SCS-C03 AWS Certified Security – Specialty Questions and Answers

EC2 Instance Connect endpoints provide secure, private connectivity to EC2 instances without requiring public IP addresses, inbound internet access, or VPN connectivity. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, Instance Connect endpoints are designed specifically for incident response and secure administrative access scenarios.

By deploying an EC2 Instance Connect endpoint in the VPC, the security team can block all external network access while still maintaining controlled access to EC2 instances through the AWS Management Console. The endpoint uses AWS-managed infrastructure and private connectivity, and access is authorized using IAM policies and instance profiles.

Options A and B rely on direct EC2 Instance Connect installation and network paths that may still depend on external access. Option C is incorrect because tunneling is not required when using the console-based Instance Connect endpoint.

This solution enables forensic access during incidents without reopening external network paths, aligning with AWS incident response best practices.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint Architecture

AWS Incident Response Best Practices

AWS incident response best practices emphasize rapid containment, credential revocation, and threat detection to minimize the blast radius of a compromise. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide, when unauthorized resources such as an Amazon S3 bucket hosting malware are discovered, immediate action must be taken to stop further misuse of the account and to prevent recurrence.

Rotating or deleting all AWS access keys (Option D) is a critical containment step. If an IAM user has been compromised, any long-term credentials associated with that user must be revoked immediately to prevent continued unauthorized access. AWS guidance explicitly lists access key rotation or deletion as a first-response action for suspected credential compromise.

Deleting unrecognized or unauthorized resources (Option F) directly removes the malicious infrastructure that is being abused. In this case, deleting the unauthorized S3 bucket immediately stops malware distribution and reduces reputational and compliance impact.

Turning on Amazon GuardDuty (Option B) enables continuous threat detection by analyzing CloudTrail events, VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs. GuardDuty can identify additional malicious activity, compromised credentials, or persistence mechanisms that the attacker may have established. AWS documentation recommends enabling GuardDuty during or immediately after an incident to detect ongoing or future threats.

Option A does not reduce the impact of the current compromise. Option C is overly disruptive and not recommended; credential rotation should be targeted. Option E is unnecessary because there is no indication that EBS-backed compute resources are involved.

AWS incident response guidance clearly prioritizes credential revocation, malicious resource removal, and threat detection to minimize consequences.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Incident Response Best Practices

Amazon GuardDuty User Guide

AWS IAM Security Best Practices

Amazon Macie is the AWS service designed specifically to discover, classify, and report sensitive data stored in Amazon S3. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, Macie uses machine learning and managed data identifiers to automatically detect sensitive data types such as PII and financial information.

Macie integrates natively with Amazon EventBridge, allowing findings to be routed to other services such as Amazon SNS with minimal configuration. Creating an EventBridge rule to forward Macie findings to an existing SNS topic satisfies the notification requirement without custom code.

Option A is invalid because AWS Config does not inspect object contents. Option B requires custom development and ongoing maintenance. Option D is incorrect because Amazon GuardDuty focuses on threat detection, not sensitive data discovery.

AWS documentation emphasizes Macie as the lowest-effort and most accurate solution for sensitive data identification in S3.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon Macie Sensitive Data Discovery

Amazon EventBridge Integration with Security Services

AWS IAM Identity Center delegated administration requires foundational configuration to be completed in the organization’s management account before delegation. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, IAM Identity Center must be enabled with a directory in the management account before any delegation can occur.

Permission sets must be created in the management account because they define the permissions that will later be delegated to member accounts. Additionally, user assignments must initially exist in the management account to establish baseline access control before delegation is configured.

Option A is too generic and not a required prerequisite step. Option C is unrelated to Identity Center delegation. Option E is incorrect because IAM Identity Center uses identities from its directory or external IdPs, not IAM users.

