Master AWS GuardDuty: Crucial Interview Questions Explained

I can provide you with a list of top 10 interview questions and answers related to AWS GuardDuty. Keep in mind that these questions are specifically about AWS GuardDuty and not about other cloud services or technologies.

1. Q: What is AWS GuardDuty?
   A: AWS GuardDuty is a continuous threat detection and monitoring service that analyzes and processes various data sources, such as VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail event logs, and DNS logs, to identify potential security threats and anomalies within your AWS environment. It is a managed service, which means you don’t have to maintain any infrastructure or install any agents to use it.
   
2. Q: How does AWS GuardDuty work?
   A: GuardDuty uses machine learning, anomaly detection, and integrated threat intelligence to analyze data from multiple sources within your AWS environment. It then generates findings, which are detailed alerts that report potential security threats, based on the analysis of this data. These findings are grouped into categories like reconnaissance, instance compromise, and privilege escalation, and can be sent to other AWS services or third-party tools for further analysis or remediation.
   
3. Q: How do you enable AWS GuardDuty?
   A: You can enable GuardDuty through the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDKs. In the console, you simply navigate to the GuardDuty service, and click “Enable GuardDuty.” This will automatically create a GuardDuty detector, which is the primary resource that analyzes and processes data from the data sources.
   
4. Q: What are the benefits of using AWS GuardDuty?
   A: Some key benefits of GuardDuty include:
   • Continuous monitoring and threat detection
   • Ease of use and low maintenance, as it’s a fully managed service
   • Scalability, since it can handle any number of accounts and resources
   • Integration with other AWS services and third-party tools for incident response and remediation
     
5. Q: What are some examples of findings generated by GuardDuty?
   A: Some common GuardDuty findings include:
   • Unauthorized access attempts
   • Brute force attacks on EC2 instances
   • Cryptocurrency mining activity
   • Data exfiltration attempts
   • Command and control (C&C) communications
     
6. Q: How can you customize AWS GuardDuty?
   A: You can customize GuardDuty by creating custom threat lists, which are lists of IP addresses or domain names that represent known malicious entities. You can also suppress specific findings by creating suppression rules, which tell GuardDuty to ignore certain findings based on specified criteria.
   
7. Q: How can you remediate threats detected by GuardDuty?
   A: You can integrate GuardDuty with AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, or third-party tools to automatically respond to threats. This can include actions like isolating compromised instances, blocking malicious IPs, or revoking access credentials.
   
8. Q: How much does AWS GuardDuty cost?
   A: GuardDuty uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which means you pay based on the number of events analyzed and the number of accounts monitored. There are no upfront costs or long-term commitments required. You can view the current pricing details on the AWS GuardDuty pricing page.
   
9. Q: How does GuardDuty ensure the privacy of the analyzed data?
   A: GuardDuty retains analyzed data for 30 days and does not store customer content, such as the content of S3 objects or the body of API calls. It only retains metadata and uses it for threat detection and anomaly analysis.
   
10. Q: How can you disable AWS GuardDuty?
    A: You can disable GuardDuty through the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDKs. In the console, navigate to the GuardDuty service, click on “Settings” in the left-hand menu, and then click “Disable GuardDuty.” Keep in mind that disabling GuardDuty will stop the analysis of data sources and the generation of findings, and any associated costs will no longer be incurred.