Amazon SCS-C03 Exam Questions

Amazon GuardDuty generates security findings when it detects suspicious or malicious activity, includingCryptoCurrency:EC2/* findings that indicate an EC2 instance may be involved in unauthorized cryptocurrency mining. According to AWS Certified Security -- Specialty documentation, GuardDuty findings are published as events toAmazon EventBridge(formerly Amazon CloudWatch Events).

Amazon EventBridge is the recommended service for buildingautomated incident response workflows. By creating an EventBridge rule that listens for GuardDuty findings of type CryptoCurrency:EC2/*, the security engineer can automatically invoke a Lambda function to isolate the affected EC2 instance by modifying its security group attachments.

Option A is incorrect because GuardDuty does not directly invoke Lambda functions. Option B and Option D are incorrect because AWS Config tracks configuration compliance and resource changes, not real-time threat detection events. Cryptocurrency findings are security detections, not configuration changes.

AWS documentation explicitly describes this pattern---GuardDuty EventBridge Lambda remediation action---as a best practice for automated threat response and containment.

AWS Certified Security -- Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon GuardDuty User Guide -- Findings

Amazon EventBridge User Guide

AWS Incident Response Best Practices

Before beginning an investigation, incident response best practice is topreserve evidence,prevent accidental loss of the asset, andclearly mark and control the potentially affected resource. Enablingtermination protection(Option B) helps ensure the instance is not accidentally terminated during triage, which would destroy volatile evidence and complicate forensics and recovery.

TakingEBS snapshotsof all attached data volumes (Option C) preserves a point-in-time copy of disk evidence for later forensic analysis, malware scanning, or offline investigation. Snapshots allow responders to create forensic volumes or AMIs in an isolated environment without repeatedly touching the potentially compromised instance.

Capturinginstance metadataand tagging the instance asunder quarantine(Option E) supports both investigation and operational control. Metadata capture (instance ID, IAM role, network interfaces, security groups, user-data, tags, recent changes) provides context for responders. Quarantine tagging enables automated workflows (for example, incident runbooks that isolate the instance, restrict IAM, or move it to a quarantine security group) and signals to other teams/tools that the instance is under investigation.

Option A is the opposite of what you want. Option D destroys evidence. Option F is not an appropriate ''before investigation'' step; altering metadata risks losing evidence and is not the primary containment approach.

For centralized, organization-wide user access to AWS services and supported applications, AWS best practice is to useAWS IAM Identity Center(successor to AWS SSO). IAM Identity Center provides a single place to manage workforce identities, permission sets, and account assignments across AWS Organizations. Amazon Q Developer is integrated for centralized access using IAM Identity Center, where you can assign the relevant permissions to users and groups and enable access consistently across multiple AWS accounts. Setting Amazon Q Developer up as anAWS managed applicationaligns with IAM Identity Center's model for centrally provisioning and controlling access with minimal operational overhead.

Amazon Cognito is primarily intended forcustomer identity and application sign-up/sign-inscenarios, not for workforce access to AWS managed developer tools across multiple AWS accounts. ''Identity pools'' are a Cognito concept for exchanging identities for AWS credentials, which adds unnecessary complexity and is not the standard approach for centrally granting employees access to Amazon Q Developer in an organization. Therefore, enabling IAM Identity Center and configuring Amazon Q Developer as an AWS managed application is the correct solution.

AWS KMS provides condition keys that can be used to tightly scope how and where a customer managed key can be used. According to the AWS Certified Security -- Specialty Study Guide, the kms:ViaService condition key is specifically designed to restrict key usage to requests that originate from a particular AWS service in a specific Region.

By configuring the key policy to allow KMS cryptographic operations only when kms:ViaService equals s3.<region>.amazonaws.com, the security engineer ensures that the key can be used exclusively by Amazon S3. Even if other IAM principals have permissions to use the key, the key cannot be used by other services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, or AWS Lambda.

Option A is incorrect because AWS services do not assume identities in key policies. Options C and D modify IAM role policies, which do not control how a KMS key is used by AWS services. AWS documentation clearly states that service-level restrictions must be enforced at the KMS key policy level using condition keys.

This approach enforces strong separation of duties and limits blast radius, which aligns with AWS security best practices.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security -- Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS KMS Key Policy Condition Keys

AWS KMS Best Practices

AWS abuse notifications are delivered as AWS Health events. According to the AWS Certified Security -- Specialty Study Guide, Amazon EventBridge integrates natively with AWS Health and can be used to detect specific event types such as AWS_ABUSE_DOS_REPORT in near real time.

By creating an EventBridge rule that filters for the abuse report event type and publishes directly to Amazon SNS, the solution remains fully managed, low latency, and cost effective.

Polling APIs introduces delay and complexity. CloudTrail does not log abuse notifications. EventBridge with AWS Health is the recommended mechanism for reacting to AWS service events.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security -- Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Health and EventBridge Integration

AWS Abuse Notification Handling