AWS guidance clearly outlines directory creation, permission set definition, and initial user assignments as mandatory preparatory steps for delegated administration.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS IAM Identity Center Delegated Administration

AWS Organizations and Identity Center Integration

AWS CloudTrail Lake is purpose-built to store, query, and analyze CloudTrail events, including data events, without requiring additional infrastructure. The AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation explains that CloudTrail Lake provides immutable event storage with configurable retention periods, including multi-year retention, which satisfies long-term compliance requirements such as 7-year retention. Events are stored in an append-only, immutable format managed by AWS, reducing operational complexity.

CloudTrail Lake supports SQL-based queries for complex analysis directly against the event data, eliminating the need to export logs to other services for querying. Additionally, CloudTrail Lake includes built-in dashboards and integrations that enable visualization of event trends and patterns without standing up separate analytics or visualization platforms.

Option B is invalid because CloudTrail Event History only retains events for up to 90 days and does not support long-term retention or advanced querying. Option C introduces high operational overhead and cost by requiring persistent Amazon EMR clusters and additional services. Option D incurs ongoing ingestion, indexing, and storage costs for OpenSearch Service over a 7-year period, making it less cost-effective than CloudTrail Lake.

AWS documentation positions CloudTrail Lake as the most cost-effective and operationally efficient solution for long-term, queryable CloudTrail event storage and visualization.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS CloudTrail Lake Architecture and Retention

AWS CloudTrail Data Events Overview

AWS IAM Identity Center centrally manages user access across an AWS Organization. Disabling the user in Identity Center immediately revokes access to all AWS accounts. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, organizational CloudTrail event data stores provide centralized, queryable access to all events across accounts.

Using CloudTrail Lake enables direct querying of activity without exporting logs. Disabling the user at the Identity Center level ensures full containment.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS IAM Identity Center Incident Response

AWS CloudTrail Lake

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..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 incident response best practices emphasize immediate containment, preservation of evidence, and safe forensic investigation. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, when an EC2 instance is suspected of compromise, security teams should avoid logging in to the instance or installing additional tools, as these actions can alter evidence and increase risk.

Terminating the compromised instance after ensuring that its Amazon EBS volumes are preserved prevents further malicious activity immediately. By setting the EBS volumes to not delete on termination, all disk data is retained for forensic analysis. Launching a new, clean EC2 instance in a different subnet or Availability Zone with preinstalled diagnostic tools allows investigators to safely attach and analyze the compromised volumes without executing potentially malicious code.

Option A introduces significant risk by logging in to the compromised instance and modifying security controls during active compromise. Option B delays containment and allows continued outbound traffic during investigation steps. Option D is invalid because AWS WAF cannot be attached directly to Amazon EC2 instances and does not control outbound traffic.

AWS documentation strongly recommends isolating or terminating compromised resources and performing offline analysis using detached storage volumes. This approach ensures immediate mitigation, preserves forensic integrity, and aligns with AWS incident response frameworks.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Incident Response Best Practices

Amazon EC2 and EBS Forensics Guidance

AWS Well-Architected Framework – Security Pillar

Amazon CloudWatch Logs provides a centralized, scalable service for collecting and storing logs from Amazon EC2 instances, regardless of whether the instances are On-Demand or Spot Instances. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide, CloudWatch Logs is the recommended service for centralized log aggregation and near-real-time analysis of application and system logs.

By configuring all EC2 instances to send logs to a single CloudWatch Logs log group, the security engineer ensures that logs from all instances are available in one centralized location. Access to the log group can be restricted by using IAM policies, ensuring that only authorized users can view and analyze the logs.

CloudWatch Logs Insights provides a powerful query language with SQL-like syntax, enabling users to search, filter, aggregate, and analyze log data efficiently. This directly satisfies the requirement for SQL-style queries to identify event patterns and perform root cause analysis without requiring data movement or additional services.

Option B is incorrect because CloudWatch Logs Insights cannot query log files stored in Amazon S3. Option C is inefficient and operationally complex, as Athena cannot directly query CloudWatch Logs log groups. Option D is invalid because Amazon Detective is designed for security investigations using GuardDuty findings, not for general application log analysis.

