloud Environment in Google Cloud: Challenge Lab
4 Kubernetes in Google Cloud (Qwiklabs Quest)
4.1 Introduction to Docker
4.2 Kubernetes Engine: Qwik Start
4.3 Orchestrating the Cloud with Kubernetes
4.4 Managing Deployments Using Kubernetes Engine
4.5 Continuous Delivery with Jenkins in Kubernetes Engine
Post these courses I did the following for mock exam preparation:
Cloud computing has revolutionized the way companies develop applications. Most of the modern applications are now cloud native. Undoubtedly, the cloud offers immense benefits like reduced infrastructure maintenance, increased availability, cost reduction, and many others.
However, which cloud vendor to choose, is a challenge in itself. If we look at the horizon of cloud computing, the three main providers that come to mind are AWS, Azure, and Google cloud. Today, we will compare the top three cloud giants and see how they differ. We will compare their services, specialty, and pros and cons. After reading this article, you will be able to decide which cloud vendor is best suited to your needs and why.
History and establishment
AWS
AWS is the oldest player in the market, operating since 2006. Here’s a brief history of AWS and how computing has changed. Being the first in the cloud industry, it has gained a particular advantage over its competitors. It offers more than 200+ services to its users. Some of its notable clients include:
Netflix
Expedia
Airbnb
Coursera
FDA
Coca Cola
Azure
Azure by Microsoft started in 2010. Although it started four years later than AWS, it is catching up quite fast. Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud platform which is why many companies prefer to use Azure for their Microsoft-based applications. It also offers more than 200 services and products. Some of its prominent clients include:
HP
Asus
Mitsubishi
3M
Starbucks
CDC (Center of Disease Control) USA
National health service (NHS) UK
Google
Google Cloud also started in 2010. Its arsenal of cloud services is relatively smaller compared to AWS or Azure. It offers around 100+ services. However, its services are robust, and many companies embrace Google cloud for its specialty services. Some of its noteworthy clients include:
PayPal
UPS
Toyota
Twitter
Spotify
Unilever
Market share & growth rate
If you look at the market share and growth chart below, you will notice that AWS has been leading for more than four years. Azure is also expanding fast, but it is still has a long way to go to catch up with AWS.
However, in terms of revenue, Azure is ahead of AWS. In Q1 2022, AWS revenue was $18.44 billion; Azure earned $23.4 billion, while Google cloud earned $5.8 billion.
Availability Zones (Data Centers)
When comparing cloud vendors, it is essential to see how many regions and availability zones are offered. Here is a quick comparison between all three cloud vendors in terms of regions and data centers:
AWS
AWS operates in 25 regions and 81 availability zones. It offers 218+ edge locations and 12 regional edge caches as well. You can utilize the edge location and edge caches in services like AWS Cloudfront and global accelerator, etc.
Azure
Azure has 66 regions worldwide and a minimum of three availability zones in each region. It also offers more than 116 edge locations.
Google
Google has a presence in 27 regions and 82 availability zones. It also offers 146 edge locations.
Although all three cloud giants are continuously expanding. Both AWS and Azure offer data centers in China to specifically cater for Chinese consumers. At the same time, Azure seems to have broader coverage than its competitors.
Comparison of common cloud services
Let’s look at the standard cloud services offered by these vendors.
Compute
Amazon’s primary compute offering is EC2 instances, which are very easy to operate. Amazon also provides a low-cost option called “Amazon lightsail” which is a perfect fit for those who are new to computing and have a limited budget. AWS charges for EC2 instances only when you are using them. Azure’s compute offering is also based on virtual machines. Google is no different and offers virtual machines in Google’s data centers. Here’s a brief comparison of compute offerings of all three vendors:
Storage
All three vendors offer various forms of storage, including object-based storage, cold storage, file-based storage, and block-based storage. Here’s a brief comparison of all three:
Database
All three vendors support managed services for databases. They also offer NoSQL as well as document-based databases. AWS also provides a proprietary RDBMS named “Aurora”, a highly scalable and fast database offering for both MySQL and PostGreSQL. Here’s a brief comparison of all three vendors:
Comparison of Specialized services
All three major cloud providers are competing with each other in the latest technologies. Some notable areas of competition include ML/AI, robotics, DevOps, IoT, VR/Gaming, etc. Here are some of the key specialties of all three vendors.
AWS
Being the first and only one in the cloud market has many benefits, and Amazon has certainly taken advantage of that. Amazon has advanced specifically in AI and machine learning related tools. AWS DeepLens is an AI-powered camera that you can use to develop and deploy machine learning algorithms. It helps you with OCR and image recognition. Similarly, Amazon has launched an open source library called “Gluon” which helps with deep learning and neural networks. You can use this library to learn how neural networks work, even if you lack any technical background. Another service that Amazon offers is SageMaker. You can use SageMaker to train and deploy your machine learning models. It contains the Lex conversational interface, which is the backbone of Alexa, Lambda, and Greengrass IoT messaging services.
Another unique (and recent) offering from AWS is IoT twinmaker. This service can create digital twins of real-world systems like factories, buildings, production lines, etc.
AWS is even providing a service for Quantum computing called AWS Braket.
Azure
Azure excels where you are already using some Microsoft products, especially on-premises Microsoft products. Organizations already using Microsoft products prefer to use Azure instead of other cloud vendors because Azure offers a better and more robust integration with Microsoft products.
Azure has excellent services related to ML/AI and cognitive services. Some notable services include Bing web search API, Face API, Computer vision API, text analytics API, etc.
Google
Google is the current leader of all cloud providers regarding AI. This is because of their open-source Google library TensorFlow, the most popular library for developing machine learning applications. Vertex AI and BigQueryOmni are also beneficial services offered lately. Similarly, Google offers rich services for NLP, translation, speech, etc.
Pros and Cons
Let’s summarize the pros and cons for all three cloud vendors:
AWS
Pros:
An extensive list of services
Huge market share
Support for large businesses
Global reach
Cons:
Pricing model. Many companies struggle to understand the cost structure. Although AWS has improved the UX of its cost-related reporting in the AWS console, many companies still hesitate to use AWS because of a perceived lack of cost transparency
Azure
Pros:
Excellent integration with Microsoft tools and software
Broader feature set
Support for open source
Cons:
Geared towards enterprise customers
Google
Pros:
Strong integration with open source tools
Flexible contracts
Good DevOps services
The most cost-efficient
The preferred choice for startups
Good ML/AI-based services
Cons:
A limited number of services as compared to AWS and Azure
As mentioned earlier, AWS has the largest market share compared to other cloud vendors. That means more companies are using AWS, and there are more vacancies in the market for AWS-certified professionals. Here are main reasons why you would choose to learn AWS:
Azure is the second largest cloud service provider. It is ideal for companies that are already using Microsoft products. Here are the top reasons why you would choose to learn Azure:
Ideal for experienced user of Microsoft services
Azure certifications rank among the top paying IT certifications
If you’re applying for a company that primarily uses Microsoft Services
Google
Although Google is considered an underdog in the cloud market, it is slowly catching up. Here’s why you may choose to learn GCP.
While there are fewer job postings, there is also less competition in the market
GCP certifications rank among the top paying IT certifications
Most valuable IT Certifications
Keen to learn about the top paying cloud certifications and jobs? If you look at the annual salary figures below, you can see the average salary for different cloud vendors and IT companies, no wonder AWS is on top. A GCP cloud architect is also one of the top five. The Azure architect comes at #9.
Which cloud certification to choose depends mainly on your career goals and what type of organization you want to work for. No cloud certification path is better than the other. What matters most is getting started and making progress towards your career goals. Even if you decide at a later point in time to switch to a different cloud provider, you’ll still benefit from what you previously learned.
Over time, you may decide to get certified in all three – so you can provide solutions that vary from one cloud service provider to the next.
Don’t get stuck in analysis-paralysis! If in doubt, simply get started with AWS certifications that are the most sought-after in the market – especially if you are at the very beginning of your cloud journey. The good news is that you can become an AWS expert when enrolling in our value-packed training.
Further Reading
You may also be interested in the following articles:
Hello AZ cert Community, I passed AZ-500 last week. It is sure one of the hardest exam format with case study and number of questions (~55) in 100 minutes. Anyone sitting in exam, plan time accordingly to complete all questions. Case studies are long and time consuming reading and back track for reference to information consumed too much time. I prepared according to latest exam outline by searching azure documentation and MS learn. Good luck to future exam takers!! submitted by /u/Firm-Calligrapher646 [link] [comments]
Hi all, Thinking of using my ignite challenge cert for az104. Can anyone recommend me some learning resources? Thanks submitted by /u/Alascato [link] [comments]
Hi All, Hope you are doing well! Recently finished the CBT course on SC-200, and feel like it lacks a dramatic amount of information based on what I have seen others discuss. Would anyone perhaps be able to push me in the right direction for further material? I am planning on doing the MS Learn Path + Labs and have got the whizlabs practice tests so far. Just worried that I run into the exam unprepared Thank you! submitted by /u/Complex-Painting4745 [link] [comments]
Hello everyone two part question here, are the MS Learn practice exams efficient enough for preparation for the actual exam and what are some other practice exam resources that some of you found success utilizing? I appreciate all of the advice in advance. submitted by /u/Boat_Background [link] [comments]
I passed Az104 a couple of days ago on first attempt and have started on Az500 straight away. I have been reading on here that Az500 is a harder exam than Az104 but from what I can see so far (3 hours into an ACG course for Az500) the Az104 content seems more technical for sure. Are we certain we think Az500 is harder than Az104 because for the most part it looks like people think that? submitted by /u/Front-Piano-1237 [link] [comments]
Hi guys , So i have AZ-900 and MS-900 , im studying to AZ-104 and then to MD-102. My work if based on SCCM and future in Intune all around infrastructure, love what i do and i wanna keep learning , honestly after take az104 and MD102 dont know what path i should take. Any advice? Thanks. submitted by /u/No_Application_110 [link] [comments]
Hey guys, hope everyone is doing well. I've currently been studying to complete the AZ-204 exam. I've gone through all the learn modules, taken the practice assessment many, many times, and have gone through Scott Duffy's AZ-204 Udemy course. Now, I'm planning to find as many practice tests as I can online and grind them out. My question: what are your learning resource recommendations for this exam? Frankly, I've been studying quite a bit, but every thread I've read on here talks about how weirdly designed this exam is. Makes me a little uneasy. Appreciate the time, any help is greatly appreciated. submitted by /u/SuperAlbinoRhino [link] [comments]
Hi, I wanna get this exam passed before it retires, but I am confused as some say it contains labs and some say it does not... has anyone taken this, can you confirm if there are labs involved in this exam. Thanks. submitted by /u/Fearnie85 [link] [comments]
Credly is eliminating partnership with Microsoft as you know. A lot of people aren't worried saying that the learn profile is enough but I gave my exam through Certiport and you can't connect the Certiport and Learn profiles together. So when it comes to sharing my badge through linked in or a resume it's a problem. submitted by /u/cold-blue25 [link] [comments]
LOL. Ok so I brought the TD AZ-104 ebook and practice exams. 😂. I figured I get a text to speech to listen to the ebook while I play call of duty & do my errands. Man I downloaded Speechify and it got Snoop Dogg’s voice and it’s amazing! It’s definitely got that AI slurring, but it’s definitely beneficial. Studies show you retain more information with hearing & reading. Ebook is only 135 pages. Take away the all the pages before chapter 1 it’s even less. It cost $6 I going to run this back so times in different voices. Lol. Free 3 day trail. My referral link to get free $60 in speechify: https://share.speechify.com/mzvIsET submitted by /u/215Juice [link] [comments]
Microsoft announced it will release Fabric. Which certifications are no longer worth doing with this announcement, in your opinion? submitted by /u/Dimher [link] [comments]
Whether my azure 104 skills has gotten rusty or questions were a bit tricky. Since it was untimed, I have tried to test the each question on azure portal, and checked any related documentation and tutorial. I might have spent 3-4 hours overall for just 28 questions (granted, I was a bit slow). Still I only scored 85 . If you are short on time, just take the test and answer the questions after a detailed research. However, I will keep studying the corresponding lectures now that this exam has shown me how much az-104 content I don’t know. Dont forget, it is untimed, you can take it as long as you want (note, you can’t return back the questions you have answered) submitted by /u/Karrakan [link] [comments]
Hey folks, just took az-104 for the first time. I passed with 900.I am an SDE so I haven't dealt with much of the admin side of azure before. This was my first azure cert. For prep, I went to the learn page and went through the az-104 resources along with the github labs, practice exam on the learn page along with TJ. I spent 3 weekends preparing for this exam and some nights after work, in total about 40-50 hours. My weakest areas are onprem/AD/managing users outside of RBAC(mfa, password reset etc..) but I don't recall many questions from those, probably 1 or 2. The worst part was the case study, it is difficult to navigate as you have to swap between tabs, I had 6 questions. I suggest you try to find some mock UI for the case study as it is difficult to read and you can get the feel of it. submitted by /u/Retroman90 [link] [comments]
I have taken TD and I am unable to score above 80%. I only did a month of prep but I am sure of the labs I did on Ms learn. submitted by /u/Plus_Satisfaction453 [link] [comments]
Hello..! I just want to know which module you like the most in AZ-104? Identity Access & Governance Storage Compute Networking Monitoring Mine is networking. submitted by /u/let_me_know_its_true [link] [comments]
A run-through of the reasons I chose to specialise in Azure over the other Cloud Service Providers(CSP's) Watch below ⬇️ https://youtu.be/rVj_uxz2nXI submitted by /u/Zestyclose_Proof7363 [link] [comments]
Try these FREE UDEMY AZ-900 Practice Tests, https://www.udemy.com/course/microsoft-azure-az-900-exam-ready-practice-tests-2023/?couponCode=FREEAZURE900-1 Update - Free coupons sold out. Here is the discounted price. https://www.udemy.com/course/microsoft-azure-az-900-exam-ready-practice-tests-2023/?couponCode=AZURE900 submitted by /u/Top_Memory_8764 [link] [comments]
Hi all, I am going to be taking Az204 next Tuesday and I average around 80% (once 90%) on MeasureUp exams. I have also been using Whizlabs practice exams and the free MS practice exam as well. For anyone who has taken the Az204 exam, would you say that MeasureUp reflects the exam well? Or was the actual exam a lot more challenging? I've heard MeasureUp is harder but I find this hard to believe. submitted by /u/Healthy_Brush_9157 [link] [comments]
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Djamgatech – Multilingual and Platform Independent Cloud Certification and Education App for AWS Azure Google Cloud
Djamgatech is the ultimate Cloud Education Certification App. It is an EduFlix App for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Certification Prep, School Subjects, Python, Math, SAT, etc.[Android, iOS]
Technology is changing and is moving towards the cloud. The cloud will power most businesses in the coming years and is not taught in schools. How do we ensure that our kids and youth and ourselves are best prepared for this challenge?
Building mobile educational apps that work offline and on any device can help greatly in that sense.
The ability to tab on a button and learn the cloud fundamentals and take quizzes is a great opportunity to help our children and youth to boost their job prospects and be more productive at work.
The App covers the following certifications : AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Prep CCP CLF-C01, Azure Fundamentals AZ 900 Exam Prep, AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate SAA-C02 Exam Prep, AWS Certified Developer Associate DVA-C01 Exam Prep, Azure Administrator AZ 104 Exam Prep, Google Associate Cloud Engineer Exam Prep, Data Analytics for AWS DAS-C01, Machine Learning for AWS and Google, AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C01), AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty (MLS-C01), Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer and more… [Android, iOS]
Azure: Virtual Machines, Azure App Services, Azure Container Instances (ACI), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Windows Virtual Desktop, Virtual Networks, VPN Gateway, Virtual Network peering, and ExpressRoute, Container (Blob) Storage, Disk Storage, File Storage, and storage tiers, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and SQL Managed Instance, Azure Marketplace, Azure consumption-based mode, management groups, resources and RG, Geographic distribution concepts such as Azure regions, region pairs, and AZ Internet of Things (IoT) Hub, IoT Central, and Azure Sphere, Azure Synapse Analytics, HDInsight, and Azure Databricks, Azure Machine Learning, Cognitive Services and Azure Bot Service, Serverless computing solutions that include Azure Functions and Logic Apps, Azure DevOps, GitHub, GitHub Actions, and Azure DevTest Labs, Azure Mobile, Azure Advisor, Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, Azure Security, Privacy and Workloads, General security and network security, Azure security features, Azure Security Centre, policy compliance, security alerts, secure score, and resource hygiene, Key Vault, Azure Sentinel, Azure Dedicated Hosts, Concept of defense in depth, NSG, Azure Firewall, Azure DDoS protection, Identity, governance, Conditional Access, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and Single Sign-On (SSO),Azure Services, Core Azure architectural components, Management Groups, Azure Resource Manager,
If you are looking for an all-in-one solution to help you prepare for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam, look no further than this AWS Cloud Practitioner CCP CLFC01 book below.
Features: – Practice exams – 1000+ Q&A updated frequently. – 3+ Practice exams per Certification – Scorecard / Scoreboard to track your progress – Quizzes with score tracking, progress bar, countdown timer. – Can only see scoreboard after completing the quiz. – FAQs for most popular Cloud services – Cheat Sheets – Flashcards – works offline
Note and disclaimer: We are not affiliated with AWS, Azure, Microsoft or Google. The questions are put together based on the certification study guide and materials available online. The questions in this app should help you pass the exam but it is not guaranteed. We are not responsible for any exam you did not pass.
Important: To succeed with the real exam, do not memorize the answers in this app. It is very important that you understand why a question is right or wrong and the concepts behind it by carefully reading the reference documents in the answers.
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CyberSecurity 101 and Top 25 AWS Certified Security Specialty Questions and Answers Dumps
Almost 4.57 billion people were active internet users as of July 2020, encompassing 59 percent of the global population. 94% of enterprises use cloud. 77% of organizations worldwide have at least one application running on the cloud. This results in an exponential growth of cyber attacks. Therefore, CyberSecurity is one the biggest challenge to individuals and organizations worldwide: 158,727 cyber attacks per hour, 2,645 per minute and 44 every second of every day.
I- The AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C01) examination is intended for individuals who perform a security role. This exam validates an examinee’s ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge about securing the AWS platform.
It validates an examinee’s ability to demonstrate:
An understanding of specialized data classifications and AWS data protection mechanisms.
An understanding of data-encryption methods and AWS mechanisms to implement them.
An understanding of secure Internet protocols and AWS mechanisms to implement them.
A working knowledge of AWS security services and features of services to provide a secure production environment.
Competency gained from two or more years of production deployment experience using AWS security services and features.
The ability to make tradeoff decisions with regard to cost, security, and deployment complexity given a set of application requirements.
AWS Certified Security Specialty
An understanding of security operations and risks.
Below are the Top 25 AWS Certified Security Specialty Questions and Answers Dumps including Notes, Hint and References:
If you are looking for an all-in-one solution to help you prepare for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam, look no further than this AWS Cloud Practitioner CCP CLFC01 book below.
Question 2: A company has AWS workloads in multiple geographical locations. A Developer has created an Amazon Aurora database in the us-west-1 Region. The database is encrypted using a customer-managed AWS KMS key. Now the Developer wants to create the same encrypted database in the us-east-1 Region. Which approach should the Developer take to accomplish this task?
A) Create a snapshot of the database in the us-west-1 Region. Copy the snapshot to the us-east-1 Region and specify a KMS key in the us-east-1 Region. Restore the database from the copied snapshot.
B) Create an unencrypted snapshot of the database in the us-west-1 Region. Copy the snapshot to the useast-1 Region. Restore the database from the copied snapshot and enable encryption using the KMS key from the us-east-1 Region
C) Disable encryption on the database. Create a snapshot of the database in the us-west-1 Region. Copy the snapshot to the us-east-1 Region. Restore the database from the copied snapshot.
D) In the us-east-1 Region, choose to restore the latest automated backup of the database from the us-west1 Region. Enable encryption using a KMS key in the us-east-1 Region
ANSWER2:
A
Notes/Hint2:
If a user copies an encrypted snapshot, the copy of the snapshot must also be encrypted. If a user copies an encrypted snapshot across Regions, users cannot use the same AWS KMS encryption key for the copy as used for the source snapshot, because KMS keys are Region specific. Instead, users must specify a KMS key that is valid in the destination Region
Question 3: A corporate cloud security policy states that communication between the company’s VPC and KMS must travel entirely within the AWS network and not use public service endpoints. Which combination of the following actions MOST satisfies this requirement? (Select TWO.)
A) Add the aws:sourceVpce condition to the AWS KMS key policy referencing the company’s VPC endpoint ID.
B) Remove the VPC internet gateway from the VPC and add a virtual private gateway to the VPC to prevent direct, public internet connectivity.
C) Create a VPC endpoint for AWS KMS with private DNS enabled.
D) Use the KMS Import Key feature to securely transfer the AWS KMS key over a VPN. E) Add the following condition to the AWS KMS key policy: “aws:SourceIp”: “10.0.0.0/16“.
ANSWER3:
A and C
Notes/Hint3:
An IAM policy can deny access to AWS KMS except through your VPC endpoint with the following condition statement:
“Condition”: {
“StringNotEquals”: {
“aws:sourceVpce”: “vpce-0295a3caf8414c94a”
}
}
If you select the Enable Private DNS Name option, the standard AWS KMS DNS hostname resolves to your VPC endpoint.
Question 4: An application team is designing a solution with two applications. The security team wants the applications’ logs to be captured in two different places, because one of the applications produces logs with sensitive data. Which solution meets the requirement with the LEAST risk and effort?
A) Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to capture all logs, write an AWS Lambda function that parses the log file, and move sensitive data to a different log.
B) Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs with two log groups, with one for each application, and use an AWS IAM policy to control access to the log groups, as required.
C) Aggregate logs into one file, then use Amazon CloudWatch Logs, and then design two CloudWatch metric filters to filter sensitive data from the logs.
D) Add logic to the application that saves sensitive data logs on the Amazon EC2 instances’ local storage, and write a batch script that logs into the Amazon EC2 instances and moves sensitive logs to a secure location.
In an n-tier architecture, each tier’s security group allows traffic from the security group sending it traffic only. The presentation tier opens traffic for HTTP and HTTPS from the internet. Since security groups are stateful, only inbound rules are required.
Question 6: A security engineer is working with a product team building a web application on AWS. The application uses Amazon S3 to host the static content, Amazon API Gateway to provide RESTful services, and Amazon DynamoDB as the backend data store. The users already exist in a directory that is exposed through a SAML identity provider. Which combination of the following actions should the engineer take to enable users to be authenticated into the web application and call APIs? (Select THREE).
A) Create a custom authorization service using AWS Lambda.
B) Configure a SAML identity provider in Amazon Cognito to map attributes to the Amazon Cognito user pool attributes.
