Score Higher on Verified SCS-C03 | AWS Certified Security – Specialty Exam Questions with Answers

AWS incident response best practices emphasize containment with minimal blast radius while preserving business continuity. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide, isolating a compromised resource while allowing the application to continue operating is the recommended initial response.

By creating an Amazon EventBridge rule that reacts to GuardDuty anomalous traffic findings and invokes an AWS Lambda function, the security engineer can automatically remove the affected EC2 instance from the Auto Scaling group and attach a restricted security group. This immediately stops malicious activity while allowing Auto Scaling to replace the instance and keep the application available.

Option A is inappropriate because EC2 instance profiles do not use long-term access keys. Option C applies subnet-wide changes that could disrupt unrelated workloads. Option D provides notification only and does not meet the automated response requirement.

AWS documentation explicitly identifies instance isolation via security groups as a preferred containment technique that preserves application availability and forensic integrity.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon GuardDuty User Guide

AWS Incident Response Best Practices

AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides continuous monitoring and evaluation of AWS resource configurations against desired configuration baselines. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide, AWS Config is the primary service used to track configuration changes, evaluate compliance in near real time, and display compliance states for individual AWS resources.

AWS Config provides managed rules that directly map to the listed Aurora MySQL security requirements, including encryption at rest, public accessibility, deletion protection, and log exports to CloudWatch Logs. These managed rules continuously evaluate resources and mark them as compliant or noncompliant whenever a configuration change occurs.

The AWS Config dashboard enables security engineers to view per-resource and per-rule compliance states at any point in time, satisfying the requirement to display compliance status for each part of the policy.

AWS Audit Manager (Option A) is designed for audit evidence collection and reporting, not continuous monitoring. AWS Security Hub (Option C) aggregates findings from other services but relies on AWS Config for configuration compliance data. Option D introduces unnecessary custom logic and does not provide a native compliance dashboard.

AWS documentation explicitly identifies AWS Config as the authoritative service for continuous compliance monitoring and visibility.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Config Developer Guide

Amazon Aurora Security Best Practices

AWS Well-Architected Framework – Security Pillar

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