AWS documentation explicitly states that CloudWatch Logs combined with CloudWatch Logs Insights is the most efficient and secure approach for centralized log analysis in EC2-based architectures.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Documentation

CloudWatch Logs Insights Query Guide

When an internet-facing ALB is used as a CloudFront origin, it remains directly accessible unless additional access controls are enforced. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty guidance, CloudFront IP allow lists alone are insufficient, because CloudFront IP ranges change and are not guaranteed to be exclusive.

The recommended and most secure approach is to configure CloudFront to send a custom origin header (such as X-Shared-Secret) with a secret value on every request to the origin. The ALB listener rules are then configured to forward traffic only when the header exists and matches the expected value. Requests that attempt to bypass CloudFront will not include this header and will be denied.

Option A is invalid because CloudFront does not support PrivateLink origins. Option B introduces unnecessary architectural changes and is not required. Option C is brittle and operationally risky due to changing IP ranges.

AWS documentation explicitly recommends custom origin headers as the best practice to ensure that only CloudFront can access an internet-facing ALB when AWS WAF is attached at the CloudFront layer.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon CloudFront Origin Security Documentation

AWS WAF and ALB Integration Guidance

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager provides secure, auditable, and portless access to EC2 instances. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, Session Manager allows administrators to connect to instances without opening inbound SSH or RDP ports, fully satisfying strict compliance requirements.

Session Manager integrates directly with AWS IAM Identity Center, ensuring that all access is authenticated and authorized using centralized identity management. Additionally, Session Manager automatically records session activity and can send logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon S3, providing a complete audit trail of all commands executed during a session.

Option A (EC2 serial console) does not provide comprehensive auditing and is intended for recovery scenarios. Option B requires inbound network access and security group rules, violating the “no exposed management ports” requirement. Option D explicitly opens ports, which directly violates compliance constraints.

AWS documentation clearly identifies Systems Manager Session Manager as the recommended solution for secure, auditable, and identity-integrated instance access in regulated environments.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager Documentation

AWS IAM Identity Center Best Practices

CloudWatch Logs Insights is a managed, on-demand query capability designed to search and analyze log data stored in CloudWatch Logs without moving the data elsewhere. AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation highlights Logs Insights as the lowest-effort method for rapid investigations, because it supports filtering, parsing, aggregation, and time-range queries directly over existing log groups. In this scenario, the logs already exist in CloudWatch Logs with sufficient retention. The engineer can write a query that filters for the suspicious IP address, counts occurrences over the last 7 days, and extracts requested URLs using parsing functions. This satisfies both requirements (count and URLs) immediately, without building pipelines or exporting data. Option B adds operational overhead by provisioning and maintaining OpenSearch ingestion and indexing. Options A and D require exporting data and additional services that are not necessary for a one-week forensic query. Therefore, Logs Insights is the most efficient and cost-effective approach.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights Querying and Investigation Workflows

AWS incident response best practices emphasize isolating compromised resources rather than immediately terminating them. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, removing an instance from an Auto Scaling group prevents replacement loops, while applying a restrictive security group isolates the instance for forensic analysis.

Using Amazon EventBridge to trigger an AWS Lambda function enables automated, consistent responses to GuardDuty findings. This approach minimizes disruption to the application because healthy instances continue serving traffic while the affected instance is isolated.

Disabling credentials or modifying network ACLs can have broader impact on unrelated workloads. SNS notifications alone do not provide response automation.

AWS recommends isolate-and-investigate patterns for EC2 incident response.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon GuardDuty Automated Responses