C) Configure the SAML identity provider to add the Amazon Cognito user pool as a relying party.
D) Configure an Amazon Cognito identity pool to integrate with social login providers.
E) Update DynamoDB to store the user email addresses and passwords.
F) Update API Gateway to use an Amazon Cognito user pool authorizer.
When Amazon Cognito receives a SAML assertion, it needs to be able to map SAML attributes to user pool attributes. When configuring Amazon Cognito to receive SAML assertions from an identity provider, you need ensure that the identity provider is configured to have Amazon Cognito as a relying party.Amazon API Gateway will need to be able to understand the authorization being passed from Amazon Cognito, which is a configuration step.
Question 7: A company is hosting a web application on AWS and is using an Amazon S3 bucket to store images. Users should have the ability to read objects in the bucket. A security engineer has written the following bucket policy to grant public read access:
Attempts to read an object, however, receive the error: “Action does not apply to any resource(s) in statement.” What should the engineer do to fix the error?
A) Change the IAM permissions by applying PutBucketPolicy permissions.
B) Verify that the policy has the same name as the bucket name. If not, make it the same.
C) Change the resource section to “arn:aws:s3:::appbucket/*”.
D) Add an s3:ListBucket action.
ANSWER7:
C
Notes/Hint7:
The resource section should match with the type of operation. Change the ARN to include /* at the end, as it is an object operation.
Question 8: A company decides to place database hosts in its own VPC, and to set up VPC peering to different VPCs containing the application and web tiers. The application servers are unable to connect to the database. Which network troubleshooting steps should be taken to resolve the issue? (Select TWO.)
A) Check to see if the application servers are in a private subnet or public subnet.
B) Check the route tables for the application server subnets for routes to the VPC peering connection.
C) Check the NACLs for the database subnets for rules that allow traffic from the internet.
D) Check the database security groups for rules that allow traffic from the application servers.
E) Check to see if the database VPC has an internet gateway.
Question 9: A company is building a data lake on Amazon S3. The data consists of millions of small files containing sensitive information. The security team has the following requirements for the architecture:
Data must be encrypted in transit.
Data must be encrypted at rest.
The bucket must be private, but if the bucket is accidentally made public, the data must remain confidential.
Which combination of steps would meet the requirements? (Select TWO.)
A) Enable AES-256 encryption using server-side encryption with Amazon S3-managed encryption keys (SSE-S3) on the S3 bucket.
B) Enable default encryption with server-side encryption with AWS KMS-managed keys (SSE-KMS) on the S3 bucket.
C) Add a bucket policy that includes a deny if a PutObject request does not include aws:SecureTransport.
D) Add a bucket policy with aws:SourceIp to allow uploads and downloads from the corporate intranet only.
E) Enable Amazon Macie to monitor and act on changes to the data lake’s S3 bucket.
Question 10: A security engineer must ensure that all API calls are collected across all company accounts, and that they are preserved online and are instantly available for analysis for 90 days. For compliance reasons, this data must be restorable for 7 years. Which steps must be taken to meet the retention needs in a scalable, cost-effective way?
A) Enable AWS CloudTrail logging across all accounts to a centralized Amazon S3 bucket with versioning enabled. Set a lifecycle policy to move the data to Amazon Glacier daily, and expire the data after 90 days.
B) Enable AWS CloudTrail logging across all accounts to S3 buckets. Set a lifecycle policy to expire the data in each bucket after 7 years.
C) Enable AWS CloudTrail logging across all accounts to Amazon Glacier. Set a lifecycle policy to expire the data after 7 years.
D) Enable AWS CloudTrail logging across all accounts to a centralized Amazon S3 bucket. Set a lifecycle policy to move the data to Amazon Glacier after 90 days, and expire the data after 7 years.
ANSWER10:
D
Notes/Hint10:
Meets all requirements and is cost effective by using lifecycle policies to transition to Amazon Glacier.
Question 11: A security engineer has been informed that a user’s access key has been found on GitHub. The engineer must ensure that this access key cannot continue to be used, and must assess whether the access key was used to perform any unauthorized activities. Which steps must be taken to perform these tasks?
A) Review the user’s IAM permissions and delete any unrecognized or unauthorized resources.
B) Delete the user, review Amazon CloudWatch Logs in all regions, and report the abuse.
C) Delete or rotate the user’s key, review the AWS CloudTrail logs in all regions, and delete any unrecognized or unauthorized resources.
D) Instruct the user to remove the key from the GitHub submission, rotate keys, and re-deploy any instances that were launched.
Question 12: You have a CloudFront distribution configured with the following path patterns: When users request objects that start with ‘static2/’, they are receiving 404 response codes. What might be the problem?
A) CloudFront distributions cannot have multiple different origin types
B) The ‘*’ path pattern must appear after the ‘static2/*’ path
C) CloudFront distributions cannot have origins in different AWS regions
D) The ‘*’ path pattern must appear before ‘static1/*’ path
ANSWER12:
C
Notes/Hint12:
CloudFront distributions cannot have origins in different AWS regions
Question 13: An application running on EC2 instances processes sensitive information stored on Amazon S3. The information is accessed over the Internet. The security team is concerned that the Internet connectivity to Amazon S3 is a security risk. Which solution will resolve the security concern?
A) Access the data through an Internet Gateway.”,
B) Access the data through a VPN connection.”,
C) Access the data through a NAT Gateway.”,
D) Access the data through a VPC endpoint for Amazon S3″,
ANSWER13:
D
Notes/Hint13:
VPC endpoints for Amazon S3 provide secure connections to S3 buckets that do not require a gateway or NAT instances. NAT Gateways and Internet Gateways still route traffic over the Internet to the public endpoint for Amazon S3. There is no way to connect to Amazon S3 via VPN.
Question 14: An organization is building an Amazon Redshift cluster in their shared services VPC. The cluster will host sensitive data. How can the organization control which networks can access the cluster?
A) Run the cluster in a different VPC and connect through VPC peering
B) Create a database user inside the Amazon Redshift cluster only for users on the network
C) Define a cluster security group for the cluster that allows access from the allowed networks
D) Only allow access to networks that connect with the shared services network via VPN
ANSWER14:
C
Notes/Hint14:
A security group can grant access to traffic from the allowed networks via the CIDR range for each network. VPC peering and VPN are connectivity services and cannot control traffic for security. Amazon Redshift user accounts address authentication and authorization at the user level and have no control over network traffic
Question 15: From a security perspective, what is a principal?
A) An identity
B) An anonymous user
C) An authenticated user
D) A resource
ANSWER15:
B and C
Notes/Hint15:
An anonymous user falls under the definition of a principal. A principal can be an anonymous user acting on a system. An authenticated user falls under the definition of a principal. A principal can be an authenticated user acting on a system
Question 16: A company is storing an access key (access key ID and secret access key) in a text file on a custom AMI. The company uses the access key to access DynamoDB tables from instances created from the AMI. The security team has mandated a more secure solution. Which solution will meet the security team’s mandate?
A) Put the access key in an S3 bucket, and retrieve the access key on boot from the instance.
B) Pass the access key to the instances through instance user data.
C) Obtain the access key from a key server launched in a private subnet
D) Create an IAM role with permissions to access the table, and launch all instances with the new role
ANSWER16:
D
Notes/Hint16:
IAM roles for EC2 instances allow applications running on the instance to access AWS resources without having to create and store any access keys. Any solution involving the creation of an access key then introduces the complexity of managing that secret
Question 17: While signing in REST/ Query requests, for additional security, you should transmit your requests using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) by using ____.”,
Question 18: You are using AWS Envelope Encryption for encrypting all sensitive data. Which of the followings is True with regards to Envelope Encryption?
A) Data is encrypted be encrypting Data key which is further encrypted using encrypted Master Key.
B) Data is encrypted by plaintext Data key which is further encrypted using encrypted Master Key.
C) Data is encrypted by encrypted Data key which is further encrypted using plaintext Master Key.
D) Data is encrypted by plaintext Data key which is further encrypted using plaintext Master Key.”,
ANSWER18:
D
Notes/Hint18:
With Envelope Encryption, unencrypted data is encrypted using plaintext Data key. This Data is further encrypted using plaintext Master key. This plaintext Master key is securely stored in AWS KMS & known as Customer Master Keys.
Question 19: Your company has developed a web application and is hosting it in an Amazon S3 bucket configured for static website hosting. The users can log in to this app using their Google/Facebook login accounts. The application is using the AWS SDK for JavaScript in the browser to access data stored in an Amazon DynamoDB table. How can you ensure that API keys for access to your data in DynamoDB are kept secure?
A) Create an Amazon S3 role in IAM with access to the specific DynamoDB tables, and assign it to the bucket hosting your website
B) Configure S3 bucket tags with your AWS access keys for your bucket hosting your website so that the application can query them for access.
C) Configure a web identity federation role within IAM to enable access to the correct DynamoDB resources and retrieve temporary credentials
D) Store AWS keys in global variables within your application and configure the application to use these credentials when making requests.
ANSWER2:
C
Notes/Hint19:
With web identity federation, you don’t need to create custom sign-in code or manage your own user identities. Instead, users of your app can sign in using a well-known identity provider (IdP) —such as Login with Amazon, Facebook, Google, or any other OpenID Connect (OIDC)-compatible IdP, receive an authentication token, and then exchange that token for temporary security credentials in AWS that map to an IAM role with permissions to use the resources in your AWS account. Using an IdP helps you keep your AWS account secure, because you don’t have to embed and distribute long-term security credentials with your application. Option A is invalid since Roles cannot be assigned to S3 buckets Options B and D are invalid since the AWS Access keys should not be used
Question 20: Your application currently makes use of AWS Cognito for managing user identities. You want to analyze the information that is stored in AWS Cognito for your application. Which of the following features of AWS Cognito should you use for this purpose?
A) Cognito Data
B) Cognito Events
C) Cognito Streams
D) Cognito Callbacks
ANSWER20:
C
Notes/Hint20:
Amazon Cognito Streams gives developers control and insight into their data stored in Amazon Cognito. Developers can now configure a Kinesis stream to receive events as data is updated and synchronized. Amazon Cognito can push each dataset change to a Kinesis stream you own in real time. All other options are invalid since you should use Cognito Streams
Question 22:Which of the following statements are correct? (Choose 2)
A) The Customer Master Key is used to encrypt and decrypt the Envelope Key or Data Key
B) The Envelope Key or Data Key is used to encrypt and decrypt plain text files.
C) The envelope Key or Data Key is used to encrypt and decrypt the Customer Master Key.
D) The Customer MasterKey is used to encrypt and decrypt plain text files.
ANSWER22:
A and B
Notes/Hint22:
AWS Key Management Service Concepts: The Customer Master Key is used to encrypt and decrypt the Envelope Key or Data Key, The Envelope Key or Data Key is used to encrypt and decrypt plain text files.
Question 23:Which of the following is an encrypted key used by KMS to encrypt your data
A) Customer Managed Key
B) Encryption Key
C) Envelope Key
D) Customer Master Key
ANSWER23:
C
Notes/Hint23:
Your Data key also known as the Enveloppe key is encrypted using the master key. This approach is known as Envelope encryption. Envelope encryption is the practice of encrypting plaintext data with a data key, and then encrypting the data key under another key
Question 26: A Security engineer must develop an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategy for a company’s organization in AWS Organizations. The company needs to give developers autonomy to develop and test their applications on AWS, but the company also needs to implement security guardrails to help protect itself. The company creates and distributes applications with different levels of data classification and types. The solution must maximize scalability.
Which combination of steps should the security engineer take to meet these requirements? (Choose three.)
A) Create an SCP to restrict access to highly privileged or unauthorized actions to specific AM principals. Assign the SCP to the appropriate AWS accounts.
B) Create an IAM permissions boundary to allow access to specific actions and IAM principals. Assign the IAM permissions boundary to all AM principals within the organization
C) Create a delegated IAM role that has capabilities to create other IAM roles. Use the delegated IAM role to provision IAM principals by following the principle of least privilege.
D) Create OUs based on data classification and type. Add the AWS accounts to the appropriate OU. Provide developers access to the AWS accounts based on business need.
E) Create IAM groups based on data classification and type. Add only the required developers’ IAM role to the IAM groups within each AWS account.
F) Create IAM policies based on data classification and type. Add the minimum required IAM policies to the developers’ IAM role within each AWS account.
Answer: A B and C
Notes:
If you look at the choices, there are three related to SCP, which controls services, and three related to IAM and permissions boundaries.
Limiting services doesn’t help with data classification – using boundaries, policies and roles give you the scalability and can solve the problem.
Question 27: A Network Load Balancer (NLB) target instance is not entering the InService state. A security engineer determines that health checks are failing,
Which factors could cause the health check failures? (Choose three.)
A) The target instance’s security group does not allow traffic from the NLB.
B) The target instance’s security group is not attached to the NLB
C) The NLB’s security group is not attached to the target instance.
D) The target instance’s subnet network ACL does not allow traffic from the NLB.
E) The target instance’s security group is not using IP addresses to allow traffic from the NLB.
F) The target network ACL is not attached to the NLB.
B D and E I believe. You have a one to many relationship based on L3 NLB, and it’s unreachable – well architected would put them in same security group, the traffic would have to be allowed on the port that’s sending and receiving. The host points back to NLB as default gateway. Don’t think other ones fit. Plus BDE is a preferred combo for their tests. I remember it with the acronym big dice envy.
Cryptography: Practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries.
Hacking: catch-all term for any type of misuse of a computer to break the security of another computing system to steal data, corrupt systems or files, commandeer the environment or disrupt data-related activities in any way.
Cyberwarfare: Uuse of technology to attack a nation, causing comparable harm to actual warfare. There is significant debate among experts regarding the definition of cyberwarfare, and even if such a thing exists
Penetration testing: Colloquially known as a pen test, pentest or ethical hacking, is an authorized simulated cyberattack on a computer system, performed to evaluate the security of the system. Not to be confused with a vulnerability assessment.
Malwares: Any software intentionally designed to cause damage to a computer, server, client, or computer network. A wide variety of malware types exist, including computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, adware, rogue software, and scareware.
Malware Analysis Tool: Any .Run Malware hunting with live access to the heart of an incident https://any.run/Malware Analysis Total: VirusTotal – Analyze suspicious files and URLs to detect types of malware, automatically share them with the security community https://www.virustotal.com/gui/
VPN: A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. Applications running across a VPN may therefore benefit from the functionality, security, and management of the private network. Encryption is a common, although not an inherent, part of a VPN connection.
Antivirus: Antivirus software, or anti-virus software (abbreviated to AV software), also known as anti-malware, is a computer program used to prevent, detect, and remove malware.
DDos: A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one of the most powerful weapons on the internet. When you hear about a website being “brought down by hackers,” it generally means it has become a victim of a DDoS attack.
Fraud Detection: Set of activities undertaken to prevent money or property from being obtained through false pretenses. Fraud detection is applied to many industries such as banking or insurance. In banking, fraud may include forging checks or using stolen credit cards.
Spywares: Spyware describes software with malicious behavior that aims to gather information about a person or organization and send such information to another entity in a way that harms the user; for example by violating their privacy or endangering their device’s security.
Spoofing: Disguising a communication from an unknown source as being from a known, trusted source
Pharming: Malicious websites that look legitimate and are used to gather usernames and passwords.
Catfishing: Creating a fake profile for fraudulent or deceptive purposes
SSL: Stands for secure sockets layer. Protocol for web browsers and servers that allows for the authentication, encryption and decryption of data sent over the Internet.
Phishing emails: Disguised as trustworthy entity to lure someone into providing sensitive information
Intrusion detection System: Device or software application that monitors a network or systems for malicious activity or policy violations. Any intrusion activity or violation is typically reported either to an administrator or collected centrally using a security information and event management system.
Encryption: Encryption is the method by which information is converted into secret code that hides the information’s true meaning. The science of encrypting and decrypting information is called cryptography. In computing, unencrypted data is also known as plaintext, and encrypted data is called ciphertext.
MFA: Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is defined as a security mechanism that requires an individual to provide two or more credentials in order to authenticate their identity. In IT, these credentials take the form of passwords, hardware tokens, numerical codes, biometrics, time, and location.
Vulnerabilities: A vulnerability is a hole or a weakness in the application, which can be a design flaw or an implementation bug, that allows an attacker to cause harm to the stakeholders of an application. Stakeholders include the application owner, application users, and other entities that rely on the application.
SQL injections: SQL injection is a code injection technique, used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution.
Cyber attacks: In computers and computer networks an attack is any attempt to expose, alter, disable, destroy, steal or gain unauthorized access to or make unauthorized use of an asset.
Confidentiality: Confidentiality involves a set of rules or a promise usually executed through confidentiality agreements that limits access or places restrictions on certain types of information.
Secure channel: In cryptography, a secure channel is a way of transferring data that is resistant to overhearing and tampering. A confidential channel is a way of transferring data that is resistant to overhearing, but not necessarily resistant to tampering.
Tunneling: Communications protocol that allows for the movement of data from one network to another. It involves allowing private network communications to be sent across a public network through a process called encapsulation.
SSH: Secure Shell is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Typical applications include remote command-line, login, and remote command execution, but any network service can be secured with SSH.
SSL Certificates: SSL certificates are what enable websites to move from HTTP to HTTPS, which is more secure. An SSL certificate is a data file hosted in a website’s origin server. SSL certificates make SSL/TLS encryption possible, and they contain the website’s public key and the website’s identity, along with related information.
Phishing: Phishing is a cybercrime in which a target or targets are contacted by email, telephone or text message by someone posing as a legitimate institution to lure individuals into providing sensitive data such as personally identifiable information, banking and credit card details, and passwords.
Cybercrime: Cybercrime, or computer-oriented crime, is a crime that involves a computer and a network. The computer may have been used in the commission of a crime, or it may be the target. Cybercrime may threaten a person, company or a nation’s security and financial health.
Backdoor: A backdoor is a means to access a computer system or encrypted data that bypasses the system’s customary security mechanisms. A developer may create a backdoor so that an application or operating system can be accessed for troubleshooting or other purposes.
Salt and Hash: A cryptographic salt is made up of random bits added to each password instance before its hashing. Salts create unique passwords even in the instance of two users choosing the same passwords. Salts help us mitigate rainbow table attacks by forcing attackers to re-compute them using the salts.
Password: A password, sometimes called a passcode,[1] is a memorized secret, typically a string of characters, usually used to confirm the identity of a user.[2] Using the terminology of the NIST Digital Identity Guidelines,[3] the secret is memorized by a party called the claimant while the party verifying the identity of the claimant is called the verifier. When the claimant successfully demonstrates knowledge of the password to the verifier through an established authentication protocol,[4] the verifier is able to infer the claimant’s identity.
Fingerprint: A fingerprint is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. The recovery of partial fingerprints from a crime scene is an important method of forensic science. Moisture and grease on a finger result in fingerprints on surfaces such as glass or metal.
Facial recognition: Facial recognition works better for a person as compared to fingerprint detection. It releases the person from the hassle of moving their thumb or index finger to a particular place on their mobile phone. A user would just have to bring their phone in level with their eye.
Asymmetric key ciphers versus symmetric key ciphers (Difference between symmetric and Asymmetric encryption): The basic difference between these two types of encryption is that symmetric encryption uses one key for both encryption and decryption, and the asymmetric encryption uses public key for encryption and a private key for decryption.
Decryption: The conversion of encrypted data into its original form is called Decryption. It is generally a reverse process of encryption. It decodes the encrypted information so that an authorized user can only decrypt the data because decryption requires a secret key or password.
Algorithms: Finite sequence of well-defined, computer-implementable instructions, typically to solve a class of problems or to perform a computation.
Authentication: is the act of proving an assertion, such as the identity of a computer system user. In contrast with identification, the act of indicating a person or thing’s identity, authentication is the process of verifying that identity. It might involve validating personal identity documents, verifying the authenticity of a website with a digital certificate,[1] determining the age of an artifact by carbon dating, or ensuring that a product or document is not counterfeit.
DFIR: Digital forensic and incident response: Multidisciplinary profession that focuses on identifying, investigating, and remediating computer network exploitation. This can take varied forms and involves a wide variety of skills, kinds of attackers, an kinds of targets. We’ll discuss those more below.
OTP: One Time Password: A one-time password, also known as one-time PIN or dynamic password, is a password that is valid for only one login session or transaction, on a computer system or other digital device
Proxy Server and Reverse Proxy Server:A proxyserver is a go‑between or intermediary server that forwards requests for content from multiple clients to different servers across the Internet. A reverseproxyserver is a type of proxyserver that typically sits behind the firewall in a private network and directs client requests to the appropriate backend server.
