Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Security – Specialty SCS-C03 Exam Dumps: Updated Questions & Answers (February 2026)

Amazon Detective is specifically designed to help security teams investigate and visualize the root cause of security findings. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, Detective automatically aggregates and correlates data from GuardDuty, CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs to provide interactive visualizations and timelines.

Detective enables investigators to pivot from GuardDuty findings to IAM roles, API calls, network traffic, and resource behavior. This makes it the most efficient tool for understanding how IAM roles were used during suspicious activity.

Amazon Inspector focuses on vulnerability assessment, not behavioral investigation. Security Hub aggregates findings but does not provide deep investigation graphs. Manual analysis with Athena requires significantly more effort.

AWS guidance explicitly recommends Amazon Detective for root cause analysis and visualization of security incidents.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon Detective Investigation Capabilities

AWS Threat Detection and Analysis

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 WAF allows security engineers to create string match rule statements that inspect specific parts of web requests, including HTTP headers such as the User-Agent header. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide and AWS WAF documentation, string match rules are ideal for blocking requests that contain known malicious identifiers, such as a distinctive user agent associated with a specific bot or IoT device brand.

In this scenario, the attack originates from a specific IoT device brand that uses a unique user agent. A string match rule that inspects the User-Agent header can precisely block malicious requests while allowing legitimate customer traffic to continue uninterrupted. This approach provides targeted mitigation for both current and future attacks originating from the same device signature.

Option A is incorrect because IP addresses cannot be derived from user agent strings, and IoT botnets frequently rotate IP addresses, making IP-based blocking ineffective. Option B is incorrect because geographic blocking is overly broad and risks blocking legitimate customers in the same regions as the attacking devices. Option C is incorrect because rate-based rules limit request volume per IP address and do not specifically identify malicious device signatures; legitimate high-traffic users could be unintentionally blocked.

AWS documentation emphasizes that header inspection with string match conditions is a best practice for mitigating attacks that use identifiable request characteristics such as custom user agents, especially in DDoS and bot mitigation scenarios.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS WAF Developer Guide – Rule Statements

AWS DDoS Resiliency Best Practices

AWS Well-Architected Framework – Security Pillar

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

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

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.

AWS incident response best practices emphasize rapid containment to prevent further data exposure. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, the fastest and least disruptive containment method for compromised compute resources is to immediately revoke credentials and permissions rather than modifying data or infrastructure.

Revoking the IAM role’s active sessions prevents the EC2 instance from continuing to access AWS services. Updating the S3 bucket policy to explicitly deny access to the IAM role ensures immediate enforcement, even if temporary credentials remain cached. Removing the IAM role from the instance profile further prevents new credentials from being issued.

Option A and D involve large-scale data movement or re-encryption, which is time-consuming and operationally expensive. Option B relies on network-level controls that do not prevent access through private AWS endpoints.

AWS guidance explicitly recommends credential revocation and policy-based denial as the fastest containment step during active incidents.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Incident Response Best Practices

AWS IAM Role Session Management

AWS KMS enforces a mandatory minimum waiting period of 7 days before a customer managed key can be deleted. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty incident response guidance, no method exists to immediately delete a KMS key. The fastest possible deletion is achieved by scheduling deletion with the minimum 7-day waiting period.

In this scenario, although deletion was previously scheduled, the key remains enabled and usable. The most authoritative and reliable method to regain control and reissue deletion immediately is to use the AWS account root user, which has implicit permissions to manage KMS keys regardless of compromised IAM principals.

Option B is incorrect because KMS keys are regional resources; multi-Region keys require coordinated deletion but do not shorten the waiting period. Option C is unnecessary because the key policy already allows kms:*. Option D increases the deletion waiting period to 30 days, which violates the requirement to delete the key as quickly as possible.

AWS documentation clearly states that root user access is the ultimate authority for KMS key management and that 7 days is the minimum deletion window, making this the fastest valid option.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Key Management Service Developer Guide

AWS Incident Response Best Practices

AWS Lambda automatically sends function execution logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs when logging is enabled in the function code. However, this logging capability depends on the Lambda execution role having the appropriate permissions. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, the execution role must include permissions such as logs:CreateLogGroup, logs:CreateLogStream, and logs:PutLogEvents.

If these permissions are missing, Lambda cannot create log groups or streams, and no execution logs will appear in CloudWatch Logs—even though the function was successfully invoked. This is the most common reason Lambda logs are unavailable during forensic investigations.

Option B is incorrect because Lambda logs are stored in CloudWatch Logs regardless of whether the invocation source is API Gateway, EventBridge, or another AWS service. Option C is incorrect because CloudWatch Logs does not require direct S3 permissions from the Lambda execution role. Option D is irrelevant because Lambda versions do not affect logging behavior.

AWS documentation emphasizes verifying execution role permissions as a first step when Lambda logs are missing.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Lambda Execution Roles

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Integration with Lambda

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