AWS Incident Response Playbooks

To enforce encryption in transit for Amazon S3, AWS best practice is to require HTTPS (TLS) by using a bucket policy condition that denies any request where aws:SecureTransport is false. The requirement includes both existing buckets and future buckets, so the control must continuously evaluate configuration drift and automatically remediate. AWS Config is the service intended for continuous configuration compliance monitoring across resources, and AWS Config managed rules provide standardized checks with low operational overhead. The s3-bucket-ssl-requests-only managed rule evaluates whether S3 buckets enforce SSL-only requests, aligning directly with enforcing encryption in transit. Setting the trigger type to Hybrid ensures evaluation both on configuration changes and periodically. Automatic remediation with an AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook allows the organization to apply or correct the bucket policy consistently at scale without manual work. This approach also supports governance by maintaining a measurable compliance status while actively fixing noncompliance. Option A is not the best fit because a “proactive” custom policy rule does not by itself remediate existing buckets and “block resource creation” is not how AWS Config enforces controls. Option C is incorrect because Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability management service and does not govern S3 bucket transport policies. Option D is inefficient and indirect because CloudTrail data events are not a compliance engine and would require custom processing.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Config Managed Rules for S3 Compliance

Amazon S3 Security Best Practices for SSL-only Access

AWS CloudFormation supports the use of a service role, which allows CloudFormation to assume a dedicated IAM role to create and manage resources on behalf of users. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, using a service role is the most secure and consistent way to ensure predictable stack deployments when users have varying permission sets.

By creating a service role with cloudformation.amazonaws.com as the trusted service principal (Option B), CloudFormation—not individual users—assumes responsibility for resource creation. Updating each stack to explicitly use this service role (Option E) ensures that all deployments use the same permission set, eliminating inconsistencies.

Granting the team members permission to pass the service role via iam:PassRole (Option F) is required so that CloudFormation can assume the role during stack operations. This approach adheres to the principle of least privilege and prevents users from gaining direct access to elevated permissions.

Composite principals (Option A) are unnecessary and insecure. Referencing stack ARNs (Option C) does not solve the root cause. While Option D reflects good policy design, it is implicit in creating the service role and is not a required standalone step.

AWS documentation clearly identifies CloudFormation service roles combined with iam:PassRole as best practice for secure, consistent infrastructure deployments.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS CloudFormation Service Role Documentation

AWS IAM Best Practices

When Amazon CloudFront is used in front of an Application Load Balancer, CloudFront becomes the immediate source of incoming requests to the ALB. As a result, AWS WAF logs record the CloudFront edge location IP addresses as the client IPs, not the original viewer IP addresses. This behavior is explicitly documented in the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide and the AWS WAF and CloudFront integration documentation.

To preserve the original client IP address, CloudFront automatically adds the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header, which contains the IP address of the originating client followed by any proxy addresses involved in forwarding the request. AWS WAF logs include this header, making it the authoritative source for identifying true client IP addresses when CloudFront is used.

Option A is incorrect because VPC Flow Logs capture network-level metadata and will only show CloudFront IP addresses, not the original client IPs. Option C is incorrect because disabling connection reuse does not change how client IPs are logged in AWS WAF. Option D is unnecessary and unsupported as a requirement because CloudFront already provides the required information through standard headers.

AWS documentation consistently states that X-Forwarded-For is the correct and supported mechanism for tracing client IPs in CloudFront-protected applications.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS WAF Developer Guide – Logging

Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide – Request Headers

Amazon Macie is the AWS service designed specifically to discover, classify, and inventory sensitive data stored in Amazon S3. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, Macie can be enabled organization-wide using AWS Organizations, with a delegated administrator account that centrally manages findings across all member accounts.

By designating the security account as the delegated administrator for both Amazon Macie and AWS Security Hub, the company can centralize sensitive data findings in a single location. Macie automatically scans S3 buckets for sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) and publishes findings to Security Hub for centralized visibility and reporting.

Option B and C are incorrect because Amazon Inspector does not scan S3 objects for sensitive data. Option D is invalid because AWS Trusted Advisor does not ingest Macie sensitive data findings.

AWS best practices recommend Amazon Macie with delegated administration and Security Hub integration for centralized sensitive data inventory across multi-account environments.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon Macie Sensitive Data Discovery

AWS Organizations Delegated Administrator Model

AWS Security Hub Integration Overview

Amazon GuardDuty findings provide high-level detection of suspicious activity but are not designed for deep investigation on their own. The AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation explains that Amazon Detective is purpose-built to support rapid investigations by automatically collecting, correlating, and visualizing data from GuardDuty, AWS CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs. Detective enables security engineers to analyze API calls, user behavior, and resource interactions in context without making any changes to the environment.