Offensive * Exploit Database – The Exploit Database is maintained by Offensive Security, an information security training company that provides various Information Security Certifications as well as high end penetration testing services. https://www.exploit-db.com/
Dark Reading Cyber security’s comprehensive news site is now an online community for security professionals. https://www.darkreading.com/
The Hacker News – The Hacker News (THN) is a leading, trusted, widely-acknowledged dedicated cybersecurity news platform, attracting over 8 million monthly readers including IT professionals, researchers, hackers, technologists, and enthusiasts. https://thehackernews.com
SecuriTeam – A free and independent source of vulnerability information. https://securiteam.com/
SANS NewsBites – “A semiweekly high-level executive summary of the most important news articles that have been published on computer security during the last week. Each news item is very briefly summarized and includes a reference on the web for detailed information, if possible.” Published for free on Tuesdays and Fridays. https://www.sans.org/newsletters/newsbites
SimplyCyber Weekly vids, Simply Cyber brings Information security related content to help IT or Information Security professionals take their career further, faster. Current cyber security industry topics and techniques are explored to promote a career in the field. Topics cover offense, defense, governance, risk, compliance, privacy, education, certification, conferences; all with the intent of professional development. https://www.youtube.com/c/GeraldAuger
HackADay – Hackaday serves up Fresh Hacks Every Day from around the Internet. https://hackaday.com/
TheCyberMentor – Heath Adams uploads regular videos related to various facets of cyber security, from bug bounty hunts to specific pentest methodologies like API, buffer overflows, networking. https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCyberMentor/
Grant Collins – Grant uploads videos regarding breaking into cybersecurity, various cybersecurity projects, building up a home lab amongst many others. Also has a companion discord channel and a resource website. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTLUi3oc1-a7dS-2-YgEKmA/featured
Risky Business Published weekly, the Risky Business podcast features news and in-depth commentary from security industry luminaries. Hosted by award-winning journalist Patrick Gray, Risky Business has become a must-listen digest for information security professionals. https://risky.biz/
Pauls Security Weekly This show features interviews with folks in the security community; technical segments, which are just that, very technical; and security news, which is an open discussion forum for the hosts to express their opinions about the latest security headlines, breaches, new exploits and vulnerabilities, “not” politics, “cyber” policies and more. https://securityweekly.com/category-shows/paul-security-weekly/
Security Now – Steve Gibson, the man who coined the term spyware and created the first anti-spyware program, creator of Spinrite and ShieldsUP, discusses the hot topics in security today with Leo Laporte. https://twit.tv/shows/security-now
Daily Information Security Podcast (“StormCast”) Stormcasts are daily 5-10 minute information security threat updates. The podcast is produced each work day, and typically released late in the day to be ready for your morning commute. https://isc.sans.edu/podcast.html
ShadowTalk Threat Intelligence Podcast by Digital Shadow_. The weekly podcast highlights key findings of primary-source research our Intelligence Team is conducting, along with guest speakers discussing the latest threat actors, campaigns, security events and industry news. https://resources.digitalshadows.com/threat-intelligence-podcast-shadowtalk
Don’t Panic – The Unit 42 Podcast Don’t Panic! is the official podcast from Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks. We find the big issues that are frustrating cyber security practitioners and help simplify them so they don’t need to panic. https://unit42.libsyn.com/
Recorded Future Recorded Future takes you inside the world of cyber threat intelligence. We’re sharing stories from the trenches and the operations floor as well as giving you the skinny on established and emerging adversaries. We also talk current events, technical tradecraft, and offer up insights on the big picture issues in our industry. https://www.recordedfuture.com/resources/podcast/
The Cybrary Podcast Listen in to the Cybrary Podcast where we discuss a range topics from DevSecOps and Ransomware attacks to diversity and how to retain of talent. Entrepreneurs at all stages of their startup companies join us to share their stories and experience, including how to get funding, hiring the best talent, driving sales, and choosing where to base your business. https://www.cybrary.it/info/cybrary-podcast/
Cyber Life The Cyber Life podcast is for cyber security (InfoSec) professionals, people trying to break into the industry, or business owners looking to learn how to secure their data. We will talk about many things, like how to get jobs, cover breakdowns of hot topics, and have special guest interviews with the men and women “in the trenches” of the industry. https://redcircle.com/shows/cyber-life
Career Notes Cybersecurity professionals share their personal career journeys and offer tips and advice in this brief, weekly podcast from The CyberWire. https://www.thecyberwire.com/podcasts/career-notes
Down the Security Rabbitholehttp://podcast.wh1t3rabbit.net/ Down the Security Rabbithole is hosted by Rafal Los and James Jardine who discuss, by means of interviewing or news analysis, everything about Cybersecurity which includes Cybercrime, Cyber Law, Cyber Risk, Enterprise Risk & Security and many more. If you want to hear issues that are relevant to your organization, subscribe and tune-in to this podcast.
The Privacy, Security, & OSINT Showhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-privacy-security-osint-show/id1165843330 The Privacy, Security, & OSINT Show, hosted by Michael Bazzell, is your weekly dose of digital security, privacy, and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) opinion and news. This podcast will help listeners learn some ideas on how to stay secure from cyber-attacks and help them become “digitally invisible”.
Defensive Security Podcasthttps://defensivesecurity.org/ Hosted by Andrew Kalat (@lerg) and Jerry Bell (@maliciouslink), the Defensive Security Podcasts aims to look/discuss the latest security news happening around the world and pick out the lessons that can be applied to keeping organizations secured. As of today, they have more than 200 episodes and some of the topics discussed include Forensics, Penetration Testing, Incident Response, Malware Analysis, Vulnerabilities and many more.
Darknet Diarieshttps://darknetdiaries.com/episode/ Darknet Diaries Podcast is hosted and produced by Jack Rhysider that discuss topics related to information security. It also features some true stories from hackers who attacked or have been attacked. If you’re a fan of the show, you might consider buying some of their souvenirs here (https://shop.darknetdiaries.com/).
Brakeing Down Securityhttps://www.brakeingsecurity.com/ Brakeing Down Security started in 2014 and is hosted by Bryan Brake, Brian Boettcher, and Amanda Berlin. This podcast discusses everything about the Cybersecurity world, Compliance, Privacy, and Regulatory issues that arise in today’s organizations. The hosts will teach concepts that Information Security Professionals need to know and discuss topics that will refresh the memories of seasoned veterans.
Open Source Security Podcasthttps://www.opensourcesecuritypodcast.com/ Open Source Security Podcast is a podcast that discusses security with an open-source slant. The show started in 2016 and is hosted by Josh Bressers and Kurt Siefried. As of this writing, they now posted around 190+ podcasts
Cyber Motherboardhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cyber/id1441708044 Ben Makuch is the host of the podcast CYBER and weekly talks to Motherboard reporters Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Joseph Cox. They tackle topics about famous hackers and researchers about the biggest news in cybersecurity. The Cyber- stuff gets complicated really fast, but Motherboard spends its time fixed in the infosec world so we don’t have to.
Hak5https://shop.hak5.org/pages/videos Hak5 is a brand that is created by a group of security professionals, hardcore gamers and “IT ninjas”. Their podcast, which is mostly uploaded on YouTube discusses everything from open-source software to penetration testing and network infrastructure. Their channel currently has 590,000 subscribers and is one of the most viewed shows when you want to learn something about security networks.
Threatpost Podcast Serieshttps://threatpost.com/category/podcasts/ Threatpost is an independent news site which is a leading source of information about IT and business security for hundreds of thousands of professionals worldwide. With an award-winning editorial team produces unique and high-impact content including security news, videos, feature reports and more, with their global editorial activities are driven by industry-leading journalist Tom Spring, editor-in-chief.
CISO-Security Vendor Relationship Podcasthttps://cisoseries.com Co-hosted by the creator of the CISO/Security Vendor Relationship Series, David Spark, and Mike Johnson, in 30 minutes, this weekly program challenges the co-hosts, guests, and listeners to critique, share true stories. This podcast, The CISO/Security Vendor Relationship, targets to enlighten and educate listeners on improving security buyer and seller relationships.
Getting Into Infosec Podcast Stories of how Infosec and Cybersecurity pros got jobs in the field so you can be inspired, motivated, and educated on your journey. – https://gettingintoinfosec.com/
Unsupervised Learning Weekly podcasts and biweekly newsletters as a curated summary intersection of security, technology, and humans, or a standalone idea to provoke thought, by Daniel Miessler. https://danielmiessler.com/podcast/
SECURITY BOOKS:
Building Secure & Reliable Systems Best Practices for Designing, Implementing and Maintaining Systems (O’Reilly) By Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Ana Oprea, Piotr Lewandowski, Adam Stubblefield https://landing.google.com/sre/books/
Security Engineering By Ross Anderson – A guide to building dependable distributed systems. (and Ross Anderson is brilliant //OP editorial) https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html
The Cyber Skill Gap By Vagner Nunes – The Cyber Skill Gap: How To Become A Highly Paid And Sought After Information Security Specialist! (Use COUPON CODE: W4VSPTW8G7 to make it free) https://payhip.com/b/PdkW
Texas A&M Security Courses The web-based courses are designed to ensure that the privacy, reliability, and integrity of the information systems that power the global economy remain intact and secure. The web-based courses are offered through three discipline-specific tracks: general, non-technical computer users; technical IT professionals; and business managers and professionals. https://teex.org/program/dhs-cybersecurity/
AWS Cloud Certified Get skills in AWS to be more marketable. Training is quality and free. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hLmDS179YE Have to create an AWS account, Exam is $100.
“Using ATT&CK for Cyber Threat Intelligence Training” – 4 hour training The goal of this training is for students to understand the following: at: https://attack.mitre.org/resources/training/cti/
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Workshop Training – The Chief Information Security Office (CISO) workshop contains a collection of security learnings, principles, and recommendations for modernizing security in your organization. This training workshop is a combination of experiences from Microsoft security teams and learnings from customers. – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/security/ciso-workshop/ciso-workshop
CLARK Center Plan C – Free cybersecurity curriculum that is primarily video-based or provide online assignments that can be easily integrated into a virtual learning environments https://clark.center/home
Hack.me is a FREE, community based project powered by eLearnSecurity. The community can build, host and share vulnerable web application code for educational and research purposes. It aims to be the largest collection of “runnable” vulnerable web applications, code samples and CMS’s online. The platform is available without any restriction to any party interested in Web Application Security. https://hack.me/
M.E. Kabay Free industry courses and course materials for students, teachers and others are welcome to use for free courses and lectures. http://www.mekabay.com/courses/index.htm
Enroll Now Free: PCAP Programming Essentials in Pythonhttps://www.netacad.com/courses/programming/pcap-programming-essentials-python Python is the very versatile, object-oriented programming language used by startups and tech giants, Google, Facebook, Dropbox and IBM. Python is also recommended for aspiring young developers who are interested in pursuing careers in Security, Networking and Internet-of-Things. Once you complete this course, you are ready to take the PCAP – Certified Associate in Python programming. No prior knowledge of programming is required.
Stanford University Webinar – Hacked! Security Lessons from Big Name Breaches 50 minute cyber lecture from Stanford.You Will Learn: — The root cause of key breaches and how to prevent them; How to measure your organization’s external security posture; How the attacker lifecycle should influence the way you allocate resources https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9agUAz0DwI
Stanford University Webinar – Hash, Hack, Code: Emerging Trends in Cyber Security Join Professor Dan Boneh as he shares new approaches to these emerging trends and dives deeper into how you can protect networks and prevent harmful viruses and threats. 50 minute cyber lecture from Stanford. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=544rhbcDtc8
Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections (Documentary) (Referenced at GRIMMCON), In advance of the 2020 Presidential Election, Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections takes a deep dive into the weaknesses of today’s election technology, an issue that is little understood by the public or even lawmakers. https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/kill-chain-the-cyber-war-on-americas-elections
Intro to Cybersecurity Course (15 hours) Learn how to protect your personal data and privacy online and in social media, and why more and more IT jobs require cybersecurity awareness and understanding. Receive a certificate of completion. https://www.netacad.com/portal/web/self-enroll/c/course-1003729
Cybersecurity Essentials (30 hours) Foundational knowledge and essential skills for all cybersecurity domains, including info security, systems sec, network sec, ethics and laws, and defense and mitigation techniques used in protecting businesses. https://www.netacad.com/portal/web/self-enroll/c/course-1003733
Pluralsight and Microsoft Partnership to help you become an expert in Azure. With skill assessments and over 200+ courses, 40+ Skill IQs and 8 Role IQs, you can focus your time on understanding your strengths and skill gaps and learn Azure as quickly as possible.https://www.pluralsight.com/partners/microsoft/azure
Blackhat Webcast Series Monthly webcast of varying cyber topics. I will post specific ones in the training section below sometimes, but this is worth bookmarking and checking back. They always have top tier speakers on relevant, current topics. https://www.blackhat.com/html/webcast/webcast-home.html
Federal Virtual Training Environment – US Govt sponsored free courses. There are 6 available, no login required. They are 101 Coding for the Public, 101 Critical Infrastructure Protection for the Public, Cryptocurrency for Law Enforcement for the Public, Cyber Supply Chain Risk Management for the Public, 101 Reverse Engineering for the Public, Fundamentals of Cyber Risk Management. https://fedvte.usalearning.gov/public_fedvte.php
Harrisburg University CyberSecurity Collection of 18 curated talks. Scroll down to CYBER SECURITY section. You will see there are 4 categories Resource Sharing, Tools & Techniques, Red Team (Offensive Security) and Blue Teaming (Defensive Security). Lot of content in here; something for everyone. https://professionaled.harrisburgu.edu/online-content/
OnRamp 101-Level ICS Security Workshop Starts this 4/28. 10 videos, Q&A / discussion, bonus audio, great links. Get up to speed fast on ICS security. It runs for 5 weeks. 2 videos per week. Then we keep it open for another 3 weeks for 8 in total. https://onramp-3.s4xevents.com
HackXOR WebApp CTF Hackxor is a realistic web application hacking game, designed to help players of all abilities develop their skills. All the missions are based on real vulnerabilities I’ve personally found while doing pentests, bug bounty hunting, and research. https://hackxor.net/
flAWS System Through a series of levels you’ll learn about common mistakes and gotchas when using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Multiple levels, “Buckets” of fun. http://flaws.cloud/
Stanford CS 253 Web Security A free course from Stanford providing a comprehensive overview of web security. The course begins with an introduction to the fundamentals of web security and proceeds to discuss the most common methods for web attacks and their countermeasures. The course includes video lectures, slides, and links to online reading assignments. https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253
Linux Journey A free, handy guide for learning Linux. Coverage begins with the fundamentals of command line navigation and basic text manipulation. It then extends to more advanced topics, such as file systems and networking. The site is well organized and includes many examples along with code snippets. Exercises and quizzes are provided as well. https://linuxjourney.com
Ryan’s Tutorials A collection of free, introductory tutorials on several technology topics including: Linux command line, Bash scripting, creating and styling webpages with HTML and CSS, counting and converting between different number systems, and writing regular expressions. https://ryanstutorials.net
CYBER INTELLIGENCE ANALYTICS AND OPERATIONS Learn:The ins and outs of all stages of the intelligence cycle from collection to analysis from seasoned intel professionals. How to employ threat intelligence to conduct comprehensive defense strategies to mitigate potential compromise. How to use TI to respond to and minimize impact of cyber incidents. How to generate comprehensive and actionable reports to communicate gaps in defenses and intelligence findings to decision makers. https://www.shadowscape.io/cyber-intelligence-analytics-operat
Linux Command Line for Beginners 25 hours of training – In this course, you’ll learn from one of Fullstack’s top instructors, Corey Greenwald, as he guides you through learning the basics of the command line through short, digestible video lectures. Then you’ll use Fullstack’s CyberLab platform to hone your new technical skills while working through a Capture the Flag game, a special kind of cybersecurity game designed to challenge participants to solve computer security problems by solving puzzles. Finally, through a list of carefully curated resources through a series of curated resources, we’ll introduce you to some important cybersecurity topics so that you can understand some of the common language, concepts and tools used in the industry. https://prep.fullstackacademy.com/
Hacking 101 6 hours of free training – First, you’ll take a tour of the world and watch videos of hackers in action across various platforms (including computers, smartphones, and the power grid). You may be shocked to learn what techniques the good guys are using to fight the bad guys (and which side is winning). Then you’ll learn what it’s like to work in this world, as we show you the different career paths open to you and the (significant) income you could make as a cybersecurity professional. https://cyber.fullstackacademy.com/prepare/hacking-101
Choose Your Own Cyber Adventure Series: Entry Level Cyber Jobs Explained YouTube Playlist (videos from my channel #simplyCyber) This playlist is a collection of various roles within the information security field, mostly entry level, so folks can understand what different opportunities are out there. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4Q-ttyNIRAqog96mt8C8lKWzTjW6f38F
NETINSTRUCT.COM Free Cybersecurity, IT and Leadership Courses – Includes OS and networking basics. Critical to any Cyber job. https://netinstruct.com/courses
HackerSploit – HackerSploit is the leading provider of free and open-source Infosec and cybersecurity training. https://hackersploit.org/
Computer Science courses with video lectures Intent of this list is to act as Online bookmarks/lookup table for freely available online video courses. Focus would be to keep the list concise so that it is easy to browse. It would be easier to skim through 15 page list, find the course and start learning than having to read 60 pages of text. If you are student or from non-CS background, please try few courses to decide for yourself as to which course suits your learning curve best. https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses?utm_campaign=meetedgar&utm_medium=social&utm_source=meetedgar.com
Cryptography I -offered by Stanford University – Rolling enrollment – Cryptography is an indispensable tool for protecting information in computer systems. In this course you will learn the inner workings of cryptographic systems and how to correctly use them in real-world applications. The course begins with a detailed discussion of how two parties who have a shared secret key can communicate securely when a powerful adversary eavesdrops and tampers with traffic. We will examine many deployed protocols and analyze mistakes in existing systems. The second half of the course discusses public-key techniques that let two parties generate a shared secret key. https://www.coursera.org/learn/crypto
Software Security Rolling enrollment -offered by University of Maryland, College Park via Coursera – This course we will explore the foundations of software security. We will consider important software vulnerabilities and attacks that exploit them — such as buffer overflows, SQL injection, and session hijacking — and we will consider defenses that prevent or mitigate these attacks, including advanced testing and program analysis techniques. Importantly, we take a “build security in” mentality, considering techniques at each phase of the development cycle that can be used to strengthen the security of software systems. https://www.coursera.org/learn/software-security
Intro to Information Security Georgia Institute of Technology via Udacity – Rolling Enrollment. This course provides a one-semester overview of information security. It is designed to help students with prior computer and programming knowledge — both undergraduate and graduate — understand this important priority in society today. Offered at Georgia Tech as CS 6035 https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-information-security–ud459
Cyber-Physical Systems Security Georgia Institute of Technology via Udacity – This course provides an introduction to security issues relating to various cyber-physical systems including industrial control systems and those considered critical infrastructure systems. 16 week course – Offered at Georgia Tech as CS 8803 https://www.udacity.com/course/cyber-physical-systems-security–ud279
Finding Your Cybersecurity Career Path – University of Washington via edX – 4 weeks long – self paced – In this course, you will focus on the pathways to cybersecurity career success. You will determine your own incoming skills, talent, and deep interests to apply toward a meaningful and informed exploration of 32 Digital Pathways of Cybersecurity. https://www.edx.org/course/finding-your-cybersecurity-career-path
Building a Cybersecurity Toolkit – University of Washington via edX – 4 weeks self-paced The purpose of this course is to give learners insight into these type of characteristics and skills needed for cybersecurity jobs and to provide a realistic outlook on what they really need to add to their “toolkits” – a set of skills that is constantly evolving, not all technical, but fundamentally rooted in problem-solving. https://www.edx.org/course/building-a-cybersecurity-toolkit
Cybersecurity: The CISO’s View – University of Washington via edX – 4 weeks long self-paced – This course delves into the role that the CISO plays in cybersecurity operations. Throughout the lessons, learners will explore answers to the following questions: How does cybersecurity work across industries? What is the professionals’ point of view? How do we keep information secure https://www.edx.org/course/cybersecurity-the-cisos-view
Introduction to Cybersecurity – University of Washington via edX – In this course, you will gain an overview of the cybersecurity landscape as well as national (USA) and international perspectives on the field. We will cover the legal environment that impacts cybersecurity as well as predominant threat actors. – https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-cybersecurity
Cyber Attack Countermeasures New York University (NYU) via Coursera – This course introduces the basics of cyber defense starting with foundational models such as Bell-LaPadula and information flow frameworks. These underlying policy enforcements mechanisms help introduce basic functional protections, starting with authentication methods. Learners will be introduced to a series of different authentication solutions and protocols, including RSA SecureID and Kerberos, in the context of a canonical schema. – https://www.coursera.org/learn/cyber-attack-countermeasures
Introduction to Cyber Attacks New York University (NYU) via Coursera – This course provides learners with a baseline understanding of common cyber security threats, vulnerabilities, and risks. An overview of how basic cyber attacks are constructed and applied to real systems is also included. Examples include simple Unix kernel hacks, Internet worms, and Trojan horses in software utilities. Network attacks such as distributed denial of service (DDOS) and botnet- attacks are also described and illustrated using real examples from the past couple of decades. https://www.coursera.org/learn/intro-cyber-attacks
Enterprise and Infrastructure Security New York University (NYU) via Coursera – This course introduces a series of advanced and current topics in cyber security, many of which are especially relevant in modern enterprise and infrastructure settings. The basics of enterprise compliance frameworks are provided with introduction to NIST and PCI. Hybrid cloud architectures are shown to provide an opportunity to fix many of the security weaknesses in modern perimeter local area networks. https://www.coursera.org/learn/enterprise-infrastructure-security
Network Security Georgia Institute of Technology via Udacity – This course provides an introduction to computer and network security. Students successfully completing this class will be able to evaluate works in academic and commercial security, and will have rudimentary skills in security research. The course begins with a tutorial of the basic elements of cryptography, cryptanalysis, and systems security, and continues by covering a number of seminal papers and monographs in a wide range of security areas. – https://www.udacity.com/course/network-security–ud199
Real-Time Cyber Threat Detection and Mitigation – New York University (NYU) via Coursera This course introduces real-time cyber security techniques and methods in the context of the TCP/IP protocol suites. Explanation of some basic TCP/IP security hacks is used to introduce the need for network security solutions such as stateless and stateful firewalls. Learners will be introduced to the techniques used to design and configure firewall solutions such as packet filters and proxies to protect enterprise assets. https://www.coursera.org/learn/real-time-cyber-threat-detection
Hey everyone, I’ve started getting into hacking, and would like to know the cheapest but best Wi-Fi cracking/deauthing/hacking adapter. I’m on a fairly tight budget of 20AUD and am willing to compromise if needed. Priority is a card with monitor mode, then cracking capabilities, then deauthing, etc. Thank you guys! By the way, if there are any beginner tips you are willing to give, please let me know!
A browser or server attempts to connect to a website (i.e. a web server) secured with SSL. The browser/server requests that the web server identify itself.
The web server sends the browser/server a copy of its SSL certificate.
The browser/server checks to see whether or not it trusts the SSL certificate. If so, it sends a message to the web server.
The web server sends back a digitally signed acknowledgement to start an SSL encrypted session.
Encrypted data is shared between the browser/server and the web server.
There are many benefits to using SSL certificates. Namely, SSL customers can:
Utilize HTTPs, which elicits a stronger Google ranking
Create safer experiences for your customers
Build customer trust and improve conversions
Protect both customer and internal data
Encrypt browser-to-server and server-to-server communication
Authentication — The process of checking if a user is allowed to gain access to a system. eg. Login forms with username and password.
Authorization — Checking if the authenticated user has access to perform an action. eg. user, admin, super admin roles.
Audit — Conduct a complete inspection of an organization’s network to find vulnerable endpoints or malicious software.
Access Control List — A list that contains users and their level of access to a system.
Aircrack-ng — Wifi penetration testing software suite. Contains sniffing, password cracking, and general wireless attacking tools.
Backdoor — A piece of code that lets hackers get into the system easily after it has been compromised.
Burp Suite — Web application security software, helps test web apps for vulnerabilities. Used in bug bounty hunting.
Banner Grabbing — Capturing basic information about a server like the type of web server software (eg. apache) and services running on it.
Botnet — A network of computers controlled by a hacker to perform attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service.
Brute-Force Attack — An attack where the hacker tries different login combinations to gain access. eg. trying to crack a 9 -digit numeric password by trying all the numbers from 000000000 to 999999999
Buffer Overflow — When a program tries to store more information than it is allowed to, it overflows into other buffers (memory partitions) corrupting existing data.
Cache — Storing the response to a particular operation in temporary high-speed storage is to serve other incoming requests better. eg. you can store a database request in a cache till it is updated to reduce calling the database again for the same query.
Cipher — Cryptographic algorithm for encrypting and decrypting data.
