Amazon Web Services Updated SCS-C03 Exam Questions and Answers by zayaan

Amazon Detective is a purpose-built AWS service designed toanalyze, investigate, and visualize security datato help identify the root cause of suspicious or malicious activity. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide, Amazon Detective directly integrates withAmazon GuardDuty findings, AWS CloudTrail logs, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, and Amazon EKS audit logs to automatically create behavior graphs and timelines.

When GuardDuty generates findings related to anomalous activity, Amazon Detective enables security engineers to pivot directly to an investigation focused on a specific IAM role, user, or resource. Detective automatically correlates historical activity, identifies deviations from baseline behavior, and highlightsindicators of compromise, such as unusual API calls, credential misuse, or suspicious network activity.

AWS Audit Manager (Option B) is designed for compliance and audit evidence collection, not threat investigation. Amazon Inspector (Options C and D) is focused on vulnerability scanning of compute resources and does not analyze IAM behavior or GuardDuty findings.

AWS documentation explicitly states thatAmazon Detective is the recommended service for deep-dive investigations following GuardDuty alerts, providing enriched context and investigation reports for security incidents.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon Detective User Guide

Amazon GuardDuty Integration Documentation

AWS CloudTrail data event logging is the correct solution because it is specifically designed to capture detailed, structured, and near–real-time API activity for Amazon S3 object-level operations. When S3 data events are enabled, CloudTrail records actions such as GetObject, PutObject, and DeleteObject, along with critical context including the IAM principal, source IP address, event time, request parameters, and response elements. These logs are delivered in JSON format, making them highly structured and suitable for security analysis, SIEM integration, and automated detection workflows.

Amazon S3 server access logging (option A) provides basic request-level information but does not include full IAM identity context and is delivered with a significant delay, which does not meet the near–real-time requirement. AWS Config (option C) focuses on resource configuration changes and compliance evaluation; it does not log object-level access events. Amazon Macie (option D) is a data security service that uses machine learning to discover and classify sensitive data in S3 and generate findings for anomalous access patterns, but it is not a comprehensive access logging solution.

AWS Security Specialty documentation clearly states that CloudTrail data events are the authoritative mechanism for auditing S3 object-level access with identity attribution and precise timestamps, making option B the correct and best-practice answer

EventBridge natively consumes CloudTrail management events and provides near-real-time notifications.

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