Using read-only credentials ensures that the investigation does not impact the production application. Amazon Detective allows investigators to pivot directly from a GuardDuty finding into a detailed activity graph, showing which IAM user made anomalous calls, what resources were accessed, and how behavior deviated from the baseline. This significantly accelerates incident investigation.

Options A and C involve applying DenyAll policies, which are containment actions and could affect application availability. Option D requires manual analysis and setup and is slower than using Amazon Detective, which is designed for immediate investigative workflows.

AWS incident response guidance recommends using Detective for rapid, non-intrusive analysis after GuardDuty findings.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Detective Integration

AWS Incident Response Investigation Best Practices

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager requires secure outbound HTTPS connectivity from the EC2 instance to Systems Manager endpoints. In a VPC without internet access, AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation recommends using interface VPC endpoints to enable private connectivity without exposing the instance to the internet.

Creating a VPC interface endpoint for Systems Manager allows the SSM Agent to communicate securely with the Systems Manager service. The endpoint must have an attached security group that allows inbound traffic on port 443 from the VPC CIDR range. Additionally, the EC2 instance security group must allow outbound HTTPS traffic on port 443 so the agent can initiate connections.

Option C is incorrect because creating or associating key pairs enables SSH access, which can alter forensic evidence and violates forensic best practices. Option B is unnecessary because Session Manager does not require inbound rules on the EC2 instance. Option F is invalid because EC2 does not use interface endpoints for management connectivity.

This combination ensures secure, private access for forensic investigation while preserving evidence integrity and adhering to AWS incident response best practices.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager Architecture

AWS Incident Response and Forensics Best Practices

Amazon S3 Block Public Access provides centralized controls to prevent public access through bucket policies and ACLs. AWS Certified Security – Specialty guidance recommends enabling Block Public Access to reduce accidental exposure and to enforce guardrails that override public grants. Enabling Block Public Access on the bucket removes current public exposure when combined with correcting policies/ACLs and prevents future misconfiguration. To ensure the bucket cannot be made public again, the security engineer must prevent principals from disabling Block Public Access. An SCP that denies s3:PutPublicAccessBlock prevents changes that would remove or weaken the PublicAccessBlock configuration, enforcing the guardrail across the OU or account. Options A and D do not directly address public exposure control. Option B denies object reads but does not ensure public access cannot be re-enabled; it also does not address the root misconfiguration pathways and could disrupt legitimate access patterns. Option C specifically combines the correct preventive control (PublicAccessBlock) with organizational enforcement to stop future reversal.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon S3 Block Public Access

AWS Organizations SCP Guardrails for S3 Controls

Option D is the correct solution because it provides fully automated, real-time detection and mitigation of application-layer (Layer 7) DDoS attacks with no manual intervention. AWS Shield Advanced includes automatic application layer DDoS mitigation when it is enabled for supported resources such as Amazon CloudFront distributions. This feature continuously monitors traffic patterns and, when an attack is detected, automatically deploys AWS WAF rules to mitigate malicious requests.

Adding a rate-based rule to the AWS WAF web ACL further strengthens protection by automatically blocking IP addresses that exceed a defined request threshold, which is a common characteristic of Layer 7 DDoS attacks. This combination aligns directly with AWS best practices for protecting web applications against volumetric and application-layer threats.

Option A only provides alerting and visibility but does not ensure automated mitigation. Option B includes proactive engagement with the AWS DDoS Response Team, which is valuable for complex or large-scale attacks but still involves human interaction and therefore does not meet the “no manual effort” requirement. Option C introduces unnecessary complexity and is not recommended for protecting CloudFront-based applications against Layer 7 DDoS attacks.

AWS Security Specialty documentation explicitly recommends AWS Shield Advanced with automatic application layer DDoS mitigation and AWS WAF rate-based rules for fully automated, real-time protection of public web applications.