Code Injection — Injecting malicious code into a system by exploiting a bug or vulnerability.
Cross-Site Scripting — Executing a script on the client-side through a legitimate website. This can be prevented if the website sanitizes user input.
Compliance — A set of rules defined by the government or other authorities on how to protect your customer’s data. Common ones include HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and FISMA.
Dictionary Attack — Attacking a system with a pre-defined list of usernames and passwords. eg. admin/admin is a common username/password combination used by amateur sysadmins.
Dumpster Diving — Looking into a company’s trash cans for useful information.
Denial of Service & Distributed Denial of Service — Exhausting a server’s resources by sending too many requests is Denial of Service. If a botnet is used to do the same, its called Distributed Denial of Service.
DevSecOps — Combination of development and operations by considering security as a key ingredient from the initial system design.
Directory Traversal — Vulnerability that lets attackers list al the files and folders within a server. This can include system configuration and password files.
Domain Name System (DNS) — Helps convert domain names into server IP addresses. eg. Google.com -> 216.58.200.142
DNS Spoofing — Trikcnig a system’s DNS to point to a malicious server. eg. when you enter ‘facebook.com’, you might be redirected to the attacker’s website that looks like Facebook.
Encryption — Encoding a message with a key so that only the parties with the key can read the message.
Exploit — A piece of code that takes advantage of a vulnerability in the target system. eg. Buffer overflow exploits can get you to root access to a system.
Enumeration — Mapping out all the components of a network by gaining access to a single system.
Footprinting — Gathering information about a target using active methods such as scanning and enumeration.
Flooding — Sending too many packets of data to a target system to exhaust its resources and cause a Denial of Service or similar attacks.
Firewall — A software or hardware filter that can be configured to prevent common types of attacks.
Fork Bomb — Forking a process indefinitely to exhaust system resources. Related to a Denial of Service attack.
Fuzzing — Sending automated random input to a software program to test its exception handling capacity.
Hardening — Securing a system from attacks like closing unused ports. Usually done using scripts for servers.
Hash Function — Mapping a piece of data into a fixed value string. Hashes are used to confirm data integrity.
Honey Pot — An intentionally vulnerable system used to lure attackers. This is then used to understand the attacker’s strategies.
HIPAA — The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. If you are working with healthcare data, you need to make sure you are HIPAA compliant. This is to protect the customer’s privacy.
Input Validation — Checking user inputs before sending them to the database. eg. sanitizing form input to prevent SQL injection attacks.
Integrity — Making sure the data that was sent from the server is the same that was received by the client. This ensures there was no tampering and integrity is achieved usually by hashing and encryption.
Intrusion Detection System — A software similar to a firewall but with advanced features. Helps in defending against Nmap scans, DDoS attacks, etc.
IP Spoofing — Changing the source IP address of a packet to fool the target into thinking a request is coming from a legitimate server.
John The Ripper — Brilliant password cracking tool, runs on all major platforms.
Kerberos — Default authorization software used by Microsoft, uses a stronger encryption system.
KeyLogger — A software program that captures all keystrokes that a user performs on the system.
Logic Bombs — A piece of code (usually malicious) that runs when a condition is satisfied.
Light Weight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) — Lightweight client-server protocol on Windows, central place for authentication. Stores usernames and passwords to validate users on a network.
Malware — Short for “Malicious Software”. Everything from viruses to backdoors is malware.
MAC Address — Unique address assigned to a Network Interface Card and is used as an identifier for local area networks. Easy to spoof.
Multi-factor Authentication — Using more than one method of authentication to access a service. eg. username/password with mobile OTP to access a bank account (two-factor authentication)
MD5 — Widely used hashing algorithm. Once a favorite, it has many vulnerabilities.
Meterpreter — An advanced Metasploit payload that lives in memory and hard to trace.
Null-Byte Injection — An older exploit, uses null bytes (i.e. %00, or 0x00 in hexadecimal) to URLs. This makes web servers return random/unwanted data which might be useful for the attacker. Easily prevented by doing sanity checks.
Network Interface Card(NIC) — Hardware that helps a device connect to a network.
Network Address Translation — Utility that translates your local IP address into a global IP address. eg. your local IP might be 192.168.1.4 but to access the internet, you need a global IP address (from your router).
Nmap — Popular network scanning tool that gives information about systems, open ports, services, and operating system versions.
Netcat — Simple but powerful tool that can view and record data on a TCP or UDP network connections. Since it is not actively maintained, NCat is preferred.
Nikto — A popular web application scanner, helps to find over 6700 vulnerabilities including server configurations and installed web server software.
Nessus — Commercial alternative to NMap, provides a detailed list of vulnerabilities based on scan results.
Packet — Data is sent and received by systems via packets. Contains information like source IP, destination IP, protocol, and other information.
Password Cracking — Cracking an encrypted password using tools like John the Ripper when you don’t have access to the key.
Password Sniffing — Performing man-in-the-middle attacks using tools like Wireshark to find password hashes.
Patch — A software update released by a vendor to fix a bug or vulnerability in a software system.
Phishing — Building fake web sites that look remarkably similar to legitimate websites (like Facebook) to capture sensitive information.
Ping Sweep — A technique that tries to ping a system to see if it is alive on the network.
Public Key Cryptography — Encryption mechanism that users a pair of keys, one private and one public. The sender will encrypt a message using your public key which then you can decrypt using your private key.
Public Key Infrastructure — A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system to create, store, and distribute digital certificates. This helps sysadmins verify that a particular public key belongs to a certain authorized entity.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) — Any information that identified a user. eg. Address, Phone number, etc.
Payload — A piece of code (usually malicious) that performs a specific function. eg. Keylogger.
PCI-DSS — Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. If you are working with customer credit cards, you should be PCI-DSS compliant.
Ransomware — Malware that locks your system using encryption and asks you to pay a price to get the key to unlock it.
Rainbow Table — Pre calculated password hashes that will help you crack password hashes of the target easily.
Reconnaissance — Finding data about the target using methods such as google search, social media, and other publicly available information.
Reverse Engineering — Rebuilding a piece of software based on its functions.
Role-Based Access — Providing a set of authorizations for a role other than a user. eg. “Managers” role will have a set of permissions while the “developers” role will have a different set of permissions.
Rootkit — A rootkit is a malware that provides unauthorized users admin privileges. Rootkits include keyloggers, password sniffers, etc.
Scanning — Sending packets to a system and gaining information about the target system using the packets received. This involved the 3-way-handshake.
Secure Shell (SSH) — Protocol that establishes an encrypted communication channel between a client and a server. You can use ssh to login to remote servers and perform system administration.
Session — A session is a duration in which a communication channel is open between a client and a server. eg. the time between logging into a website and logging out is a session.
Session Hijacking — Taking over someone else’s session by pretending to the client. This is achieved by stealing cookies and session tokens. eg. after you authenticate with your bank, an attacker can steal your session to perform financial transactions on your behalf.
Social Engineering — The art of tricking people into making them do something that is not in their best interest. eg. convincing someone to provide their password over the phone.
Secure Hashing Algorithm (SHA) — Widely used family of encryption algorithms. SHA256 is considered highly secure compared to earlier versions like SHA 1. It is also a one-way algorithm, unlike an encryption algorithm that you can decrypt. Once you hash a message, you can only compare with another hash, you cannot re-hash it to its earlier format.
Sniffing — performing man-in-the-middle attacks on networks. Includes wired and wireless networks.
Spam — Unwanted digital communication, including email, social media messages, etc. Usually tries to get you into a malicious website.
Syslog — System logging protocol, used by system administrators to capture all activity on a server. Usually stored on a separate server to retain logs in the event of an attack.
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) — Establishes an encrypted tunnel between the client and server. eg. when you submit passwords on Facebook, only the encrypted text will be visible for sniffers and not your original password.
Snort — Lightweight open-source Intrusion Detection System for Windows and Linux.
SQL Injection — A type of attack that can be performed on web applications using SQL databases. Happens when the site does not validate user input.
Trojan — A malware hidden within useful software. eg. a pirated version of MS office can contain trojans that will execute when you install and run the software.
Traceroute — Tool that maps the route a packet takes between the source and destination.
Tunnel — Creating a private encrypted channel between two or more computers. Only allowed devices on the network can communicate through this tunnel.
Virtual Private Network — A subnetwork created within a network, mainly to encrypt traffic. eg. connecting to a VPN to access a blocked third-party site.
Virus — A piece of code that is created to perform a specific action on the target systems. A virus has to be triggered to execute eg. autoplaying a USB drive.
Vulnerability — A point of attack that is caused by a bug / poor system design. eg. lack of input validation causes attackers to perform SQL injection attacks on a website.
War Driving — Travelling through a neighborhood looking for unprotected wifi networks to attack.
WHOIS — Helps to find information about IP addresses, its owners, DNS records, etc.
Wireshark — Open source program to analyze network traffic and filter requests and responses for network debugging.
Worm — A malware program capable of replicating itself and spreading to other connected systems. eg. a worm to built a botnet. Unlike Viruses, Worms don’t need a trigger.
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) — Protocol that helps mobile devices connect to the internet.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) — Firewalls for web applications that help with cross-site scripting, Denial of Service, etc.
Zero-Day — A newly discovered vulnerability in a system for which there is no patch yet. Zero-day vulnerabilities are the most dangerous type of vulnerabilities since there is no possible way to protect against one.
Zombie — A compromised computer, controlled by an attacker. A group of zombies is called a Botnet.
Increased distributed working: With organizations embracing work from home, incremental risks have been observed due to a surge in Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Virtual Private Network (VPN), Software As A Service (SaaS), O365 and Shadow IT, as it could be exploited by various Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack vectors.
Reimagine Business Models: Envisioning new business opportunities, modes of working, and renewed investment priorities. With reduced workforce capability, compounded with skill shortages, staff who are focusing on business as usual tasks can be victimized, via social engineering.
Digital Transformation and new digital infrastructure: With the change in nature for organizations across the industrial and supply chain sector – security is deprioritized. Hardening of the industrial systems and cloud based infrastructure is crucial as cyber threats exploit these challenges via vulnerability available for unpatched systems.
With an extreme volume of digital communication, security awareness is lowered with increased susceptibility. Malicious actors are using phishing techniques to exploit such situations.
Re-evaluate your approach to cyber
Which cyber scenarios your organization appears to be preparing for or is prepared?
Is there a security scenario that your organization is currently ignoring – but shouldn’t be?
What would your organization need to do differently in order to win, in each of the identified cyber scenarios?
What capabilities, cyber security partnerships, and workforce strategies do you need to strengthen?
The organizations should reflect the following scenarios at a minimum and consider:
Which cyber scenarios your organization appears to be preparing for or is prepared?
Is there a security scenario that your organization is currently ignoring – but shouldn’t be?
What would your organization need to do differently in order to win, in each of the identified cyber scenarios?
What capabilities, cyber security partnerships, and workforce strategies do you need to strengthen?
To tackle the outcome from the above scenarios, the following measures are the key:
Inoculation through education: Educate and / or remind your employees about –
Your organization’s defense – remote work cyber security policies and best practices
Potential threats to your organization and how will it attack – with a specific focus on social engineering scams and identifying COVID-19 phishing campaigns
Assisting remote employees with enabling MFA across the organization assets
Adjust your defenses: Gather cyber threat intelligence and execute a patching sprint:
Set intelligence collection priorities
Share threat intelligence with other organizations
Use intelligence to move at the speed of the threat
Focus on known tactics, such as phishing and C-suite fraud.
Prioritize unpatched critical systems and common vulnerabilities.
Enterprise recovery: If the worst happens and an attack is successful, follow a staged approach to recovering critical business operations which may include tactical items such as:
Protect key systems through isolation
Fully understand and contain the incident
Eradicate any malware
Implement appropriate protection measures to improve overall system posture
Identify and prioritize the recovery of key business processes to deliver operations
Implement a prioritized recovery plan
Cyber Preparedness and Response: It is critical to optimize the detection capability thus, re-evaluation of the detection strategy aligned with the changing landscape is crucial. Some key trends include:
Secure and monitor your cloud environments and remote working applications
Increase monitoring to identify threats from shadow IT
Analyze behavior patterns to improve detection content
Finding the right cyber security partner: To be ready to respond identify the right partner with experience and skillset in Social Engineering, Cyber Response, Cloud Security, and Data Security.
Critical actions to address
At this point, as the organizations are setting the direction towards the social enterprise, it is an unprecedented opportunity to lead with cyber discussions and initiatives. Organizations should immediately gain an understanding of newly introduced risks and relevant controls by:
Getting a seat at the table
Understanding the risk prioritization:
Remote workforce/technology performance
Operational and financial implications
Emerging insider and external threats
Business continuity capabilities
Assessing cyber governance and security awareness in the new operating environment
Assessing the highest areas of risk and recommend practical mitigation strategies that minimize impact to constrained resources.
Keeping leadership and the Board apprised of ever-changing risk profile
Given the complexity of the pandemic and associated cyber challenges, there is reason to believe that the recovery phase post-COVID-19 will require unprecedented levels of cyber orchestration, communication, and changing of existing configurations across the organization.
CyberSecurity: Protect Yourself on Internet
Use two factor authentication when possible. If not possible, use strong unique passwords that are difficult to guess or crack. This means avoiding passwords that use of common words, your birthdate, your SSN, names and birthdays of close associates, etc.
Make sure the devices you are using are up-to-date and have some form of reputable anti-virus/malware software installed.
Never open emails, attachments, programs unless they are from a trusted source (i.e., a source that can be verified). Also disregard email or web requests that ask you to share your personal or account information unless you are sure the request and requestor are legitimate.
Try to only use websites that are encrypted. To do this, look for either the trusted security lock symbol before the website address and/or the extra “s” at the end of http in the URL address bar.
Avoid using an administrator level account when using the internet.
Only enable cookies when absolutely required by a website.
Make social media accounts private or don’t use social media at all.
Consider using VPNs and encrypting any folders/data that contains sensitive data.
Stay away from using unprotected public Wi-Fi networks.
Social media is genetically engineered in Area 51 to harvest as much data from you as possible. Far beyond just having your name and age and photograph.
Never use the same username twice anywhere, or the same password twice anywhere.
Use Tor/Tor Browser whenever possible. It’s not perfect, but it is a decent default attempt at anonymity.
Use a VPN. Using VPN and Tor can be even better.
Search engines like DuckDuckGo offer better privacy (assuming they’re honest, which you can never be certain of) than Google which, like social media, works extremely hard to harvest every bit of data from you that they can.
Never give your real details anywhere. Certainly not things like your name or pictures of yourself, but even less obvious things like your age or country of origin. Even things like how you spell words and grammatical quirks can reveal where you’re from.
Erase your comments from websites after a few days/weeks. It might not erase them from the website’s servers, but it will at least remove them from public view. If you don’t, you can forget they exist and you never know how or when they can and will be used against you.
With Reddit, you can create an account fairly easily over Tor using no real information. Also, regularly nuke your accounts in case Reddit or some crazy stalker is monitoring your posts to build a profile of who you might be. Source: Reddit
Notable Hackers
Adrian Lamo – gained media attention for breaking into several high-profile computer networks, including those of The New York Times, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, culminating in his 2003 arrest. Lamo was best known for reporting U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning to Army criminal investigators in 2010 for leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks.
Albert Gonzales – an American computer hacker and computer criminal who is accused of masterminding the combined credit card theft and subsequent reselling of more than 170 million card and ATM numbers from 2005 to 2007: the biggest such fraud in history.
Andrew Auernheimer (known as Weev) – Went to jail for using math against AT&T website.
Barnaby Jack – was a New Zealand hacker, programmer and computer security expert. He was known for his presentation at the Black Hat computer security conference in 2010, during which he exploited two ATMs and made them dispense fake paper currency on the stage. Among his other most notable works were the exploitation of various medical devices, including pacemakers and insulin pumps.
Gary McKinnon – a Scottish systems administrator and hacker who was accused in 2002 of perpetrating the “biggest military computer hack of all time,” although McKinnon himself states that he was merely looking for evidence of free energy suppression and a cover-up of UFO activity and other technologies potentially useful to the public. 👽🛸
George Hotz aka geohot – “The former Facebook engineer took on the giants of the tech world by developing the first iPhone carrier-unlock techniques,” says Mark Greenwood, head of data science at Netacea, “followed a few years later by reverse engineering Sony’s PlayStation 3, clearing the way for users to run their own code on locked-down hardware. George sparked an interest in a younger generation frustrated with hardware and software restrictions being imposed on them and led to a new scene of opening up devices, ultimately leading to better security and more openness.”
Guccifer 2.0 – a persona which claimed to be the hacker(s) that hacked into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer network and then leaked its documents to the media, the website WikiLeaks, and a conference event.
Hector Monsegur (known as Sabu) – an American computer hacker and co-founder of the hacking group LulzSec. He Monsegur became an informant for the FBI, working with the agency for over ten months to aid them in identifying the other hackers from LulzSec and related groups.
Jacob Appelbaum – an American independent journalist, computer security researcher, artist, and hacker. He has been employed by the University of Washington, and was a core member of the Tor project, a free software network designed to provide online anonymity.
James Forshaw – one of the world’s foremost bug bounty huners
Jeanson James Ancheta – On May 9, 2006, Jeanson James Ancheta (born 1985) became the first person to be charged for controlling large numbers of hijacked computers or botnets.
Jeremy Hammond – He was convicted of computer fraud in 2013 for hacking the private intelligence firm Stratfor and releasing data to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
John Draper – also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch or Crunchman (after the Cap’n Crunch breakfast cereal mascot), is an American computer programmer and former legendary phone phreak.
Kimberley Vanvaeck (known as Gigabyte) – a virus writer from Belgium known for a long-standing dispute which involved the internet security firm Sophos and one of its employees, Graham Cluley. Vanvaeck wrote several viruses, including Quis, Coconut and YahaSux (also called Sahay). She also created a Sharp virus (also called “Sharpei”), credited as being the first virus to be written in C#.
Lauri Love – a British activist charged with stealing data from United States Government computers including the United States Army, Missile Defense Agency, and NASA via computer intrusion.
Michael Calce (known as MafiaBoy) – a security expert from Île Bizard, Quebec who launched a series of highly publicized denial-of-service attacks in February 2000 against large commercial websites, including Yahoo!, Fifa.com, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE, eBay, and CNN.
Mudge – Peiter C. Zatko, better known as Mudge, is a network security expert, open source programmer, writer, and a hacker. He was the most prominent member of the high-profile hacker think tank the L0pht as well as the long-lived computer and culture hacking cooperative the Cult of the Dead Cow.
PRAGMA – Also known as Impragma or PHOENiX, PRAGMA is the author of Snipr, one of the most prolific credential stuffing tools available online.
The 414s – The 414s were a group of computer hackers who broke into dozens of high-profile computer systems, including ones at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Security Pacific Bank, in 1982 and 1983.
The Shadow Brokers – is a hacker group who first appeared in the summer of 2016. They published several leaks containing hacking tools from the National Security Agency (NSA), including several zero-day exploits. Specifically, these exploits and vulnerabilities targeted enterprise firewalls, antivirus software, and Microsoft products.[6] The Shadow Brokers originally attributed the leaks to the Equation Group threat actor, who have been tied to the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations unit.
The Strange History of Ransomware The first ransomware virus predates e-mail, even the Internet as we know it, and was distributed on floppy disk by the postal service. It sounds quaint, but in some ways this horse-and-buggy version was even more insidious than its modern descendants. Contemporary ransomware tends to bait victims using legitimate-looking email attachments — a fake invoice from UPS, or a receipt from Delta airlines. But the 20,000 disks dispatched to 90 countries in December of 1989 were masquerading as something far more evil: AIDS education software.
How to protect sensitive data for its entire lifecycle in AWS
How to protect sensitive data for its entire lifecycle in AWS
You can protect data in-transit over individual communications channels using transport layer security (TLS), and at-rest in individual storage silos using volume encryption, object encryption or database table encryption. However, if you have sensitive workloads, you might need additional protection that can follow the data as it moves through the application stack. Fine-grained data protection techniques such as field-level encryption allow for the protection of sensitive data fields in larger application payloads while leaving non-sensitive fields in plaintext. This approach lets an application perform business functions on non-sensitive fields without the overhead of encryption, and allows fine-grained control over what fields can be accessed by what parts of the application. Read m ore here…
I Passed AWS Security Specialty SCS-C01 Testimonials
Passing the SCS-C01 AWS Certified Security Specialty exam
I’ve been studying for both DevOps DOP-C01 and Security Specialty SCS-C01 tests but opted to just focus on SCS-C01 since the DevOps exam seems like a tough one to pass. I’m planning to take the DevOps one next but I read that there’s a new DOP-C02 version just came out so I might postpone it until for a couple of months.
This AWS Certified Security Specialty exam is easier than the SAA exam since the main focus is all about security. The official Exam Guide has been my ultimate guide in knowing the particular AWS services to focus for the test. Once I got 90% on all my practice tests attempts from TD, I went ahead and booked my exam.
Here’s a compilation of all the helpful SCS-C01 posts that helped me:
The Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Security Specialty course provides a good summary of all the relevant topics that are about to be asked in the exam. Prepare to see topics in Key Management Infrastructure, IPS/IDS, network security, EKS/ECS container security and many more.
