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

Option A satisfies all requirements with the most direct, purpose-built AWS logging workflow. By using the CloudWatch Agent (or fluent-bit / unified logging configuration) on each EC2 instance—regardless of whether it is On-Demand or Spot—the application logs can be centralized into asingle Amazon CloudWatch Logs log group. Centralization ensures the logs remain available even as Spot Instances are interrupted and replaced. Access control is handled withIAM policies(and optionally resource policies/KMS encryption) so that only a specific set of users can read/query the log group.

For analysis,CloudWatch Logs Insightsprovides an interactive query language that is SQL-like and commonly treated as “SQL queries” for troubleshooting. It enables fast filtering, aggregation, and pattern detection across large log volumes without building a separate data lake pipeline. This supports event-pattern analysis and root cause investigation directly from the centralized log group.

Option B is incorrect because Logs Insights queries CloudWatch Logs data, not arbitrary log files sitting in S3. Option C is inefficient (many log groups) and Athena cannot directly query CloudWatch log groups as a native data source. Option D is incorrect because Amazon Detective is for security investigations across supported data sources and is not the primary service for ad-hoc SQL-style querying of application logs.

Amazon Inspector provides native Lambda code vulnerability scanning. GuardDuty focuses on runtime threats, not static code analysis.

This is a classic Layer 7 rate-limiting requirement tied toclient IPand atime window, and AWS WAF provides this natively withrate-based rules. Placing AWS WAF in front of the ALB allows the company to count requests per source IP over a rolling window and take action (block, CAPTCHA/challenge, or count depending on configuration) once the threshold is exceeded. This approach mitigates scanning and application-layer request floods early, before requests consume EC2 or DynamoDB capacity, and it requires minimal custom code or operational work.

Options B and C require building and maintaining custom counting logic (either in Lambda or in the application), which increases complexity and risk of errors, and it also introduces operational overhead for scaling state tracking across many IPs. Option D is not appropriate: altering DynamoDB capacity does not enforce “per-IP reads,” and storing per-request metadata in the same table is an anti-pattern that increases write load and complexity.

Therefore, using AWS WAF rate-based protection at the ALB is the least-effort, most effective solution.