Continuous monitoring requires an always-on compliance service that evaluates resources over time. AWS Config provides managed rules that assess configuration state and compliance continuously. AWS Certified Security – Specialty guidance highlights AWS Config for continuous compliance across accounts and regions when used with AWS Organizations. The ec2-managedinstance-applications-required managed rule evaluates whether specified software is installed on managed instances, leveraging Systems Manager inventory/managed instance status. By enabling AWS Config organization-wide and deploying this managed rule across all accounts, the company can continuously evaluate both existing and newly launched instances for required application presence. This provides a consistent compliance dashboard and history of compliance changes. Option D can provide inventory lists, but it is not a compliance rule engine that flags noncompliance with the same governance reporting and remediation pathways. Options B and C are operational approaches but do not provide continuous compliance state across the organization.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Config Managed Rules for EC2 and SSM Managed Instances

AWS Organizations Integration with AWS Config

Amazon Cognito is a fully managed identity service that provides user authentication, authorization, and user management for web and mobile applications. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, Cognito user pools are specifically designed to offload authentication responsibilities from applications while maintaining strong security controls.

By federating authentication with third-party identity providers (such as social IdPs), Cognito eliminates the need for the company to manage user passwords directly. This dramatically reduces password reset requests and customer service overhead, while also improving security through industry-standard authentication mechanisms, including MFA and token-based access.

Option A is insecure and incorrect because IAM access keys are not intended for end users. Option B simply relocates password storage and does not reduce operational burden. Option D uses API keys, which are not designed for user authentication and provide no identity verification.

AWS guidance clearly states that Amazon Cognito is the recommended service for scalable, secure user authentication, especially when reducing password management complexity is a requirement.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon Cognito User Pools Documentation

AWS IAM Security Best Practices

AWS IAM Access Analyzer policy generation is specifically designed to help security engineers generate least-privilege IAM policies based on actual usage recorded in AWS CloudTrail. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, policy generation analyzes historical CloudTrail data to identify the exact API actions and resources that a role has accessed over a specified time period.

Because the role has been actively used for three months, there is sufficient CloudTrail data for IAM Access Analyzer to generate a refined customer managed policy automatically. This significantly reduces manual effort and eliminates the need to analyze logs or infer permissions. The generated policy can be reviewed and attached directly to the role, ensuring least privilege access with minimal engineering effort.

Option B only validates existing policies for security warnings and does not reduce permissions. Option C requires manual analysis of CloudWatch logs, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Option D does not analyze real usage and cannot generate role-specific least privilege policies.

AWS documentation explicitly recommends IAM Access Analyzer policy generation as the fastest and most accurate method to refine IAM permissions based on observed behavior.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS IAM Access Analyzer Policy Generation

AWS IAM Least Privilege Best Practices

AWS WAF rate-based rules are designed specifically to track the number of requests from a single IP address over a configurable time window. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty guidance, rate-based rules integrate natively with CloudFront and emit CloudWatch metrics that can trigger alarms.

CloudFront logs and VPC Flow Logs are not real-time detection tools. ASN match rules do not count request rates.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS WAF Rate-Based Rules

CloudFront and AWS WAF Integration

AWS Service Catalog is specifically designed to help organizations govern and control how AWS resources are provisioned at scale. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide, Service Catalog enables administrators to define approved CloudFormation templates as products and to control which accounts, users, or organizational units can deploy those products.

By creating a Service Catalog portfolio in the management account and sharing it with a specific OU, the security engineer ensures that only accounts within that OU can deploy the approved infrastructure. Third-party developers can deploy resources only by using the predefined CloudFormation template and cannot alter the deployment plan, which enforces consistency and compliance.

This approach also limits access to the deployment plan itself, because developers interact with the Service Catalog product rather than the raw template. No cross-account IAM roles or excessive permissions are required, which reduces the attack surface.

CloudFormation modules and extensions (Options B and D) provide reuse but do not enforce deployment governance or access control. Option C introduces unnecessary cross-account IAM roles, which is less secure than native Service Catalog sharing.