Hello I'm close to finishing the google cybersecurity certificate and on the website I was told they give exclusive access to job searching website that they also have companies that are committed to hiring people with the certificate. I'm looking to see if anyone has seen this and how good is it. submitted by /u/Rough_Ad_7760 [link] [comments]
Please give some insight on the different job responsibilities within the GRC realm. Which job is most difficult? Easiest? What are some tips to jump into the field and to move up the ranks? Thanks. submitted by /u/anon67- [link] [comments]
My Comptia certs (A+,Network+,Sec+) are about to expire and not sure what to do. Dont really feel like paying for a cert above these that I dont really care about just to renew these but also I am worried that in future interviews they might pick on me for not disclosing they have expired. How do you guys approach this situation? I think if I get confronted about them I will just explain how I think its a ripoff and I dont want to pay for a renewal. submitted by /u/crablemet111 [link] [comments]
There seems to be some confusion over Certificate and Certification - They are not the same thing and they are not interchangeable This training from Google through coursera - https://www.coursera.org/professional-certificates/google-cybersecurity - is just that online training - you get a training certificate at the end of the training It is not an industry Certification CompTia - Security+ AWS - Cloud Practitioner ISC2 - CISSP SANs - GIAC these are industry certifications - you take the same exam everyone else is taking and if you pass you are awarded the certification - certifications must be maintained and have annual CEUs/CPEs - basically continuing education credits you get through more training, webinars, conferences and Certifications do expire That google course is just online training, no different that you would find on sites like Pluralsight, Udemy, Udacity, Cybrary, etc submitted by /u/DeezSaltyNuts69 [link] [comments]
Howdy! Its not that much of a tool than wrappers of few awesome tools that most of you probably know and use today - sqlmap, bbot and nikto. I'm excited to share with you my latest contributions to the GitHub community: a collection of free GitHub Actions designed to streamline and enhance security practices utilizing DAST and OSINT. There were no GH Actions that I could find, so I made them for my use case, but figured everyone can benefit from those awesome tools. Action - 🗺️ - sqlmap The famous sqmap - perform automated (or semi-automated) penetration testing on your releases: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/thereisnotime-action-sqlmap Action - 🤖 - bbot One of the newer OSINT automation tools on the block, I personally love it so here it is: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/thereisnotime-action-bbot Action - 🎯 - nikto A stable and tested tool that can easily scan a ton of endpoints for security issues: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/thereisnotime-action-nikto WIP: Currently I am working on a nice workaround to generate outputs from the actions and not directly from the tools (but you can still use the tool outputs in your job steps) and after that I will add more examples (the way I use it for regular security compliance reports etc.). Because those amazing tools have a ton of parameters, one of my main goals was to provide an easy option to provide custom arguments instead of wrapping each one and also re-use as much as possible from the official or at least most supported Dockerfiles where available. Feel free to try them out, provide feedback, or even contribute to their development. The actions are under active development but they are working. Your input is valuable in making these actions even more robust and effective. If you find them useful, please leave a ⭐ in GitHub. submitted by /u/bilporti [link] [comments]
Did anyone implemented wazuh (server, dashboard and agent) full setup? I am facing issues with agent and server communication, where agent is not able to connect with server. submitted by /u/Kmk00009 [link] [comments]
Copied from a Linkedin post A threat actor that goes by the moniker "spyboy" claims to have devised a method to terminate all AVs/EDRs/XDRs. The software has allegedly been tested on most AVs/EDRs/XDRs that exist in the market. This evening, the threat actor made a video of terminating CrowdStrike EDR. Ref: https://lnkd.in/gzDAMRcH The all-in-one version that bypasses most renowned EDRs is currently being sold for $1,500 (early bird perks for the first five buyers)- but will soon be sold for $3,000. Below is the complete list of EDRs that can be allegedly terminated using the program: https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D5622AQHzhwkOagEK9g/feedshare-shrink_2048_1536/0/1685293180140?e=1687996800&v=beta&t=BkFlsoTi-fHw5zRC3IHQl00XPs9ujxj04gDLM1HNwH0 submitted by /u/ThePrestigiousRide [link] [comments]
Does anyone have an incident response playbook they can share? I understand that companies don’t generally share these (for a good reason) and the vendor specific ones are more geared to SIEM implementation…. Can anyone point me in the right direction? submitted by /u/RearAdmiral5 [link] [comments]
Hello! FIM v0.4.7 was just released. FIM is an open-source endpoint cybersecurity tool to monitor files of your system. We may ask all of you if you can take a look at our project. If you want to know more about FIM, come at our website. https://achiefs.com/ https://documentation.achiefs.com https://github.com/Achiefs/fim Any feedback or questions will be appreciated. If you like the project give us a star 😀 Thanks! submitted by /u/okynos [link] [comments]
Hey why is it bad to click a malicious link, like from a spam mail? The worst thing that could happen, is that a malicious file will be downloaded. But what happens after this step? The file lies somewhere within a directory, but an user interaction is required to execute the file (e.g. double-clicking, loading a dll, executing a script etc.) Is it possible, to execute a downloaded file automatically just by clicking a malicious link (not via Script!)? Thanks in advance submitted by /u/ugonikon [link] [comments]
Researchers have discovered an inexpensive attack technique that could be leveraged to brute-force fingerprints on smartphones to bypass user authentication and seize control of the devices.
The approach, dubbed BrutePrint, bypasses limits put in place to counter failed biometric authentication attempts by weaponizing two zero-day vulnerabilities in the smartphone fingerprint authentication (SFA
Building out internal training programs and looking for any recommendations Cyber Threat Intelligence training, asides SANS? Any recommendations welcome! submitted by /u/thehelmet92 [link] [comments]
A crypter (alternatively spelled cryptor) malware dubbed AceCryptor has been used to pack numerous strains of malware since 2016.
Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET said it identified over 240,000 detections of the crypter in its telemetry in 2021 and 2022. This amounts to more than 10,000 hits per month.
Some of the prominent malware families contained within AceCryptor are SmokeLoader, RedLine
Each week I post a summary of the top stories in cybersecurity to help members of this subreddit keep up with the industry. Hopefully this helps! Edition: 29/05/2023 🔓 Cyber Attacks Emby shuts down user media servers hacked in recent attack Media server company Emby remotely shut down an undisclosed number of user-hosted servers following a hack that exploited a known vulnerability and insecure admin configurations. Emby plans a security update soon. US govt contractor ABB confirms ransomware attack, data theft Swiss tech multinational and U.S. government contractor ABB has confirmed that some of its systems were impacted by a ransomware attack, previously described by the company as "an IT security incident." 💀 Threat Actors Lazarus Group Striking Vulnerable Windows IIS Web Servers North Korea's Lazarus Group is exploiting vulnerabilities in unpatched Windows IIS Web servers to launch cyber espionage campaigns, using known exploits like Log4Shell and the 3CX supply chain attack. 'Volt Typhoon' Breaks Fresh Ground for China-Backed Cyber Campaigns A China-backed cyberattack campaign, dubbed "Volt Typhoon," is targeting critical infrastructure organizations in Guam. The actor is believed to be preparing for potentially disruptive attacks in the future, indicating a shift from their traditional focus on cyber espionage. 🛡️ Malware / Threats / Vulnerabilities Hot Pixels attack checks CPU temp, power changes to steal data Researchers have developed a "Hot Pixels" attack that can steal data by monitoring CPU temperature and power changes. The attack retrieves pixel information from the content displayed in the browser and infers navigation history. CosmicEnergy Malware Emerges, Capable of Electric Grid Shutdown Russian code that could tamper with industrial machines and toggle RTUs on and off was floating around VirusTotal for years before being noticed. It raises new questions about the state of OT security. QBot malware abuses Windows WordPad EXE to infect devices QBot malware is abusing a DLL hijacking flaw in Windows 10's WordPad to infect computers, using the legitimate program to evade security software detection. This method primarily affects Windows 10 and later versions. CISA warns govt agencies of recently patched Barracuda zero-day CISA warned government agencies about a recently patched zero-day vulnerability in Barracuda Email Security Gateway appliances, urging them to ensure their networks haven't been breached. Clever ‘File Archiver In The Browser’ phishing trick uses ZIP domains Security researcher mr.d0x has developed a phishing toolkit exploiting the new ZIP top-level domain. This toolkit creates fake in-browser WinRar and Windows File Explorer interfaces on ZIP domains, fooling users into interacting with malicious files. 💹 Trends / Events / Other News PyPI announces mandatory use of 2FA for all software publishers PyPI has decided to enforce two-factor authentication for all project management accounts by the end of 2023. This move is aimed at enhancing platform security and reducing the risk of supply chain attacks. Tesla Whistleblower Leaks 100GB of Data, Revealing Safety Complaints Tesla whistleblowers have leaked 100GB of data including thousands of safety complaints regarding the Autopilot feature and personal information of over 100,000 current and former employees. Tesla hasn't made public statements yet. Netflix's Password-Sharing Ban Offers Security Upsides Netflix's new password-sharing restriction is not just about boosting profits, but also enhancing account security. Experts highlight the potential risks of password-sharing, including unauthorized access and increased phishing susceptibility. I write these summaries as part of weekly newsletter I send out, so any feedback on the length/content/style is also appreciated. submitted by /u/MenuParking7693 [link] [comments]
If you're a cybersecurity professional, you're likely familiar with the sea of acronyms our industry is obsessed with. From CNAPP, to CWPP, to CIEM and all of the myriad others, there seems to be a new initialism born each day.
In this article, we'll look at another trending acronym – CTEM, which stands for Continuous Threat Exposure Management – and the often-surprising challenges that come
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Top 100 AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty Certification Questions and Answers Dumps
If you’re looking to take your data analytics career to the next level, then this AWS Data Analytics Specialty Certification Exam Preparation blog is a must-read! With over 100 exam questions and answers, plus data science and data analytics interview questions, cheat sheets and more, you’ll be fully prepared to ace the DAS-C01 exam.
In this blog, we talk about big data and data analytics; we also give you the last updated top 100 AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty Questions and Answers Dumps
AWS Data analytics DAS-C01 Exam Prep
The AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty (DAS-C01) examination is intended for individuals who perform in a data analytics-focused role. This exam validates an examinee’s comprehensive understanding of using AWS services to design, build, secure, and maintain analytics solutions that provide insight from data.
The AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty (DAS-C01) covers the following domains:
Domain 1: Collection 18%
Domain 2: Storage and Data Management 22%
Domain 3: Processing 24%
Domain 4: Analysis and Visualization 18%
If you are looking for an all-in-one solution to help you prepare for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam, look no further than this AWS Cloud Practitioner CCP CLFC01 book below.
Question1:What combination of services do you need for the following requirements: accelerate petabyte-scale data transfers, load streaming data, and the ability to create scalable, private connections. Select the correct answer order.
A) Snowball, Kinesis Firehose, Direct Connect
B) Data Migration Services, Kinesis Firehose, Direct Connect
C) Snowball, Data Migration Services, Direct Connect
AWS has many options to help get data into the cloud, including secure devices like AWS Import/Export Snowball to accelerate petabyte-scale data transfers, Amazon Kinesis Firehose to load streaming data, and scalable private connections through AWS Direct Connect.
AWS Data Analytics Specialty Certification Exam Preparation App is a great way to prepare for your upcoming AWS Data Analytics Specialty Certification Exam. The app provides you with over 300 questions and answers, detailed explanations of each answer, a scorecard to track your progress, and a countdown timer to help keep you on track. You can also find data science and data analytics interview questions and detailed answers, cheat sheets, and flashcards to help you study. The app is very similar to the real exam, so you will be well-prepared when it comes time to take the test.
Question 3: There is a five-day car rally race across Europe. The race coordinators are using a Kinesis stream and IoT sensors to monitor the movement of the cars. Each car has a sensor and data is getting back to the stream with the default stream settings. On the last day of the rally, data is sent to S3. When you go to interpret the data in S3, there is only data for the last day and nothing for the first 4 days. Which of the following is the most probable cause of this?
A) You did not have versioning enabled and would need to create individual buckets to prevent the data from being overwritten.
B) Data records are only accessible for a default of 24 hours from the time they are added to a stream.
C) One of the sensors failed, so there was no data to record.
D) You needed to use EMR to send the data to S3; Kinesis Streams are only compatible with DynamoDB.
ANSWER3:
B
Notes/Hint3:
Streams support changes to the data record retention period of your stream. An Amazon Kinesis stream is an ordered sequence of data records, meant to be written to and read from in real-time. Data records are therefore stored in shards in your stream temporarily. The period from when a record is added to when it is no longer accessible is called the retention period. An Amazon Kinesis stream stores records for 24 hours by default, up to 168 hours.
Question 4: A publisher website captures user activity and sends clickstream data to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. The publisher wants to design a cost-effective solution to process the data to create a timeline of user activity within a session. The solution must be able to scale depending on the number of active sessions. Which solution meets these requirements?
A) Include a variable in the clickstream data from the publisher website to maintain a counter for the number of active user sessions. Use a timestamp for the partition key for the stream. Configure the consumer application to read the data from the stream and change the number of processor threads based upon the counter. Deploy the consumer application on Amazon EC2 instances in an EC2 Auto Scaling group.
B) Include a variable in the clickstream to maintain a counter for each user action during their session. Use the action type as the partition key for the stream. Use the Kinesis Client Library (KCL) in the consumer application to retrieve the data from the stream and perform the processing. Configure the consumer application to read the data from the stream and change the number of processor threads based upon the counter. Deploy the consumer application on AWS Lambda.
C) Include a session identifier in the clickstream data from the publisher website and use as the partition key for the stream. Use the Kinesis Client Library (KCL) in the consumer application to retrieve the data from the stream and perform the processing. Deploy the consumer application on Amazon EC2 instances in an EC2 Auto Scaling group. Use an AWS Lambda function to reshard the stream based upon Amazon CloudWatch alarms.
D) Include a variable in the clickstream data from the publisher website to maintain a counter for the number of active user sessions. Use a timestamp for the partition key for the stream. Configure the consumer application to read the data from the stream and change the number of processor threads based upon the counter. Deploy the consumer application on AWS Lambda.
ANSWER4:
C
Notes/Hint4:
Partitioning by the session ID will allow a single processor to process all the actions for a user session in order. An AWS Lambda function can call the UpdateShardCount API action to change the number of shards in the stream. The KCL will automatically manage the number of processors to match the number of shards. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling will assure the correct number of instances are running to meet the processing load.
Question 5: Your company has two batch processing applications that consume financial data about the day’s stock transactions. Each transaction needs to be stored durably and guarantee that a record of each application is delivered so the audit and billing batch processing applications can process the data. However, the two applications run separately and several hours apart and need access to the same transaction information. After reviewing the transaction information for the day, the information no longer needs to be stored. What is the best way to architect this application?
A) Use SQS for storing the transaction messages; when the billing batch process performs first and consumes the message, write the code in a way that does not remove the message after consumed, so it is available for the audit application several hours later. The audit application can consume the SQS message and remove it from the queue when completed.
B) Use Kinesis to store the transaction information. The billing application will consume data from the stream and the audit application can consume the same data several hours later.
C) Store the transaction information in a DynamoDB table. The billing application can read the rows while the audit application will read the rows then remove the data.
D) Use SQS for storing the transaction messages. When the billing batch process consumes each message, have the application create an identical message and place it in a different SQS for the audit application to use several hours later.
SQS would make this more difficult because the data does not need to persist after a full day.
ANSWER5:
B
Notes/Hint5:
Kinesis appears to be the best solution that allows multiple consumers to easily interact with the records.
Question 6: A company is currently using Amazon DynamoDB as the database for a user support application. The company is developing a new version of the application that will store a PDF file for each support case ranging in size from 1–10 MB. The file should be retrievable whenever the case is accessed in the application. How can the company store the file in the MOST cost-effective manner?
A) Store the file in Amazon DocumentDB and the document ID as an attribute in the DynamoDB table.
B) Store the file in Amazon S3 and the object key as an attribute in the DynamoDB table.
C) Split the file into smaller parts and store the parts as multiple items in a separate DynamoDB table.
D) Store the file as an attribute in the DynamoDB table using Base64 encoding.
ANSWER6:
B
Notes/Hint6:
Use Amazon S3 to store large attribute values that cannot fit in an Amazon DynamoDB item. Store each file as an object in Amazon S3 and then store the object path in the DynamoDB item.
Question 7: Your client has a web app that emits multiple events to Amazon Kinesis Streams for reporting purposes. Critical events need to be immediately captured before processing can continue, but informational events do not need to delay processing. What solution should your client use to record these types of events without unnecessarily slowing the application?
A) Log all events using the Kinesis Producer Library.
B) Log critical events using the Kinesis Producer Library, and log informational events using the PutRecords API method.
C) Log critical events using the PutRecords API method, and log informational events using the Kinesis Producer Library.
D) Log all events using the PutRecords API method.
ANSWER2:
C
Notes/Hint7:
The PutRecords API can be used in code to be synchronous; it will wait for the API request to complete before the application continues. This means you can use it when you need to wait for the critical events to finish logging before continuing. The Kinesis Producer Library is asynchronous and can send many messages without needing to slow down your application. This makes the KPL ideal for the sending of many non-critical alerts asynchronously.
Question 8: You work for a start-up that tracks commercial delivery trucks via GPS. You receive coordinates that are transmitted from each delivery truck once every 6 seconds. You need to process these coordinates in near real-time from multiple sources and load them into Elasticsearch without significant technical overhead to maintain. Which tool should you use to digest the data?
A) Amazon SQS
B) Amazon EMR
C) AWS Data Pipeline
D) Amazon Kinesis Firehose
ANSWER8:
D
Notes/Hint8:
Amazon Kinesis Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into AWS. It can capture, transform, and load streaming data into Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service, enabling near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools and dashboards.
Question 9: A company needs to implement a near-real-time fraud prevention feature for its ecommerce site. User and order details need to be delivered to an Amazon SageMaker endpoint to flag suspected fraud. The amount of input data needed for the inference could be as much as 1.5 MB. Which solution meets the requirements with the LOWEST overall latency?
A) Create an Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka cluster and ingest the data for each order into a topic. Use a Kafka consumer running on Amazon EC2 instances to read these messages and invoke the Amazon SageMaker endpoint.
B) Create an Amazon Kinesis Data Streams stream and ingest the data for each order into the stream. Create an AWS Lambda function to read these messages and invoke the Amazon SageMaker endpoint.
C) Create an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream and ingest the data for each order into the stream. Configure Kinesis Data Firehose to deliver the data to an Amazon S3 bucket. Trigger an AWS Lambda function with an S3 event notification to read the data and invoke the Amazon SageMaker endpoint.
D) Create an Amazon SNS topic and publish the data for each order to the topic. Subscribe the Amazon SageMaker endpoint to the SNS topic.
ANSWER9:
A
Notes/Hint9:
An Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka cluster can be used to deliver the messages with very low latency. It has a configurable message size that can handle the 1.5 MB payload.
Question 10: You need to filter and transform incoming messages coming from a smart sensor you have connected with AWS. Once messages are received, you need to store them as time series data in DynamoDB. Which AWS service can you use?
A) IoT Device Shadow Service
B) Redshift
C) Kinesis
D) IoT Rules Engine
ANSWER10:
D
Notes/Hint10:
The IoT rules engine will allow you to send sensor data over to AWS services like DynamoDB
Question 11: A media company is migrating its on-premises legacy Hadoop cluster with its associated data processing scripts and workflow to an Amazon EMR environment running the latest Hadoop release. The developers want to reuse the Java code that was written for data processing jobs for the on-premises cluster. Which approach meets these requirements?
A) Deploy the existing Oracle Java Archive as a custom bootstrap action and run the job on the EMR cluster.
B) Compile the Java program for the desired Hadoop version and run it using a CUSTOM_JAR step on the EMR cluster.
C) Submit the Java program as an Apache Hive or Apache Spark step for the EMR cluster.
D) Use SSH to connect the master node of the EMR cluster and submit the Java program using the AWS CLI.
ANSWER11:
B
Notes/Hint11:
A CUSTOM JAR step can be configured to download a JAR file from an Amazon S3 bucket and execute it. Since the Hadoop versions are different, the Java application has to be recompiled.
Question 12: You currently have databases running on-site and in another data center off-site. What service allows you to consolidate to one database in Amazon?
A) AWS Kinesis
B) AWS Database Migration Service
C) AWS Data Pipeline
D) AWS RDS Aurora
ANSWER12:
B
Notes/Hint12:
AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data to and from most of the widely used commercial and open source databases. It supports homogeneous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle to Amazon Aurora. Migrations can be from on-premises databases to Amazon RDS or Amazon EC2, databases running on EC2 to RDS, or vice versa, as well as from one RDS database to another RDS database.
Question 13: An online retail company wants to perform analytics on data in large Amazon S3 objects using Amazon EMR. An Apache Spark job repeatedly queries the same data to populate an analytics dashboard. The analytics team wants to minimize the time to load the data and create the dashboard. Which approaches could improve the performance? (Select TWO.)
A) Copy the source data into Amazon Redshift and rewrite the Apache Spark code to create analytical reports by querying Amazon Redshift.
B) Copy the source data from Amazon S3 into Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) using s3distcp.
C) Load the data into Spark DataFrames.
D) Stream the data into Amazon Kinesis and use the Kinesis Connector Library (KCL) in multiple Spark jobs to perform analytical jobs.
E) Use Amazon S3 Select to retrieve the data necessary for the dashboards from the S3 objects.
ANSWER13:
C and E
Notes/Hint13:
One of the speed advantages of Apache Spark comes from loading data into immutable dataframes, which can be accessed repeatedly in memory. Spark DataFrames organizes distributed data into columns. This makes summaries and aggregates much quicker to calculate. Also, instead of loading an entire large Amazon S3 object, load only what is needed using Amazon S3 Select. Keeping the data in Amazon S3 avoids loading the large dataset into HDFS.
Question 14: You have been hired as a consultant to provide a solution to integrate a client’s on-premises data center to AWS. The customer requires a 300 Mbps dedicated, private connection to their VPC. Which AWS tool do you need?
A) VPC peering
B) Data Pipeline
C) Direct Connect
D) EMR
ANSWER14:
C
Notes/Hint14:
Direct Connect will provide a dedicated and private connection to an AWS VPC.
Question 15: Your organization has a variety of different services deployed on EC2 and needs to efficiently send application logs over to a central system for processing and analysis. They’ve determined it is best to use a managed AWS service to transfer their data from the EC2 instances into Amazon S3 and they’ve decided to use a solution that will do what?
A) Installs the AWS Direct Connect client on all EC2 instances and uses it to stream the data directly to S3.
B) Leverages the Kinesis Agent to send data to Kinesis Data Streams and output that data in S3.
C) Ingests the data directly from S3 by configuring regular Amazon Snowball transactions.
D) Leverages the Kinesis Agent to send data to Kinesis Firehose and output that data in S3.
ANSWER15:
D
Notes/Hint15:
Kinesis Firehose is a managed solution, and log files can be sent from EC2 to Firehose to S3 using the Kinesis agent.
Question 16: A data engineer needs to create a dashboard to display social media trends during the last hour of a large company event. The dashboard needs to display the associated metrics with a latency of less than 1 minute. Which solution meets these requirements?
A) Publish the raw social media data to an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream. Use Kinesis Data Analytics for SQL Applications to perform a sliding window analysis to compute the metrics and output the results to a Kinesis Data Streams data stream. Configure an AWS Lambda function to save the stream data to an Amazon DynamoDB table. Deploy a real-time dashboard hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket to read and display the metrics data stored in the DynamoDB table.
B) Publish the raw social media data to an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream. Configure the stream to deliver the data to an Amazon Elasticsearch Service cluster with a buffer interval of 0 seconds. Use Kibana to perform the analysis and display the results.
C) Publish the raw social media data to an Amazon Kinesis Data Streams data stream. Configure an AWS Lambda function to compute the metrics on the stream data and save the results in an Amazon S3 bucket. Configure a dashboard in Amazon QuickSight to query the data using Amazon Athena and display the results.
D) Publish the raw social media data to an Amazon SNS topic. Subscribe an Amazon SQS queue to the topic. Configure Amazon EC2 instances as workers to poll the queue, compute the metrics, and save the results to an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. Configure a dashboard in Amazon QuickSight to query the data in Aurora and display the results.
