Pass the Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Specialty SCS-C03 Questions and answers with CertsForce

AWS Config is the AWS service designed to continuously evaluate resource configurations against defined rules. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, AWS Config managed rules exist specifically to check database encryption, public accessibility, deletion protection, and log exports for Amazon RDS and Aurora.

AWS Config provides a real-time compliance timeline and displays the compliance state of each resource against each rule at any point in time. This granular visibility is required to assess ongoing compliance with security policies.

Audit Manager generates reports but does not provide continuous compliance monitoring. Security Hub aggregates findings but does not track configuration drift. EventBridge and Lambda introduce unnecessary complexity.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Config Managed Rules for RDS

AWS Continuous Compliance Monitoring

AWS KMS keys are regional resources and cannot be used across Regions. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, applications that are deployed in multiple Regions should use region-specific customer managed keys while referencing keys by alias instead of key ID.

By creating a new customer managed key in eu-north-1 and assigning it the same alias as the key in eu-west-1, the application code can continue to reference the alias without modification. Each Region resolves the alias to the correct local key, ensuring encryption continues to function correctly.

Option A is invalid because KMS keys are regional. Option B requires application changes. Option D introduces unsupported alias patterns.

AWS best practices recommend alias-based key references for multi-Region deployments.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS KMS Regional Keys and Aliases

AWS KMS Best Practices

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager provides secure, auditable shell access to EC2 instances without opening inbound ports. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty guidance, Session Manager records all session activity to CloudWatch Logs or Amazon S3 and integrates with IAM Identity Center for centralized authentication.

This solution meets all requirements: no exposed ports, full audit logging, and identity-based access control. EC2 Instance Connect and serial console access do not integrate with Identity Center and may expose management paths.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager

AWS IAM Identity Center Integration

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

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

AWS WAF supports logging of detailed HTTP request information, including source IP addresses, request URIs, headers, and rule evaluation results. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, Amazon S3 combined with Amazon Athena is the recommended and most cost-effective solution for ad hoc and forensic analysis of AWS WAF logs.

By configuring AWS WAF to deliver logs to Amazon S3 and using Athena with partition projection, the security engineer can efficiently query large volumes of log data without maintaining partitions manually. This enables rapid identification of application-layer attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and bot activity.

Options A and D are incorrect because AWS WAF logs are not delivered to CloudTrail. Option B is invalid because OpenSearch cannot directly query data stored in S3 without ingestion or additional tooling.

AWS documentation highlights S3 + Athena as a best practice for scalable, serverless analysis of AWS WAF logs.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS WAF Logging Documentation

Amazon Athena Best Practices

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

Amazon SQS is an AWS-managed service and does not operate within customer VPCs. Therefore, security groups and network ACLs cannot be used to control access to SQS, making options A and B invalid. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, the recommended approach to securely access AWS services from within a VPC is through interface VPC endpoints (AWS PrivateLink).

By creating interface VPC endpoints for Amazon SQS, the company ensures that traffic to SQS stays within the AWS network and does not traverse the public internet. Adding an SQS resource policy with the aws:SourceVpce condition restricts access so that only requests originating from the specified VPC endpoint are allowed. Additionally, using the aws:PrincipalOrgId condition ensures that only principals belonging to the same AWS Organization can access the queue.

Option D introduces an external tool, increasing cost and compliance complexity, which directly violates the requirement to minimize investment outside AWS.

AWS documentation clearly identifies VPC endpoints combined with IAM condition keys as a best practice for securing service access in multi-account environments.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon SQS Security Best Practices

AWS Organizations Documentation

AWS PrivateLink User Guide

Amazon Inspector is the AWS service designed specifically for vulnerability management across compute workloads, including Amazon ECR container images and AWS Lambda functions. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, Amazon Inspector provides automated vulnerability assessments for container images stored in ECR by performing enhanced image scanning that identifies common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) in operating systems and application dependencies.

Inspector also supports Lambda code scanning to analyze function packages and container-based Lambda images for known software vulnerabilities. Findings include severity ratings and remediation guidance, allowing security teams to identify and prioritize risks efficiently.

Amazon GuardDuty focuses on threat detection using behavioral analysis and does not perform static vulnerability scanning of container images or Lambda code. AWS Security Hub aggregates findings from other services but does not perform scanning itself.

AWS best practices recommend Amazon Inspector for vulnerability detection in container images and serverless workloads.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon Inspector for ECR and Lambda

AWS Vulnerability Management Best Practices

Amazon Cognito identity pools provide temporary AWS credentials by exchanging web identity tokens with AWS STS using AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, this is the correct mechanism for granting applications AWS credentials.

User pools authenticate users but do not issue AWS credentials. Identity pools integrate with IAM roles and STS, enabling secure, temporary access to AWS services.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon Cognito Identity Pools

AWS STS Web Identity Federation