AWS documentation explicitly identifies AWS Service Catalog + AWS Organizations as the recommended pattern for secure, standardized multi-account deployments.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Service Catalog Administrator Guide

AWS Organizations Best Practices

AWS CloudTrail is a foundational security service that records API activity and account events. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide, the only way to centrally and reliably prevent CloudTrail from being disabled across multiple AWS accounts is by using AWS Organizations service control policies (SCPs).

SCPs define the maximum available permissions for all accounts in an organization or organizational unit. By creating an SCP with an explicit Deny for the cloudtrail:StopLogging and cloudtrail:DeleteTrail actions and attaching it to the root OU, the security engineer ensures that no principal in any member account—including administrators—can stop or delete CloudTrail trails. Explicit denies in SCPs cannot be overridden by IAM permissions.

Option A is incorrect because log file integrity validation only detects tampering after logs are delivered and does not prevent CloudTrail from being disabled. Option B protects log data at rest but does not prevent trail deletion or logging suspension. Option D removes read-only permissions and does not affect the ability to stop or delete CloudTrail.

AWS documentation explicitly states that SCPs are the recommended mechanism to enforce mandatory security controls such as CloudTrail logging across an organization, making this the correct and most secure solution.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Organizations SCP Documentation

AWS CloudTrail Security Best Practices

AWS CloudTrail is the authoritative source for identity-related activity across an AWS Organization. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide, CloudTrail records all AWS API calls and authentication events, including federated sign-ins that occur through AWS IAM Identity Center with an external SAML identity provider.

When IAM Identity Center is used, successful federated login events are logged in CloudTrail as ConsoleLogin and AssumeRoleWithSAML events. These events are recorded in the organization’s management account when CloudTrail is configured as an organization trail. This allows security teams to centrally search and correlate authentication activity across all member accounts.

Option A is incorrect because CloudWatch Logs do not natively aggregate authentication events across an organization unless custom pipelines are built. Option B is not scalable and does not provide historical, organization-wide visibility. Option C is invalid because AWS does not ingest external IdP logs into EventBridge automatically, and IdP logs do not reflect AWS-side role assumptions.

AWS documentation explicitly states that CloudTrail organization trails provide centralized visibility into user authentication and access activity across all accounts, making this the fastest and most reliable way to identify when a user logged in during a specific time window.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS CloudTrail User Guide

AWS IAM Identity Center Documentation

AWS Organizations Best Practices

AWS CloudTrail provides a record of all API calls made in an AWS account, including calls initiated by AWS CloudFormation. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, CloudTrail is the primary source for troubleshooting authorization failures because it records denied actions and the policy type that caused the denial, including service control policies.

Reviewing CloudTrail logs allows a security engineer to identify which specific API calls failed during the CloudFormation deployment and whether the denial was caused by an SCP, an IAM policy, or a permission boundary. This evidence-based approach is the recommended first step before making any configuration changes.

Option B is unsafe and violates governance best practices by removing SCPs in production. Option C may be necessary later, but it does not identify whether SCPs are the root cause. Option D introduces unnecessary risk and bypasses the purpose of differentiated controls across OUs.

AWS documentation emphasizes observing and validating before modifying security controls, making CloudTrail log analysis the correct initial troubleshooting step.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Organizations Service Control Policies

AWS CloudTrail Authorization Failure Analysis

AWS CloudFormation dynamic references provide a secure mechanism for retrieving sensitive values from AWS Secrets Manager at stack creation or update time. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, dynamic references ensure that sensitive data such as database credentials are never stored in plaintext in CloudFormation templates, parameters, stack metadata, or logs.

When a dynamic reference to Secrets Manager is used, CloudFormation retrieves the secret value at runtime and passes it securely to the resource that requires it. The secret value is not exposed to users who view the template, stack, or change sets.

Option B is insecure because parameters can be exposed through the CloudFormation console and APIs. Option C is incorrect because SecureString parameters are a feature of AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, not Secrets Manager. Option D is invalid because KMS encrypts data but does not store secrets or manage secret rotation.