ANSWER16:
A
Notes/Hint16:
Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics can query data in a Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream in near-real time using SQL. A sliding window analysis is appropriate for determining trends in the stream. Amazon S3 can host a static webpage that includes JavaScript that reads the data in Amazon DynamoDB and refreshes the dashboard.
Question 17: A real estate company is receiving new property listing data from its agents through .csv files every day and storing these files in Amazon S3. The data analytics team created an Amazon QuickSight visualization report that uses a dataset imported from the S3 files. The data analytics team wants the visualization report to reflect the current data up to the previous day. How can a data analyst meet these requirements?
A) Schedule an AWS Lambda function to drop and re-create the dataset daily.
B) Configure the visualization to query the data in Amazon S3 directly without loading the data into SPICE.
C) Schedule the dataset to refresh daily.
D) Close and open the Amazon QuickSight visualization.
ANSWER17:
B
Notes/Hint17:
Datasets created using Amazon S3 as the data source are automatically imported into SPICE. The Amazon QuickSight console allows for the refresh of SPICE data on a schedule.
Question 18: You need to migrate data to AWS. It is estimated that the data transfer will take over a month via the current AWS Direct Connect connection your company has set up. Which AWS tool should you use?
A) Establish additional Direct Connect connections.
B) Use Data Pipeline to migrate the data in bulk to S3.
C) Use Kinesis Firehose to stream all new and existing data into S3.
D) Snowball
ANSWER18:
D
Notes/Hint18:
As a general rule, if it takes more than one week to upload your data to AWS using the spare capacity of your existing Internet connection, then you should consider using Snowball. For example, if you have a 100 Mb connection that you can solely dedicate to transferring your data and need to transfer 100 TB of data, it takes more than 100 days to complete a data transfer over that connection. You can make the same transfer by using multiple Snowballs in about a week.
Question 19: You currently have an on-premises Oracle database and have decided to leverage AWS and use Aurora. You need to do this as quickly as possible. How do you achieve this?
A) It is not possible to migrate an on-premises database to AWS at this time.
B) Use AWS Data Pipeline to create a target database, migrate the database schema, set up the data replication process, initiate the full load and a subsequent change data capture and apply, and conclude with a switchover of your production environment to the new database once the target database is caught up with the source database.
C) Use AWS Database Migration Services and create a target database, migrate the database schema, set up the data replication process, initiate the full load and a subsequent change data capture and apply, and conclude with a switch-over of your production environment to the new database once the target database is caught up with the source database.
D) Use AWS Glue to crawl the on-premises database schemas and then migrate them into AWS with Data Pipeline jobs.
DMS can efficiently support this sort of migration using the steps outlined. While AWS Glue can help you crawl schemas and store metadata on them inside of Glue for later use, it isn’t the best tool for actually transitioning a database over to AWS itself. Similarly, while Data Pipeline is great for ETL and ELT jobs, it isn’t the best option to migrate a database over to AWS.
Question 20: A financial company uses Amazon EMR for its analytics workloads. During the company’s annual security audit, the security team determined that none of the EMR clusters’ root volumes are encrypted. The security team recommends the company encrypt its EMR clusters’ root volume as soon as possible. Which solution would meet these requirements?
A) Enable at-rest encryption for EMR File System (EMRFS) data in Amazon S3 in a security configuration. Re-create the cluster using the newly created security configuration.
B) Specify local disk encryption in a security configuration. Re-create the cluster using the newly created security configuration.
C) Detach the Amazon EBS volumes from the master node. Encrypt the EBS volume and attach it back to the master node.
D) Re-create the EMR cluster with LZO encryption enabled on all volumes.
ANSWER20:
B
Notes/Hint20:
Local disk encryption can be enabled as part of a security configuration to encrypt root and storage volumes.
Question 21: A company has a clickstream analytics solution using Amazon Elasticsearch Service. The solution ingests 2 TB of data from Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose and stores the latest data collected within 24 hours in an Amazon ES cluster. The cluster is running on a single index that has 12 data nodes and 3 dedicated master nodes. The cluster is configured with 3,000 shards and each node has 3 TB of EBS storage attached. The Data Analyst noticed that the query performance of Elasticsearch is sluggish, and some intermittent errors are produced by the Kinesis Data Firehose when it tries to write to the index. Upon further investigation, there were occasional JVMMemoryPressure errors found in Amazon ES logs.
What should be done to improve the performance of the Amazon Elasticsearch Service cluster?
A) Improve the cluster performance by increasing the number of master nodes of Amazon Elasticsearch.
B) Improve the cluster performance by increasing the number of shards of the Amazon Elasticsearch index.
C) Improve the cluster performance by decreasing the number of data nodes of Amazon Elasticsearch.
D) Improve the cluster performance by decreasing the number of shards of the Amazon Elasticsearch index.
ANSWER21:
D
Notes/Hint21:
“Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch clusters in AWS Cloud. Elasticsearch is a popular open-source search and analytics engine for use cases such as log analytics, real-time application monitoring, and clickstream analysis. With Amazon ES, you get direct access to the Elasticsearch APIs; existing code and applications work seamlessly with the service.
Each Elasticsearch index is split into some number of shards. You should decide the shard count before indexing your first document. The overarching goal of choosing a number of shards is to distribute an index evenly across all data nodes in the cluster. However, these shards shouldn’t be too large or too numerous.
A good rule of thumb is to try to keep a shard size between 10 – 50 GiB. Large shards can make it difficult for Elasticsearch to recover from failure, but because each shard uses some amount of CPU and memory, having too many small shards can cause performance issues and out of memory errors. In other words, shards should be small enough that the underlying Amazon ES instance can handle them, but not so small that they place needless strain on the hardware. Therefore the correct answer is: Improve the cluster performance by decreasing the number of shards of Amazon Elasticsearch index.
Question 26: Which service uses continuous data replication with high availability to consolidate databases into a petabyte-scale data warehouse by streaming data to amazon Redshift and Amazon S3?
Question 29: During your data preparation stage, the raw data has been enriched to support additional insights. You need to improve query performance and reduce costs of the final analytics solution.
Which data formats meet these requirements (SELECT TWO)
Question 30: Your small start-uo company is developing a data analytics solution. You need to clean and normalize large datasets, but you do not have developers with the skill set to write custom scripts. Which tool will help efficiently design and run the data preparation activities?
ANSWER30:
B
Notes/Hint30:
AWS Glue DataBrew
To be able to run analytics, build reports, or apply machine learning, you need to be sure the data you’re using is clean and in the right format. This data preparation step requires data analysts and data scientists to write custom code and perform many manual activities. When cleaning and normalizing data, it is helpful to first review the dataset to understand which possible values are present. Simple visualizations are helpful for determining whether correlations exist between the columns.
AWS Glue DataBrew is a visual data preparation tool that helps you clean and normalize data up to 80% faster so you can focus more on the business value you can get. DataBrew provides a visual interface that quickly connects to your data stored in Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), any JDBC-accessible data store, or data indexed by the AWS Glue Data Catalog. You can then explore the data, look for patterns, and apply transformations. For example, you can apply joins and pivots, merge different datasets, or use functions to manipulate data.
Question 30: In which scenario would you use AWS Glue jobs?
A) Analyze data in real-time as data comes into the data lake
B) Transform data in real-time as data comes into the data lake
C) Analyze data in batches on schedule or on demand
D) Transform data in batches on schedule or on demand.
ANSWER30:
D
Notes/Hint30:
An AWS Glue job encapsulates a script that connects to your source data, processes it, and then writes it out to your data target. Typically, a job runs extract, transform, and load (ETL) scripts. Jobs can also run general-purpose Python scripts (Python shell jobs.) AWS Glue triggers can start jobs based on a schedule or event, or on demand. You can monitor job runs to understand runtime metrics such as completion status, duration, and start tim
Question 31: Your data resides in multiple data stores, including Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and Amazon DynamoDB. You need to efficiently query the combined datasets.
Which tool can achieve this, using a single query, without moving data?
A) Amazon Athena Federated Query
B) Amazon Redshift Query Editor
C) SQl Workbench
D) AWS Glue DataBrew
ANSWER31:
A
Notes/Hint31:
With Amazon Athena Federated Query, you can run SQL queries across a variety of relational, non-relational, and custom data sources. You get a unified way to run SQL queries across various data stores.
Athena uses data source connectors that run on AWS Lambda to run federated queries. A data source connector is a piece of code that can translate between your target data source and Athena. You can think of a connector as an extension of Athena’s query engine. Pre-built Athena data source connectors exist for data sources like Amazon CloudWatch Logs, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon RDS, and JDBC-compliant relational data sources such MySQL and PostgreSQL under the Apache 2.0 license. You can also use the Athena Query Federation SDK to write custom connectors. To choose, configure, and deploy a data source connector to your account, you can use the Athena and Lambda consoles or the AWS Serverless Application Repository. After you deploy data source connectors, the connector is associated with a catalog that you can specify in SQL queries. You can combine SQL statements from multiple catalogs and span multiple data sources with a single query.
Question 32: Which benefit do you achieve by using AWS Lake Formation to build data lakes?
A) Build data lakes quickly
B) Simplify security management
C) Provide self-service access to data
D) All of the above
ANSWER32:
D
Notes/Hint32:
Build data lakes quickly
With Lake Formation, you can move, store, catalog, and clean your data faster. You simply point Lake Formation at your data sources, and Lake Formation crawls those sources and moves the data into your new Amazon S3 data lake. Lake Formation organizes data in S3 around frequently used query terms and into right-sized chunks to increase efficiency. Lake Formation also changes data into formats like Apache Parquet and ORC for faster analytics. In addition, Lake Formation has built-in machine learning to deduplicate and find matching records (two entries that refer to the same thing) to increase data quality.
Simplify security management
You can use Lake Formation to centrally define security, governance, and auditing policies in one place, versus doing these tasks per service. You can then enforce those policies for your users across their analytics applications. Your policies are consistently implemented, eliminating the need to manually configure them across security services like AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) and AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), storage services like Amazon S3, and analytics and machine learning services like Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, and (in beta) Amazon EMR for Apache Spark. This reduces the effort in configuring policies across services and provides consistent enforcement and compliance.
Provide self-service access to data
With Lake Formation, you build a data catalog that describes the different available datasets along with which groups of users have access to each. This makes your users more productive by helping them find the right dataset to analyze. By providing a catalog of your data with consistent security enforcement, Lake Formation makes it easier for your analysts and data scientists to use their preferred analytics service. They can use Amazon EMR for Apache Spark (in beta), Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Athena on diverse datasets that are now housed in a single data lake. Users can also combine these services without having to move data between silos.
Question 33: What are the three stages to set up a data lake using AWS Lake Formation? (SELECT THREE)
A) Register the storage location
B) Create a database
C) Populate the database
D) Grant permissions
ANSWER33:
A B and D
Notes/Hint33:
Register the storage location
Lake Formation manages access to designated storage locations within Amazon S3. Register the storage locations that you want to be part of the data lake.
Create a database
Lake Formation organizes data into a catalog of logical databases and tables. Create one or more databases and then automatically generate tables during data ingestion for common workflows.
Grant permissions
Lake Formation manages access for IAM users, roles, and Active Directory users and groups via flexible database, table, and column permissions. Grant permissions to one or more resources for your selected users.
Question 34: Which of the following AWS Lake Formation tasks are performed by the AWS Glue service? (SELECT THREE)
A) ETL code creation and job monitoring
B) Blueprints to create workflows
C) Data catalog and serverless architecture
D) Simplify securty management
ANSWER34:
A B and C
Notes/Hint34:
Lake Formation leverages a shared infrastructure with AWS Glue, including console controls, ETL code creation and job monitoring, blueprints to create workflows for data ingest, the same data catalog, and a serverless architecture. While AWS Glue focuses on these types of functions, Lake Formation encompasses all AWS Glue features AND provides additional capabilities designed to help build, secure, and manage a data lake. See the AWS Glue features page for more de
Question 35: A digital media customer needs to quickly build a data lake solution for the data housed in a PostgreSQL database. As a solutions architect, what service and feature would meet this requirement?
A) Copy PostgreSQL data to an Amazon S3 bucket and build a data lake using AWS Lake Formation
B) Use AWS Lake Formation blueprints
C) Build a data lake manually
D) Build an analytics solution by directly accessing the database.
ANSWER35:
B
Notes/Hint35:
A blueprint is a data management template that enables you to easily ingest data into a data lake. Lake Formation provides several blueprints, each for a predefined source type, such as a relational database or AWS CloudTrail logs. From a blueprint, you can create a workflow. Workflows consist of AWS Glue crawlers, jobs, and triggers that are generated to orchestrate the loading and update of data. Blueprints take the data source, data target, and schedule as input to configure the workflow.
Question 36: AWS Lake Formation has a set of suggested personas and IAM permissions. Which is a required persona?
A) Data lake administrator
B) Data engineer
C) Data analyst
D) Business analyst
ANSWER36:
A
Notes/Hint36:
Data lake administrator (Required)
A user who can register Amazon S3 locations, access the Data Catalog, create databases, create and run workflows, grant Lake Formation permissions to other users, and view AWS CloudTrail logs. The user has fewer IAM permissions than the IAM administrator but enough to administer the data lake. Cannot add other data lake administrators.
Data engineer (Optional) A user who can create and run crawlers and workflows and grant Lake Formation permissions on the Data Catalog tables that the crawlers and workflows create.
Data analyst (Optional) A user who can run queries against the data lake using, for example, Amazon Athena. The user has only enough permissions to run queries.
Business analyst (Optional) Generally, an end-user application specific persona that would query data and resource using a workflow role.
Question 37: Which three types of blueprints does AWS Lake Formation support? (SELECT THREE)
AWS Lake Formation blueprints simplify and automate creating workflows. Lake Formation provides the following types of blueprints:
• Database snapshot – Loads or reloads data from all tables into the data lake from a JDBC source. You can exclude some data from the source based on an exclude pattern.
• Incremental database – Loads only new data into the data lake from a JDBC source, based on previously set bookmarks. You specify the individual tables in the JDBC source database to include. For each table, you choose the bookmark columns and bookmark sort order to keep track of data that has previously been loaded. The first time that you run an incremental database blueprint against a set of tables, the workflow loads all data from the tables and sets bookmarks for the next incremental database blueprint run. You can therefore use an incremental database blueprint instead of the database snapshot blueprint to load all data, provided that you specify each table in the data source as a paramete
• Log file – Bulk loads data from log file sources, including AWS CloudTrail, Elastic Load Balancing logs, and Application Load Balancer logs.
Question 38: Which one of the following is the best description of the capabilities of Amazon QuickSight?
A) Automated configuration service build on AWS Glue
B) Fast, serverless, business intelligence service
C) Fast, simple, cost-effective data warehousing
D) Simple, scalable, and serverless data integration
ANSWER38:
B C and D
Notes/Hint38:
B. Scalable, serverless business intelligence service is the correct choice.
See the brief descriptions of several AWS Analytics services below:
AWS Lake Formation Build a secure data lake in days using Glue blueprints and workflows
Amazon QuickSight Scalable, serverless, embeddable, ML-powered BI Service built for the cloud
Amazon Redshift Analyze all of your data with the fastest and most widely used cloud data warehouse
AWS Glue Simple, scalable, and serverless data integration
Question 39: Which benefits are provided by Amazon Redshift? (Select TWO)
A) Analyze Data stored in your data lake
B) Maintain performance at scale
C) Focus effort on Data warehouse administration
D) Store all the data to meet analytics need
E) Amazon Redshift includes enterprise-level security and compliance features.
ANSWER38:
A and B
Notes/Hint38:
A is correct – With Amazon Redshift, you can analyze all your data, including exabytes of data stored in your Amazon S3 data lake.
B is correct – Amazon Redshift provides consistent performance at scale.
• C is incorrect – Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehouse solution. It includes automations to reduce the administrative overhead traditionally associated with data warehouses. When using Amazon Redshift, you can focus your development effort on strategic data analytics solutions.
• D is incorrect – With Amazon Redshift features—such as Amazon Redshift Spectrum, materialized views, and federated query—you can analyze data where it is stored in your data lake or AWS databases. This capability provides flexibility to meet new analytics requirements without the cost, time, or complexity of moving large volumes of data between solutions.
• Answer E is incorrect – Amazon Redshift includes enterprise-level security and compliance features.
Djamga Data Sciences Big Data – Data Analytics Youtube Playlist
Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician. – Josh Wills
Data scientists apply sophisticated quantitative and computer science skills to both structure and analyze massive stores or continuous streams of unstructured data, with the intent to derive insights and prescribe action. – Burtch Works Data Science Salary Survey, May 2018
More than anything, what data scientists do is make discoveries while swimming in data… In a competitive landscape where challenges keep changing and data never stop flowing, data scientists help decision makers shift from ad hoc analysis to an ongoing conversation with data. – Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century, Harvard Business Review
Do All Data Scientists Hold Graduate Degrees?
Data scientists are highly educated. With exceedingly rare exception, every data scientist holds at least an undergraduate degree. 91% of data scientists in 2018 held advanced degrees. The remaining 9% all held undergraduate degrees. Furthermore,
25% of data scientists hold a degree in statistics or mathematics,
20% have a computer science degree,
an additional 20% hold a degree in the natural sciences, and
18% hold an engineering degree.
The remaining 17% of surveyed data scientists held degrees in business, social science, or economics.
How Are Data Scientists Different From Data Analysts?
Broadly speaking, the roles differ in scope: data analysts build reports with narrow, well-defined KPIs. Data scientists often to work on broader business problems without clear solutions. Data scientists live on the edge of the known and unknown.
We’ll leave you with a concrete example: A data analyst cares about profit margins. A data scientist at the same company cares about market share.
How Is Data Science Used in Medicine?
Data science in healthcare best translates to biostatistics. It can be quite different from data science in other industries as it usually focuses on small samples with several confounding variables.
How Is Data Science Used in Manufacturing?
Data science in manufacturing is vast; it includes everything from supply chain optimization to the assembly line.
What are data scientists paid?
Most people are attracted to data science for the salary. It’s true that data scientists garner high salaries compares to their peers. There is data to support this: The May 2018 edition of the BurtchWorks Data Science Salary Survey, annual salary statistics were
Note the above numbers do not reflect total compensation which often includes standard benefits and may include company ownership at high levels.
How will data science evolve in the next 5 years?
Will AI replace data scientists?
What is the workday like for a data scientist?
It’s common for data scientists across the US to work 40 hours weekly. While company culture does dictate different levels of work life balance, it’s rare to see data scientists who work more than they want. That’s the virtue of being an expensive resource in a competitive job market.
How do I become a Data Scientist?
The roadmap given to aspiring data scientists can be boiled down to three steps:
Earning an undergraduate and/or advanced degree in computer science, statistics, or mathematics,
Building their portfolio of SQL, Python, and R skills, and
Getting related work experience through technical internships.
All three require a significant time and financial commitment.
There used to be a saying around datascience: The road into a data science starts with two years of university-level math.
What Should I Learn? What Order Do I Learn Them?
This answer assumes your academic background ends with a HS diploma in the US.
Python
Differential Calculus
Integral Calculus
Multivariable Calculus
Linear Algebra
Probability
Statistics
Some follow up questions and answers:
Why Python first?
Python is a general purpose language. R is used primarily by statisticians. In the likely scenario that you decide data science requires too much time, effort, and money, Python will be more valuable than your R skills. It’s preparing you to fail, sure, but in the same way a savings account is preparing you to fail.
When do I start working with data?
You’ll start working with data when you’ve learned enough Python to do so. Whether you’ll have the tools to have any fun is a much more open-ended question.
How long will this take me?
Assuming self-study and average intelligence, 3-5 years from start to finish.
How Do I Learn Python?
If you don’t know the first thing about programming, start with MIT’s course in the curated list.
These modules are the standard tools for data analysis in Python:
Data Scientist with Python Career Track | DataCamp The first courses are free, but unlimited access costs $29/month. Users usually report a positive experience, and it’s one of the better hands-on ways to learn Python.
Data Scientist with R Career Track | DataCamp The first courses are free, but unlimited access costs $29/month. Users usually report a positive experience, and it’s one of the few hands-on ways to learn R.
R Inferno Learners with a CS background will appreciate this free handbook explaining how and why R behaves the way that it does.
How Do I Learn SQL?
Prioritize the basics of SQL. i.e. when to use functions like POW, SUM, RANK; the computational complexity of the different kinds of joins.
Concepts like relational algebra, when to use clustered/non-clustered indexes, etc. are useful, but (almost) never come up in interviews.
You absolutely do not need to understand administrative concepts like managing permissions.
Finally, there are numerous query engines and therefore numerous dialects of SQL. Use whichever dialect is supported in your chosen resource. There’s not much difference between them, so it’s easy to learn another dialect after you’ve learned one.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), calculus is the lament of many students, and so resources for it are plentiful. Khan Academy mimics lectures very well, and Paul’s Online Math Notes are a terrific reference full of practice problems and solutions.
Calculus, however, is not just calculus. For those unfamiliar with US terminology,
Calculus I is differential calculus.
Calculus II is integral calculus.
Calculus III is multivariable calculus.
Calculus IV is differential equations.
Differential and integral calculus are both necessary for probability and statistics, and should be completed first.
Multivariable calculus can be paired with linear algebra, but is also required.
Differential equations is where consensus falls apart. The short it is, they’re all but necessary for mathematical modeling, but not everyone does mathematical modeling. It’s another tool in the toolbox.
Curated Threads & Resources about Data Science and Data Analytics
Probability is not friendly to beginners. Definitions are rooted in higher mathematics, notation varies from source to source, and solutions are frequently unintuitive. Probability may present the biggest barrier to entry in data science.
It’s best to pick a single primary source and a community for help. If you can spend the money, register for a university or community college course and attend in person.
Practice questions on Leetcode which has both SQL and traditional data structures/algorithm questions
Review Brilliant for math and statistics questions.
SQL Zoo and Mode Analytics both offer various SQL exercises you can solve in your browser.
Tips:
Before you start coding, read through all the questions. This allows your unconscious mind to start working on problems in the background.
Start with the hardest problem first, when you hit a snag, move to the simpler problem before returning to the harder one.
Focus on passing all the test cases first, then worry about improving complexity and readability.
If you’re done and have a few minutes left, go get a drink and try to clear your head. Read through your solutions one last time, then submit.
It’s okay to not finish a coding challenge. Sometimes companies will create unreasonably tedious coding challenges with one-week time limits that require 5–10 hours to complete. Unless you’re desperate, you can always walk away and spend your time preparing for the next interview.
Remember, interviewing is a skill that can be learned, just like anything else. Hopefully, this article has given you some insight on what to expect in a data science interview loop.
The process also isn’t perfect and there will be times that you fail to impress an interviewer because you don’t possess some obscure piece of knowledge. However, with repeated persistence and adequate preparation, you’ll be able to land a data science job in no time!
