Amazon Web Services SCS-C03 Practice Test Questions Answers

Amazon Macie is the AWS service designed specifically to discover, classify, and inventory sensitive data stored in Amazon S3. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, Macie can be enabled organization-wide using AWS Organizations, with a delegated administrator account that centrally manages findings across all member accounts.

By designating the security account as the delegated administrator for both Amazon Macie and AWS Security Hub, the company can centralize sensitive data findings in a single location. Macie automatically scans S3 buckets for sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) and publishes findings to Security Hub for centralized visibility and reporting.

Option B and C are incorrect because Amazon Inspector does not scan S3 objects for sensitive data. Option D is invalid because AWS Trusted Advisor does not ingest Macie sensitive data findings.

AWS best practices recommend Amazon Macie with delegated administration and Security Hub integration for centralized sensitive data inventory across multi-account environments.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon Macie Sensitive Data Discovery

AWS Organizations Delegated Administrator Model

AWS Security Hub Integration Overview

AWS Organizations tag policies are designed to standardize and govern tag keys and allowed values across accounts. AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation describes tag policies as a governance mechanism that helps enforce consistent tagging by specifying required tag keys and permitted values. To ensure every resource has the CostCenter tag at creation time, an SCP can deny create actions when aws:RequestTag/CostCenter is missing (null). This prevents resources from being created without the required tag. Tag policies then define the three approved values and can be configured to enforce or report noncompliance depending on supported services, ensuring that tag values remain within the allowed set and preventing drift to unapproved values. Compared with custom Lambda-based enforcement, this approach minimizes operational overhead and keeps enforcement within AWS native governance services. Option A partially addresses allowed values at request time but does not address ongoing governance as cleanly across many services. Option B is not preventive because Lambda runs after events and cannot reliably block all creations. Option D still relies on custom logic and is not as operationally efficient as tag policies plus SCP guardrails.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Organizations Tag Policies

AWS Organizations SCP Condition Keys for Tag Enforcement

Amazon GuardDuty provides managed threat detection and supports EKS protection features that analyze Kubernetes audit logs to detect suspicious activity, including unauthorized or unauthenticated access attempts. AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation recommends GuardDuty for low-overhead detection because it is fully managed and does not require deploying agents or modifying application code. EKS Audit Log Monitoring is designed to consume and analyze relevant control plane audit events to identify anomalous or unauthorized actions against the cluster. Compared to third-party add-ons, GuardDuty reduces operational burden and remains fully within AWS managed services. Security Hub aggregates findings from services like GuardDuty but does not itself perform the detection. CloudWatch Container Insights focuses on performance and operational metrics, not authentication security detections. Therefore, enabling GuardDuty with EKS Audit Log Monitoring provides the required detection with the least operational effort and without requiring additional configuration to the existing EKS workload beyond enabling the feature.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon GuardDuty EKS Protection and Audit Log Monitoring

AWS Threat Detection Best Practices for Kubernetes on AWS

AWS Config provides managed rules that continuously evaluate resource configurations against compliance requirements. The AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation highlights AWS Config managed rules as the preferred mechanism for enforcing configuration compliance at scale. The managed rule for encrypted RDS storage automatically detects DB instances and clusters that are created without encryption enabled.

By configuring automatic remediation, AWS Config can immediately invoke corrective actions without manual intervention. Integrating remediation with an Amazon SNS topic enables automated email notifications, while an AWS Lambda function can terminate the noncompliant resource. This creates a fully automated detect-alert-remediate workflow.

Option B requires manual remediation, which increases operational effort and delays enforcement. Options C and D rely on Amazon EventBridge, which evaluates events rather than configuration state and does not provide continuous compliance monitoring. AWS Config is explicitly designed for configuration compliance and governance use cases.

This solution aligns with AWS governance best practices by combining continuous monitoring, automated remediation, and centralized alerting with minimal operational overhead.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Config Managed Rules

AWS Config Automatic Remediation

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