AWS best practices clearly state that CloudFormation dynamic references to Secrets Manager are the recommended solution for securely handling sensitive configuration values.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS CloudFormation Security Best Practices

AWS Secrets Manager Documentation

AWS WAF rate-based rules are specifically designed to protect applications from traffic floods and distributed attacks that originate from large numbers of IP addresses. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide, rate-based rules automatically track the number of requests coming from individual IP addresses and temporarily block IPs that exceed a defined threshold.

In this scenario, the malicious traffic originates from hundreds of IP addresses across two countries, mixed with legitimate user traffic. A rate-based rule allows the security engineer to limit excessive request rates without fully blocking access from entire geographic regions, ensuring that legitimate users can still access the application.

Option B is incorrect because geographic match rules block all traffic from selected countries, which would deny access to legitimate users and violate the stated requirement. Option C is invalid because security groups do not support geographic filtering. Option D is not scalable, as manually blocking hundreds of IP addresses is operationally inefficient and ineffective against rapidly changing attacker IPs.

AWS documentation emphasizes that rate-based rules are the recommended first-line mitigation for sudden traffic spikes and potential application-layer DDoS attacks when business continuity must be preserved.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS WAF Developer Guide – Rate-Based Rules

AWS DDoS Resiliency Best Practices

Password policies are enforced at the identity provider where authentication occurs. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, when IAM is federated with an external identity provider such as on-premises Active Directory, IAM does not manage or enforce password policies. Instead, password requirements such as minimum length must be enforced directly in Active Directory Group Policy Objects.

Amazon Cognito user pools maintain their own user directory and authentication logic. Cognito provides configurable password policies, including minimum length, complexity, and expiration. To enforce a minimum password length for application users, the Cognito user pool password policy must be updated.

IAM password policies apply only to IAM users that authenticate directly with IAM and do not affect federated users or Cognito users. SCPs and IAM policies cannot enforce password length requirements.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS IAM Federation and Password Policies

Amazon Cognito User Pool Security Settings

Amazon EC2 security groups are stateful, meaning that once a connection is established, return traffic is automatically allowed, even if the inbound rule that originally permitted the connection is later removed. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide and Amazon EC2 security documentation, existing connections are not terminated when security group rules change. This explains why the SSH session remains active even after the security group rules were modified, while new traffic such as ICMP ping is blocked.

To immediately and fully isolate an EC2 instance during an incident response scenario, AWS recommends using stateless network controls. Amazon VPC network ACLs (NACLs) are stateless, which means that every packet is evaluated against the ACL rules regardless of whether the traffic is part of an existing connection. When a deny rule is added, all traffic is immediately blocked, including active sessions.

By creating a network ACL and associating it with the subnet that contains the target instance, and by adding explicit deny rules with the lowest rule numbers for both inbound and outbound traffic, the security engineer ensures that all network communication to and from the instance is immediately interrupted. This approach satisfies the requirement to isolate the instance while preserving its runtime state and memory for forensic analysis.

Other options fail to meet the requirement because security group modifications do not terminate existing sessions, Systems Manager does not enforce network isolation, and host-level firewall changes require instance-level access and do not provide immediate, network-enforced isolation.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon EC2 Security Groups Documentation

Amazon VPC Network ACL Documentation

AWS Incident Response Best Practices

Amazon Inspector provides native CI/CD integration capabilities that allow security checks to occur before container images are pushed to Amazon ECR. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, Inspector does not block image pushes automatically. Instead, prevention must occur inside the CI/CD pipeline itself.

By generating a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) using the Amazon Inspector SBOM generator and submitting it to Inspector for scanning, the pipeline can detect critical vulnerabilities before the image is uploaded. If vulnerabilities exceed policy thresholds, the pipeline fails, preventing deployment.

Post-push scanning solutions only detect vulnerabilities after exposure. Event-driven blocking does not prevent the initial risk.

AWS best practices require “shift-left” security controls to prevent vulnerable artifacts from entering production.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon Inspector CI/CD Integration