What does the Airbnb data science interview process look like? [Coming soon]
What does the Facebook data science interview process look like? [Coming soon]
What does the Uber data science interview process look like? [Coming soon]
What does the Microsoft data science interview process look like? [Coming soon]
What does the Google data science interview process look like? [Coming soon]
What does the Netflix data science interview process look like? [Coming soon]
What does the Apple data science interview process look like? [Coming soon]
Real life enterprise databases are orders of magnitude more complex than the “customers, products, orders” examples used as teaching tools. SQL as a language is actually, IMO, a relatively simple language (the db administration component can get complex, but mostly data scientists aren’t doing that anyways). SQL is an incredibly important skill though for any DS role. I think when people emphasize SQL, what they really are talking about is the ability to write queries that interrogate the data and discover the nuances behind how it is collected and/or manipulated by an application before it is written to the dB. For example, is the employee’s phone number their current phone number or does the database store a history of all previous phone numbers? Critically important questions for understanding the nature of your data, and it doesn’t necessarily deal with statistics! The level of syntax required to do this is not that sophisticated, you can get pretty damn far with knowledge of all the joins, group by/analytical functions, filtering and nesting queries. In many cases, the data is too large to just select * and dump into a csv to load into pandas, so you start with SQL against the source. In my mind it’s more important for “SQL skills” to know how to generate hypotheses (that will build up to answering your business question) that can be investigated via a query than it is to be a master of SQL’s syntax. Just my two cents though!
Data Source: Made in Google Sheets using data from this USA Today article (for the number of arrests by arrestee’s home state) and this spreadsheet of the results of the 2020 Census (for the population of each state and DC in 2020, which was used as the denominator in calculating arrests/million people).
A data warehouse is specially designed for data analytics, which identifies relationships and trends across large amounts of data. A database is used to capture and store data, such as the details of a transaction. Unlike a data warehouse, a data lake is a centralized repository for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. A data warehouse organizes data in a tabular format (or schema) that enables SQL queries on the data. But not all applications require data to be in tabular format. Some applications can access data in the data lake even if it is “semi-structured” or unstructured. These include big data analytics, full-text search, and machine learning.
An AWS data lake only has a storage charge for the data. No servers are necessary for the data to be stored and accessed. In the case of Amazon Athena, also, there are no additional charges for processing. Data warehouse enable fast queries of structured data from transactional systems for batch reports, business intelligence, and visualization use cases. A data lake stores data without regard to its structure. Data scientists, data analysts, and business analysts use the data lake. They support use cases such as machine learning, predictive analytics, and data discovery and profiling.
Data definition language (DDL) refers to the subset of SQL commands that define data structures and objects such as databases, tables, and views. DDL commands include the following:
• CREATE: used to create a new object.
• DROP: used to delete an object.
• ALTER: used to modify an object.
• RENAME: used to rename an object.
• TRUNCATE: used to remove all rows from a table without deleting the table itself.
Businesses are responsible to identify and limit disclosure of sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) or proprietary information. Identifying and masking sensitive information is time consuming, and becomes more complex in data lakes with various data sources and formats and broad user access to published data sets.
Amazon Macie is a fully managed data security and privacy service that uses machine learning and pattern matching to discover sensitive data in AWS. Macie includes a set of managed data identifiers which automatically detect common types of sensitive data. Examples of managed data identifiers include keywords, credentials, financial information, health information, and PII. You can also configure custom data identifiers using keywords or regular expressions to highlight organizational proprietary data, intellectual property, and other specific scenarios. You can develop security controls that operate at scale to monitor and remediate risk automatically when Macie detects sensitive data. You can use AWS Lambda functions to automatically turn on encryption for an Amazon S3 bucket where Macie detects sensitive data. Or automatically tag datasets containing sensitive data, for inclusion in orchestrated data transformations or audit reports.
Amazon Macie can be integrated into the data ingestion and processing steps of your data pipeline. This approach avoids inadvertent disclosures in published data sets by detecting and addressing the sensitive data as it is ingested and processed. Building the automated detection and processing of sensitive data into your ETL pipelines simplifies and standardizes handling of sensitive data at scale.
AWS Glue DataBrew is a visual data preparation tool that simplifies cleaning and normalizing datasets in preparation for use in analytics and machine learning.
• Profile data quality, identifying patterns and automatically detecting anomalies.
• Clean and normalize data using over 250 pre-built transformations, without writing code.
• Visually map the lineage of your data to understand data sources and transformation history.
• Save data cleaning and normalization workflows for automatic application to new data.
Data processed in AWS Glue DataBrew is immediately available for use in analytics and machine learning projects.
Learn more about the built-in transformations available in AWS Glue DataBrew in the Recipe actions reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/databrew/latest/dg/recipe-actions-reference.html
AWS Glue is a fully managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) service that makes it simple and cost-effective to categorize your data, clean it, enrich it, and move it reliably between various data stores and data streams. AWS Glue consists of a central metadata repository known as the AWS Glue Data Catalog, an ETL engine that automatically generates Python or Scala code, and a flexible scheduler that handles dependency resolution, job monitoring, and retries. AWS Glue can run your ETL jobs as new data arrives. For example, you can use an AWS Lambda function to trigger your ETL jobs to run as soon as new data becomes available in Amazon S3. You can also register this new dataset in the
AWS Glue Data Catalog as part of your ETL jobs.
AWS Glue is serverless, so there’s no infrastructure to set up or manage.
AWS Glue Data Catalog The AWS Glue Data Catalog provides a uniform repository where disparate systems can store and find metadata to keep track of data in data silos, and use that metadata to query and transform the data. Once the data is cataloged, it is immediately available for search and query using Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.
You can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to control access to the data sources managed by the AWS Glue Data Catalog. The Data Catalog also provides comprehensive audit and governance capabilities, with schema-change tracking and data access controls.
AWS Glue crawler
AWS Glue crawlers can scan data in all kinds of repositories, classify it, extract schema information from it, and store the metadata automatically in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.
AWS Glue ETL
AWS Glue can run your ETL jobs as new data arrives. For example, you can use an AWS Lambda function to trigger your ETL jobs to run as soon as new data becomes available in Amazon S3. You can also register this new dataset in the AWS Glue Data Catalog as part of your ETL jobs.
AWS Glue Studio
AWS Glue Studio provides a graphical interface to create, run, and monitor extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs in AWS Glue. You can visually compose data transformation workflows and seamlessly run them on AWS Glue’s Apache Spark-based serverless ETL engine. AWS Glue Studio also offers tools to monitor ETL workflows and validate that they are operating as intended.
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to set up or manage, and you can start analyzing data immediately. You don’t even need to load your data into Athena, it works directly with data stored in S3. To get started, just log into the Amazon Athena console, define your schema, and start querying. Athena uses Presto with full standard SQL support. It works with a variety of standard data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, Apache Parquet and Avro. While Athena is ideal for quick, ad-hoc querying, it can also handle complex analysis, including large joins, window functions, and arrays.
Amazon Athena helps you analyze data stored in Amazon S3. You can use Athena to run ad-hoc queries using ANSI SQL, without the need to aggregate or load the data into Athena. It can process unstructured, semi-structured, and structured datasets. Examples include CSV, JSON, Avro or columnar data formats such as Apache Parquet and Apache ORC. Athena integrates with Amazon QuickSight for easy visualization. You can also use Athena to generate reports or to explore data with business intelligence tools or SQL clients, connected via an ODBC or JDBC driver.
The tables and databases that you work with in Athena to run queries are based on metadata. Metadata is data about the underlying data in your dataset. How that metadata describes your dataset is called the schema. For example, a table name, the column names in the table, and the data type of each column are schema, saved as metadata, that describe an underlying dataset. In Athena, we call a system for organizing metadata a data catalog or a metastore. The combination of a dataset and the data catalog that describes it is called a data source.
The relationship of metadata to an underlying dataset depends on the type of data source that you work with. Relational data sources like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server tightly integrate the metadata with the dataset. In these systems, the metadata is most often written when the data is written. Other data sources, like those built using Hive, allow you to define metadata on-the-fly when you read the dataset. The dataset can be in a variety of formats; for example, CSV, JSON, Parquet, or Avro.
Lake Formation is a fully managed service that enables data engineers, security officers, and data analysts to build, secure, manage, and use your data lake
To build your data lake in AWS Lake Formation, you must register an Amazon S3 location as a data lake. The Lake Formation service must have permission to write to the AWS Glue Data Catalog and to Amazon S3 locations in the data lake.
Next, identify the data sources to be ingested. AWS Lake formation can move data into your data lake from existing Amazon S3 data stores. Lake Formation can collect and organize datasets, such as logs from AWS CloudTrail, AWS CloudFront, detailed billing reports, or Elastic Load Balancing. You can ingest bulk or incremental datasets from relational, NoSQL, or non-relational databases. Lake Formation can ingest data from databases running in Amazon RDS or hosted in Amazon EC2. You can also ingest data from on-premises databases using Java Database Connectivity JDBC connectors. You can use custom AWS Glue jobs to load data from other databases or to ingest streaming data using Amazon Kinesis or Amazon DynamoDB.
AWS Lake Formation manages AWS Glue crawlers, AWS Glue ETL jobs, the AWS Glue Data Catalog, security settings, and access control:
• Lake Formation is an automated build environment based on AWS Glue.
• Lake Formation coordinates AWS Glue crawlers to identify datasets within the specified data stores and collect metadata for each dataset
• Lake Formation can perform transformations on your data, such as rewriting and organizing data into a consistent, analytics-friendly format. Lake Formation creates transformation templates and schedules AWS Glue jobs to prepare and optimize your data for analytics. Lake Formation also helps clean your data using FindMatches, an ML-based deduplication transform. AWS Glue jobs encapsulate scripts, such as ETL scripts, which connect to source data, process it, and write it out to a data target. AWS Glue triggers can start jobs based on a schedule or event, or on demand. AWS Glue workflows orchestrate AWS ETL jobs, crawlers, and triggers. You can define a workflow manually or use a blueprint based on commonly ingested data source types.
• The AWS Glue Data Catalog within the data lake persistently stores the metadata from raw and processed datasets. Metadata about data sources and targets is in the form of databases and tables. Tables store information about the underlying data, including schema information, partition information, and data location. Databases are collections of tables. Each AWS account has one data catalog per AWS Region.
• Lake Formation provides centralized access controls for your data lake, including security policy-based rules for users and applications by role. You can authenticate the users and roles using AWS IAM. Once the rules are defined, Lake Formation enforces them with table-and column-level granularity for users of Amazon Redshift Spectrum and Amazon Athena. Rules are enforced at the table-level in AWS Glue, which is normally accessed for administrators.
• Lake Formation leverages the encryption capabilities of Amazon S3 for data in the data lake. This approach provides automatic server-side encryption with keys managed by the AWS Key Management Service (KMS). S3 encrypts data in transit when replicating across Regions. You can separate accounts for source and destination Regions to further protect your data
Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-scale business intelligence (BI) service. In a single data dashboard, QuickSight gives decision-makers the opportunity to explore and interpret information in an interactive visual environment. QuickSight can include AWS data, third-party data, big data, spreadsheet data, SaaS data, B2B data, and more. QuickSight delivers fast and responsive query performance by using a robust in-memory engine (SPICE).
Scale from tens to tens of thousands of users
Amazon QuickSight has a serverless architecture that automatically scales to tens of thousands of users without the need to setup, configure, or manage your own servers.
Embed BI dashboards in your applications
With QuickSight, you can quickly embed interactive dashboards into your applications, websites, and portals.
Access deeper insights with Machine Learning
QuickSight leverages the proven machine learning (ML) capabilities of AWS. BI teams can perform advanced analytics without prior data science experience.
Ask questions of your data, receive answers
With QuickSight, you can quickly get answers to business questions asked in natural language with QuickSight’s new ML-powered natural language query capability, Q.
SPICE is the Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine in QuickSight.
SPICE is the Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine in QuickSight. SPICE is engineered to rapidly perform advanced calculations and serve data. The storage and processing capacity available in SPICE speeds up the analytical queries that you run against your imported data. By using SPICE, you save time because you don’t need to retrieve the data every time that you change an analysis or update a visual.
When you import data into a dataset rather than using a direct SQL query, it becomes SPICE data because of how it’s stored. SPICE is the Amazon QuickSight Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine. It’s engineered to rapidly perform advanced calculations and serve data. In Enterprise edition, data stored in SPICE is encrypted at rest.
When you create or edit a dataset, you choose to use either SPICE or a direct query, unless the dataset contains uploaded files. Importing (also called ingesting) your data into SPICE can save time and money:
• Your analytical queries process faster.
• You don’t need to wait for a direct query to process.
• Data stored in SPICE can be reused multiple times without incurring additional costs. If you use a data source that charges per query, you’re charged for querying the data when you first create the dataset and later when you refresh the dataset.
You can use AWS services as building blocks to build serverless data lakes and analytics pipelines. You can apply best practices on how to ingest, store, transform, and analyze structured and unstructured data at scale. Achieve the scale without needing to manage any storage or compute infrastructure. A decoupled, component-driven architecture allows you to start small and scale out slowly. You can quickly add new purpose-built components to one of six architecture layers to address new requirements and data sources.
This data lake-centric architecture can support business intelligence (BI) dashboarding, interactive SQL queries, big data processing, predictive analytics, and machine learning use cases.
• The ingestion layer includes protocols to support ingestion of structured, unstructured, or streaming data from a variety of sources.
• The storage layer provides durable, scalable, secure, and cost-effective storage of datasets across ingestion and processing.
• The landing zone stores data as ingested.
• Data engineers run initial quality checks to validate and cleanse data in the landing zone, producing the raw dataset.
• The processing layer creates curated datasets by further cleansing, normalizing, standardizing, and enriching data from the raw zone. The curated dataset is typically stored in formats that support performant and cost-effective access by the consumption layer.
• The catalog layer stores business and technical metadata about the datasets hosted in the storage layer.
• The consumption layer contains functionality for Search, Analytics, and Visualization. It integrates with the data lake storage, cataloging, and security layers. This integration supports analysis methods such as SQL, batch analytics, BI dashboards, reporting, and ML.
• The security and monitoring layer protects data within the storage layer and other resources in the data lake. This layer includes access control, encryption, network protection, usage monitoring, and auditing.
The main challenge with a data lake architecture is that raw data is stored with no oversight of the contents. To make the data usable, you must have defined mechanisms to catalog and secure the data. Without these mechanisms, data cannot be found or trusted, resulting in a “data swamp.” Meeting the needs of diverse stakeholders requires data lakes to have governance, semantic consistency, and access controls.
The Analytics Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework covers common analytics applications scenarios, including data lakes. It identifies key elements to help you architect your data lake according to best practices, including the following configuration notes:
• Decide on a location for data lake ingestion (that is, an S3 bucket). Select a frequency and isolation mechanism that meets your business needs.
• For Tier 2 Data, partition the data with keys that align to common query filter
. This enables pruning by common analytics tools that work on raw data files and increases performance
• Choose optimal file sizes to reduce Amazon S3 round trips during compute environment ingestion. Recommended: 512 MB – 1 GB in a columnar format (ORC/Parquet) per partition.
• Perform frequent scheduled compactions that align to the optimal file sizes noted previously. For example, compact into daily partitions if hourly files are too small.
• For data with frequent updates or deletes (that is, mutable data), either: o Temporarily store replicated data to a database like Amazon Redshift, Apache Hive, or Amazon RDS. Once the data becomes static, and then offload it to Amazon S3. Or, o Append the data to delta files per partition and compact it on a scheduled basis. You can use AWS Glue or Apache Spark on Amazon EMR for this processing.
With Tier 2 and Tier 3 Data being stored in Amazon S3, partition data using a high cardinality key. This is honored by Presto, Apache Hive, and Apache Spark and improves the query filter performance on that key
• Sort data in each partition with a secondary key that aligns to common filter queries. This allows query engines to skip files and get to requested data faster. For more information on the Analytics Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework, visit https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/analytics-lens/data-lake.html
References:
For additional information on AWS data lakes and data analytics architectures, visit:
• AWS Well-Architected: Learn, measure, and build using architectural best practices: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected
• AWS Lake Formation: Build a secure data lake in days: https://aws.amazon.com/lake-formation
• Getting Started with Amazon S3: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/getting-started
• Security in AWS Lake Formation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lake-formation/latest/dg/security.html
AWS Lake Formation: How It Works: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lake-formation/latest/dg/how-it-works.html
• AWS Lake Formation Dashboard: https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/lakeformation
• Data Lake Storage on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/products/storage/data-lake-storage/
• Building Big Data Storage Solutions (Data Lakes) for Maximum Flexibility: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/building-data-lakes/building-data-lake-aws.html
• Data Ingestion Methods: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/building-data-lakes/data-ingestion-methods.html
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Networking 101 and Top 20 AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty Questions and Answers Dumps
The AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C00) examination is intended for individuals who perform complex networking tasks. This examination validates advanced technical skills and experience in designing and implementing AWS and hybrid IT network architectures at scale.
Networking 101 and Top 20 AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty Questions and Answers Dumps
The exam covers the following domains:
Domain 1: Design and Implement Hybrid IT Network Architectures at Scale – 23%
Domain 2: Design and Implement AWS Networks – 29%
Domain 3: Automate AWS Tasks – 8%
Domain 4: Configure Network Integration with Application Services – 15%
Domain 5: Design and Implement for Security and Compliance – 12%
Domain 6: Manage, Optimize, and Troubleshoot the Network – 13%
Below are the top 20 Top 20 AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty Practice Quiz including Questions and Answers and References –
Question 1: What is the relationship between private IPv4 addresses and Elastic IP addresses?
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Question 2: A company’s on-premises network has an IP address range of 11.11.0.0/16. Only IPs within this network range can be used for inter-server communication. The IP address range 11.11.253.0/24 has been allocated for the cloud. A network engineer needs to design a VPC on AWS. The servers within the VPC should be able to communicate with hosts both on the internet and on-premises through a VPN connection. Which combination of configuration steps meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)
A) Set up the VPC with an IP address range of 11.11.253.0/24.
B) Set up the VPC with an RFC 1918 private IP address range (for example, 10.10.10.0/24). Set up a NAT gateway to do translation between 10.10.10.0/24 and 11.11.253.0/24 for all outbound traffic.
C) Set up a VPN connection between a virtual private gateway and an on-premises router. Set the virtual private gateway as the default gateway for all traffic. Configure the on-premises router to forward traffic to the internet.
D) Set up a VPN connection between a virtual private gateway and an on-premises router. Set the virtual private gateway as the default gateway for traffic destined to 11.11.0.0/24. Add a VPC subnet route to point the default gateway to an internet gateway for internet traffic.
E) Set up the VPC with an RFC 1918 private IP address range (for example, 10.10.10.0/24). Set the virtual private gateway to do a source IP translation of all outbound packets to 11.11.0.0/16.
ANSWER2:
A and C
Notes/Hint2:
The VPC needs to use a CIDR block in the assigned range (and be non-overlapping with the data center). All traffic not destined for the VPC is routed to the virtual private gateway (that route is assumed) and must then be forwarded to the internet when it arrives on-premises. B and E are incorrect because they are not in the assigned range (non-RFC 1918 addresses can be used in a VPC). D is incorrect because it directs traffic to the internet through the internet gateway.
Question 3: Tasks running on Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) can use which mode for container networking (allocating an elastic networking interface to each running task, providing a dynamic private IP address and internal DNS name)?
ANSWER3:
A
Notes/Hint3:
Tasks running an Amazon EC2 Container Service can use awsvpc for container networking.
Question 4: A network engineer needs to design a solution for an application running on an Amazon EC2 instance to connect to a publicly accessible Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance in a different VPC and Region. Security requirements mandate that the traffic not traverse the internet. Which configuration will ensure that the instances communicate privately without routing traffic over the internet?
A) Create a peering connection between the VPCs and update the routing tables to route traffic between the VPCs. Enable DNS resolution support for the VPC peering connection. Configure the application to connect to the DNS endpoint of the DB instance.
B) Create a gateway endpoint to the DB instance. Update the routing tables in the application VPC to route traffic to the gateway endpoint.
C) Configure a transit VPC to route traffic between the VPCs privately. Configure the application to connect to the DNS endpoint of the DB instance.
D) Create a NAT gateway in the same subnet as the EC2 instances. Update the routing tables in the application VPC to route traffic through the NAT gateway to the DNS endpoint of the DB instance.
ANSWER4:
A
Notes/Hint4:
Configuring DNS resolution on the VPC peering connection will allow queries from the application VPC to resolve to the private IP of the DB instance and prevent routing over the internet. B is incorrect because Amazon RDS is not supported by gateway endpoints. C and D are incorrect because the database endpoint will resolve to a public IP and the traffic will go over the internet.
Question 5: Management has decided that your firm will implement an AWS hybrid architecture. Given that decision, which of the following is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS Cloud?
ANSWER5:
B
Notes/Hint5:
AWS Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS Cloud.
Question 6: A company has implemented a critical environment on AWS. For compliance purposes, a network engineer needs to verify that the Amazon EC2 instances are using a specific approved security group and belong to a specific VPC. The configuration history of the instances should be recorded and, in the event of any compliance issues, the instances should be automatically stopped. What should be done to meet these requirements?
A) Enable AWS CloudTrail and create a custom Amazon CloudWatch alarm to perform the required checks. When the CloudWatch alarm is in a failed state, trigger the stop this instance action to stop the noncompliant EC2 instance.
B) Configure a scheduled event with AWS CloudWatch Events to invoke an AWS Lambda function to perform the required checks. In the event of a noncompliant resource, invoke another Lambda function to stop the EC2 instance.
C) Configure an event with AWS CloudWatch Events for an EC2 instance state-change notification that triggers an AWS Lambda function to perform the required checks. In the event of a noncompliant resource, invoke another Lambda function to stop the EC2 instance.
D) Enable AWS Config and create custom AWS Config rules to perform the required checks. In the event of a noncompliant resource, use a remediation action to execute an AWS Systems Manager document to stop the EC2 instance.
ANSWER6:
D
Notes/Hint6:
AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in a user’s AWS account. Using AWS Config rules with AWS Systems Manager Automation documents can automatically remediate noncompliant resources
Question 8: A company is extending its on-premises data center to AWS. Peak traffic is expected to range between 1 Gbps and 2 Gbps. A network engineer must ensure that there is sufficient bandwidth between AWS and the data center to handle peak traffic. The solution should be highly available and cost effective. What should be implemented to address these needs?
A) Deploy a 10 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connection with an IPsec VPN backup.
B) Deploy two 1 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connections in a link aggregation group.
C) Deploy two 1 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connections in a link aggregation group to two different Direct Connect locations.
D) Deploy a 10 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connection to two different Direct Connect locations.
ANSWER8:
C
Notes/Hint8:
Two AWS Direct Connect connections with link aggregation groups in two different Direct Connect locations are required to provide sufficient bandwidth with high availability. If one Direct Connect location experiences a failure, the two Direct Connect connections in the second Direct Connect location will provide backup. All of the other options would be unable to handle the peak traffic if a connection was lost.
Question 10: A network engineer needs to limit access to the company’s Amazon S3 bucket to specific source networks. What should the network engineer do to accomplish this?
A) Create an ACL on the S3 bucket, limiting access to the CIDR blocks of the specified networks.
B) Create a bucket policy on the S3 bucket, limiting access to the CIDR blocks of the specified networks using a condition statement.
C) Create a security group allowing inbound access to the CIDR blocks of the specified networks and apply the security group to the S3 bucket.
D) Create a security group allowing inbound access to the CIDR blocks of the specified networks, create a S3 VPC endpoint, and apply the security group to the VPC endpoint.
ANSWER10:
B
Notes/Hint10:
An Amazon S3 bucket policy that uses a condition statement will support restricting access if the request originates from a specific range of IP addresses. A is incorrect because an S3 ACL does not support IP restrictions. C is incorrect because security groups cannot be applied to S3 buckets. D is incorrect because security groups cannot be applied to an S3 VPC endpoint.
Question 11: AWS Direct Connect has two separate billable charges: port-hours and data transfer. Pricing is per port-hour consumed for each port type. How are partial port-hours handled?
Question 12: A company’s compliance requirements specify that web application logs must be collected and analyzed to identify any malicious activity. A network engineer also needs to monitor for remote attempts to change the network interface of web instances. Which services and configurations will meet these requirements?
A) Install the Amazon CloudWatch Logs agent on the web instances to collect application logs. Use VPC Flow Logs to send data to CloudWatch Logs. Use CloudWatch Logs metric filters to define the patterns to look for in the log data.
B) Configure AWS CloudTrail to log all management and data events to a custom Amazon S3 bucket and Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Use VPC Flow Logs to send data to CloudWatch Logs. Use CloudWatch Logs metric filters to define the patterns to look for in the log data.
C) Configure AWS CloudTrail to log all management events to a custom Amazon S3 bucket and Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Install the Amazon CloudWatch Logs agent on the web instances to collect application logs. Use CloudWatch Logs Insights to define the patterns to look for in the log data.
D) Enable AWS Config to record all configuration changes to the web instances. Configure AWS CloudTrail to log all management and data events to a custom Amazon S3 bucket. Use Amazon Athena to define the patterns to look for in the log data stored in Amazon S3.
ANSWER12:
C
Notes/Hint12:
Web application logs are internal to the operating system, and Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights can be used to collect and analyze the logs using the CloudWatch agent. AWS CloudTrail monitors all AWS API activity and can be used to monitor particular API calls to identify remote attempts to change the network interface of web instances.
Question 14: A company has an application that processes confidential data. The data is currently stored in an on premises data center. A network engineer is moving workloads to AWS, and needs to ensure confidentiality and integrity of the data in transit to AWS. The company has an existing AWS Direct Connect connection. Which combination of steps should the network engineer perform to set up the most cost-effective connection between the on-premises data center and AWS? (Select TWO.)
A) Attach an internet gateway to the VPC.
B) Configure a public virtual interface on the AWS Direct Connect connection.
C) Configure a private virtual interface to the virtual private gateway.
D) Set up an IPsec tunnel between the customer gateway and a software VPN on Amazon EC2.
E) Set up a Site-to-Site VPN between the customer gateway and the virtual private gateway.
ANSWER14:
B and E
Notes/Hint14:
Setting up a VPN over an AWS Direct Connect connection will secure the data in transit. The steps to do so are: set up a public virtual interface and create the Site-to-Site VPN between the data center and the virtual private gateway using the public virtual interface. A is incorrect because it would send traffic over the public internet. C is not possible because a public virtual interface is needed to announce the VPN tunnel IPs. D is incorrect because it would not take advantage of the already existing Direct Connect connection.
Question 15: A site you are helping create must use Adobe Media Server and the Adobe Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) to stream media files. When it comes to AWS, an RTMP distribution must use which of the following as the origin?
ANSWER15:
D
Notes/Hint15:
An RTMP distribution must use S3 bucket as the origin.
Question 16: A company is creating new features for its ecommerce website. These features will be deployed as microservices using different domain names for each service. The company requires the use of HTTPS for all its public-facing websites. The application requires the client’s source IP. Which combination of actions should be taken to accomplish this? (Select TWO.)
A) Use a Network Load Balancer to distribute traffic to each service.
B) Use an Application Load Balancer to distribute traffic to each service.
C) Configure the application to retrieve client IPs using the X-Forwarded-For header.
D) Configure the application to retrieve client IPs using the X-Forwarded-Host header.
E) Configure the application to retrieve client IPs using the PROXY protocol header.
ANSWER16:
B and C
Notes/Hint16:
An Application Load Balancer supports host-based routing, which is required to route traffic to different microservices based on the domain name. X-Forwarded-For is the correct request header to identify the client’s source IP address.
Question 18: A network engineer is architecting a high performance computing solution on AWS. The system consists of a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances that require low-latency communications between them. Which method will meet these requirements?
A) Launch instances into a single subnet with a size equal to the number of instances required for the cluster.
B) Create a cluster placement group. Launch Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)-enabled instances into the placement group.
C) Launch Amazon EC2 instances with the largest available number of cores and RAM. Attach Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) volumes. Implement a shared memory system across all instances in the cluster.
D) Choose an Amazon EC2 instance type that offers enhanced networking. Attach a 10 Gbps non-blocking elastic network interface to the instances.
ANSWER18:
B
Notes/Hint18:
Cluster placement groups and Elastic Fabric Adapters (EFAs) are recommended for high performance computing applications that benefit from low network latency, high network throughput, or both. A is incorrect because the size of a subnet has no impact on network performance. C is incorrect because an Amazon EBS volume cannot be shared between Amazon EC2 instances. D is only half the solution because the enhanced networking affects the network behaviour of an EC2 instance but not the network infrastructure between instances.
Question 19: What is the maximum number of security groups that can be associated with each network interface?
E) 2
ANSWER2:
C
Notes/Hint19:
The default number of security groups that can be associated with each network interface is 5. The maximum is 16. This quota is enforced separately for IPv4 rules and IPv6 rules.
Question 20: A company’s internal security team receives a request to allow Amazon S3 access from inside the corporate network. All external traffic must be explicitly allowed through the corporate firewalls. How can the security team grant this access?
A) Schedule a script to download the Amazon S3 IP prefixes from AWS developer forum announcements. Update the firewall rules accordingly.
B) Schedule a script to download and parse the Amazon S3 IP prefixes from the ip-ranges.json file. Update the firewall rules accordingly.
C) Schedule a script to perform a DNS lookup on Amazon S3 endpoints. Update the firewall rules accordingly.
D) Connect the data center to a VPC using AWS Direct Connect. Create routes that forward traffic from the data center to an Amazon S3 VPC endpoint.
ANSWER20:
B
Notes/Hint20:
The ip-ranges.json file contains the latest list of IP addresses used by AWS. AWS no longer posts IP prefixes in developer forum announcements. DNS lookups would not provide an exhaustive list of possible IP prefixes. D would require transitive routing, which is not possible.
Wi-Fi is a brand name for wireless networking standards. Wi-Fi lets devices communicate by sending and receiving radio waves.
In 1971, the University of Hawaii demonstrated the first wireless data network, known as ALOHAnet. In 1985, the US FCC opened the ISM radio bands for unlicensed transmissions. After 1985, other countries followed, and more people started experimenting. In 1997 and 1999, the IEEE ratified the first international wireless networking standards. They were called 802.11-1997, 802.11b, and 802.11a. The technology was amazing, but the names were not.
In 1999, the brand-consulting firm Interbrand created the logo and suggested Wi-Fi as the name. Wi-Fi was a pun on hi-fi, referring to high-fidelity audio. Wi-Fi was easier to remember than 802.11, and we’ve been stuck with the name since. The official name is Wi-Fi, but most people don’t capitalize it or include the hyphen. Wi-Fi, WiFi, Wifi, wifi, and 802.11 all refer to the same thing. In the early days, Wi-Fi was used as shorthand for Wireless Fidelity, but it isn’t officially short for anything. According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi.
What does Wi-Fi do? How does Wi-Fi work?
Wi-Fi transmits data using microwaves, which are high-frequency radio waves. Wi-Fi is more complicated than FM radio, but the basic underlying technology is the same. They both encode information into radio waves, which are received and decoded. FM radio does this for sound, Wi-Fi does this for computer data. So how can we use radio waves to send sound, or information?
At a basic level, you can think of two people holding a jump rope. One person raises and lowers their arm quickly, creating a wave. With Wi-Fi, this person would represent your Wi-Fi router, or wireless access point. Keeping the same up and down motion is known as a carrier wave. The person on the other end is the client device, such as a laptop or cell phone. When a wireless client joins the network and senses the carrier wave, it starts listening and waits for small differences in the signal.
In our example, you can imagine feeling the jump rope going up and down, and then receiving a single motion to the right. That single motion to the right can be interpreted as a binary number 1. A motion to the left would be a binary 0. Chain enough 1’s and 0’s together and you can represent complicated things, like all the data on this webpage.
It sounds like magic, but it’s not only Wi-Fi that works this way. Bluetooth, 4G, 5G, and most wireless transmissions work by manipulating waves to transfer electrical signals through the air. A deeper, better question than “How does Wi-Fi work?” is “How do wireless transmissions work?”
If you want a better answer, you need to have a basic understanding of a few things:
Fundamental physics of electricity and magnetism
Electromagnetic radiation, radio waves, and antennas
How wired networks transmit data
I tried my best to keep this understandable, and laid out in a way that makes sense. This stuff is complicated, and hard to explain. That is why there are so many bad explanations of how Wi-Fi works out there.
This isn’t going to be a light and breezy discussion. Each of these topics could be an entire college course, so forgive me for simplifying where possible. Use Wikipedia and other resources to fill in the gaps, or to clarify something I glossed over. As always, corrections and feedback are welcomed.
Let’s dive in the deep end and cover the physics first. If you’re not familiar with fundamental physics, Wikipedia is an amazing resource. The key terms highlighted in blue are links to Wikipedia articles which explain further.
Electrical current is a flow of negatively charged electrons through a conductive material, like a wire.
Electrical current flowing through a wire creates a magnetic field. This is how electromagnets work.
In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell discovered that light, magnetism, and electricity are related.
He predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves.
His equations describe how electric and magnetic fields are generated by charges, currents, and other field changes.
This is known as the 2nd great unification of physics, behind Sir Issac Newton.
In 1887, Heinrich Hertz was the first to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves. People thought that was so cool, they used his last name as the unit for a wave’s frequency.
Electromagnetic waves don’t need a medium. They can move through the vacuum of space, for example.
Since visible light is an electromagnetic wave, this is how we can see the sun, or distant stars.
This is also how we heard Neil Armstrong say “One small step for man…” live from the moon.
The warmth you feel from sunlight is due to the radiant energy sunlight contains. All electromagnetic waves have radiant energy.
Examples of electromagnetic waves: Visible light, radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays.
Wi-Fi is an example of a radio wave, specifically a microwave. Microwaves are high-energy radio waves.
Electromagnetic Waves
Electromagnetic waves come in a wide range of forms. The type of wave is categorized by wavelength and frequency.
Wavelength is a measure of the distance over which the wave’s shape repeats. In a typical continuous sine wave like Wi-Fi, every time a wave goes from peak to valley to peak, we call that a cycle. The distance it takes to complete one cycle is its wavelength.
Frequency is a measure of how many cycles the wave makes per second. We use Hertz (Hz) as the measure of frequency, 1 Hz is one cycle per second. The more common MHz and GHz are for millions, or billions, of cycles per second.
Imagine waves on a beach. On calm days the waves are small, and come in slowly. On a windy day the waves have more energy, come in faster, and have less distance between them. Higher energy, higher frequency, shorter wavelength. Unlike ocean waves, electromagnetic waves move at the speed of light. Since their speed is constant, their wavelength and frequency are inverse. As wavelength goes up, frequency does down. If you multiply the wavelength and frequency, you will always get the same value — the speed of light, the speed limit of the universe.
You can graph all the various kinds of electromagnetic waves, with the lowest energy on the left, and the highest energy on the right. We call this the electromagnetic spectrum. I’m not going to cover the entire electromagnetic spectrum, since we are mainly interested in Wi-Fi’s microwaves, and how we can use them to send data wirelessly.
Starting from the left, we have the low-energy waves we call radio. Opinions vary, but I’m going with Wikipedia’s broad definition that radio waves cover from 30 Hz, up to 300 GHz. Compared to the rest of the spectrum, radio’s wavelengths are long, their frequency is slow, and energy is low. Within radio waves, there is a separate category we call microwaves.
Microwaves fall within the broader radio wave range. At a minimum, microwaves cover 3 GHz to 30 GHz, but some people say microwaves extend further than that. The specific range depends on who you ask, but generally you can think of Microwaves as high-frequency radio waves.
Microwaves are used in microwave ovens, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, your cell phone’s 4G or 5G connection, and lots of other wireless data transmissions. Their higher energy, shorter wavelength, and other properties make them better for high-bandwidth transfers than traditional, lower-powered radio waves.
All waves can be modulated by varying either the amplitude (strength), frequency or phase of the wave. This is what allows Wi-Fi, and any other wireless technology, to encode data in a wireless signal.
Wired Networking Transmissions
Before we cover how wireless data transmission works, we need to understand how wired data transmission works. In wired Ethernet networks, we use the copper inside Ethernet cables to transmit electrical signals. The conductive copper transfers the electrical current applied at one end, through the wire, to the other side.
A typical example would be a PC plugged into an Ethernet switch. If the PC wants to transfer information, it converts binary digits to electrical impulses. On, off, on, off. It sends a specific pattern of 1’s and 0’s across the wire, which is received on the other end. Ethernet is the neighborhood street of the networking world. It’s great for getting around the local area, but you’ll need to jump on the highway if you want to go further.
The highway of the networking world is fiber optic cabling. Just like how Ethernet transfers electrical current, we can do the same thing with lasers and fiber optic cables. Fiber optic cables are made of bendable glass, and they provide a path for light to be transmitted. Since fiber optics require lasers, special transceivers are required at each end. Compared to Ethernet, Fiber optic cables have the advantage of having a longer range, and generally a higher capacity.
Fiber optic cabling carries a big portion of global Internet traffic. We have a wide array of fiber optic cabling over land, and sea. Those connections are what allow you to communicate with someone on the other side of the country, or the other side of the world. This is possible because these transmissions happen at the speed of light.
Here’s where things get fun. Just like how Ethernet and fiber optic cabling take an electrical impulse or beam of light from A to B, we can do the same thing with radios, antennas, and radio waves.
Radios, Antennas, and Wireless Networking
Now that we have a rough common understanding of electromagnetic waves and wired data transmission, how can we transmit data wirelessly? The key is an antenna. Antennas convert electricity into radio waves, and radio waves into electricity. A basic antenna consists of two metal rods connected to a receiver or transmitter.
When transmitting, a radio supplies an alternating electric current to the antenna, and the antenna radiates the energy as electromagnetic waves. When receiving, an antenna reverses this process. It intercepts some of the power of a radio wave to produce an electrical current, which is applied to a receiver, and amplified. Receiving antennas capture a fraction of the original signal, which is why distance, antenna design, and amplification are important for a successful wireless transmission.
If you have a properly tuned, powerful antenna, you can send a signal 1000s of kilometers away, or even into space. It’s not just Wi-Fi, this is what makes satellites, radar, radio, and broadcast TV transmissions work too. Pretty cool, right?
How Wi-Fi Works: From Electricity to Information
An intricate pattern of electrons representing computer data flow into your Wi-Fi router, or wireless access point.
The access point sends that pattern of electrons to an antenna, generating an electromagnetic wave.
By alternating between a positive to negative charge, the wire inside of an antenna creates an oscillating electric and magnetic field. These oscillating fields propagate out into space as electromagnetic waves, and are able to be received by anyone in range.
Typical Wi-Fi access points have omnidirectional antennas, which make the wave propagate in all horizontal directions.
This wave travels through the air and hits a receiving antenna which reverses the process, converting the radiant energy in the radio wave back into electricity.
The electric field of the incoming wave pushes electrons back and forth in the antenna, creating an alternating positive and negative charge. The oscillating field induces voltage and current, which flows to the receiver.
The signal is amplified and received, either to the client device or to an Ethernet connection for further routing.
A lot of the wave’s energy is lost along the way.
If the transmission was successful, the electrical impulses should be a good copy of what was sent.
If the transmission wasn’t successful, the data is resent.
When the information is received on the other end, it is treated the same as any other data on the network.
More Fun Wi-Fi Facts
Wi-Fi has redundancy built-in. If you wanted to send “Hello” your access point wouldn’t send an H, an E, an L, an L and a O. It sends multiple characters for each one, just like you would on a static-filled radio or phone call. It will use its equivalent of the phonetic alphabet to send “Hotel”, “Echo”, “Lima”, “Lima”, “Oscar”.
That way, even if you didn’t hear the entire transmission, you are still likely to be able to know that “Hello” was being sent. The level of redundancy varies on signal strength and interference on the channel.
If the signal strength is high, the access point and receiver are able to use a complicated modulation scheme, and encode a lot of data.
If you think about our jump rope analogy from earlier, rather than just left and right, it can divide into 1/4s, 1/8ths, or further. It can also combine the direction of the modulation with strength, or phase of modulation.
The most complex modulation in Wi-Fi 6 is 1024-QAM, which has 1024 unique combinations of amplitude and phase. This results in high throughput, but requires a very strong wireless signal and minimal interference to work effectively.
As your wireless signal weakens, complex modulation can’t be understood. Both devices will step down to a less complex modulation scheme. This is why Wi-Fi slows down as you move away from the access point.
First In a Series: Wi-Fi 101
I plan on writing a whole series of posts about Wi-Fi fundamentals which will cover various topics about Wi-Fi, how to improve your home network, and related issues. If there is something you want me to cover, leave a comment below.
Footnotes
The IEEE, an international standards body, sets the definitions of what Wi-Fi is. They’re the reason we have Wi-Fi standards with names like 802.11n, 802.11ac or 802.11ax. They’ve since renamed the major standards to Wi-Fi 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. With each generation, Wi-Fi gets better, and there are a lot of details to cover. I’ll cover that in a future post.
Hertz did not realize the practical importance of his experiments. “It’s of no use whatsoever. This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there.” When asked about the applications of his discoveries, Hertz replied, “Nothing, I guess.”You can pay your respects to this legend by always capitalizing the H in MHz and GHz.
It takes about one second for a radio wave to travel from the Earth to the moon. It’s pretty amazing that over 50 years ago we had the technology to capture sound and images on the moon, turn them into electromagnetic waves, beam them back to Earth, and transmit them around the globe. I guess it’s pretty cool we put a human on the moon, too.
If you keep adding energy to microwaves, you can end up in a unique part of the EM spectrum, visible light. Visible light’s wavelengths are measured in nanometers, and nanometers are really small: a human hair is around 75,000 nanometers wide. Visible light has a wavelength between 380 and 740 nanometers and a frequency between 405 and 790 THz (trillions of cycles per second). It’s hard to wrap your head around, but a lot of foundational physics is, too.
Your eye is reading this page because your computer screen is sending out electromagnetic radiation in the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Differences in the wavelength cause your eye to interpret different areas of the page as different colors. A whole lot of brain magic and pattern recognition lets you interpret those color variations as letters and words. If I did my job as a writer, there should also be some meaning behind those words. All from some waves shooting out of your screen. Physics is amazing, Wi-Fi isn’t magic, and writing is telepathy.
Every once in a while I go onto the Deep Space Network site to check on Voyager 1 and 2, and just to see what’s going on in general. Currently the round-trip time to V1 is about 1.69 days with a data rate of 150 bits/second, although I’ve seen it as low as 6 bits/sec. V2 is a bit closer at a mere 11 billion miles or so. It’s amazing to me that the entire space craft runs on 4 Watts. V1 and 2 have both departed the solar system.
Testimonials: I Passed the AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty
Passed the AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty Exam ANS-C01 2022
I recently passed the AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty ANS-C01 exam. I have passed the SysOps and SAA certifications before taking the ANS-C01 exam in the past, but man, this test really is challenging. The scenarios are in multiple paragraph form ( 2 or 3 paragraphs for the scenario) and the options are seemingly valid with a slight difference.
For my exam prep, I recommend using the AWS Skill Builder digital course for fast study of the core networking concepts and then take the Tutorials Dojo mock exams for validation. Read all the explanation and retake the mock exams until you feel confident on the topics. Also focus on some Kubernetes Pod Networking in EKS, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect Gateways, AWS Network Firewall and GuardDuty.
Also read the official exam guide so you know the list of services to focus on. The list of task statements is a gold mine of information. Also read the list of common exam scenarios on TD cheatsheets for final review:
For those who are about to take this exam, I recommend studying seriously for this test. You must really study and know the features of each AWS networking services. Also read up on other success posts in this subreddit, like this one:
Exam guide book by Kam Agahian and group of authors – this just got released and has all you need in a concise manual, it also included 3 practice exams, this is a must buy for future reference and covers ALL current exam topics including container networking, SD-WAN etc.
Stephane Maarek’s Udemy course – it is mostly up-to-date with the main exam topics including TGW, network firewall etc. To the point lectures with lots of hands-on demos which gives you just what you need, highly recommended as well!
Tutorial Dojos practice tests to drive it home – this helped me get an idea of the question wording, so I could train myself to read fast, pick out key words, compare similar answers and build confidence in my knowledge.
Crammed daily for 4 weeks (after work, I have a full time job + family) and went in and nailed it. I do have networking background (15+ years) and I am currently working as a cloud security engineer and I’m working with AWS daily, especially EKS, TGW, GWLB etc.
For those not from a networking background – it would definitely take longer to prep.
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Top 20 AWS Certified Associate SysOps Administrator Practice Quiz – Questions and Answers Dumps
What is the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate?
The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C01) examination is intended for individuals who have technical expertise in deployment, management, and operations on AWS.
The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam covers the following domains:
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate Study guide and Practice Exam
Question 1: Under which security model does AWS provide secure infrastructure and services, while the customer is responsible for secure operating systems, platforms, and data?
If you are looking for an all-in-one solution to help you prepare for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam, look no further than this AWS Cloud Practitioner CCP CLFC01 book below.
NOTES/HINT1: The Shared Responsibility Model is the security model under which AWS provides secure infrastructure and services, while the customer is responsible for secure operating systems, platforms, and data.
Question 2: Which type of testing method is used to compare a control system to a test system, with the goal of assessing whether changes applied to the test system improve a particular metric compared to the control system?
