SCS-C02 Threat Detection and Incident Response Practice Question
A security analyst notices an IAM role 'AdminRole' is being assumed from an IP address outside the company's allowed network. The analyst wants to receive real-time alerts when this role is assumed from unauthorized locations. Which combination of services should be used?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse AWS Config (which evaluates configuration compliance) with CloudTrail (which records API activity), or they assume GuardDuty can be customized for specific role assumption alerts, when in fact GuardDuty does not support custom event pattern matching for individual IAM roles.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch Events, and Amazon SNS
AWS CloudTrail logs IAM role assumption events (sts:AssumeRole) as CloudTrail events, which can be sent to Amazon CloudWatch Events (now Amazon EventBridge) as a real-time event stream. CloudWatch Events rules can then match specific patterns (e.g., source IP outside allowed ranges) and trigger an Amazon SNS notification to alert the security analyst immediately. This combination provides the real-time alerting required without additional polling or storage.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS CloudTrail, Amazon S3, and Amazon Athena
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudTrail, Amazon S3, and Amazon Athena together are excellent for historical auditing—CloudTrail stores API activity as JSON in S3, and Athena runs SQL queries over those logs on demand. However, this combination lacks any event-driven, real-time notification path; you would need to manually query or schedule recurring queries to detect the action, which would not produce an immediate alert when the adminrole is used.
- ✗
AWS Config, Amazon SNS, and AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config continuously records and evaluates resource configuration changes, not the stream of API calls made under a specific IAM role; it would neither detect an adminrole assumption nor trigger a Lambda on that exact event pattern. While SNS and Lambda could deliver a notification, the missing piece is that AWS Config does not ingest CloudTrail event history for API-call-level monitoring, so this stack cannot reliably alert on role usage.
- ✗
Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
Amazon GuardDuty uses anomaly detection and threat intelligence to identify malicious behavior, such as cryptomining or unusual geographic access, but it does not expose a rule engine for custom event patterns like 'when this exact IAM role performs an action' and it does not generate an event for every benign API call. A Lambda triggered by GuardDuty findings would only fire on security findings, not on the routine use of adminrole, so it would miss the specific notification requirement.
- ✓
AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch Events, and Amazon SNS
Why this is correct
This is the correct answer because each service plays a specific role in a real-time alert pipeline: CloudTrail captures the API activity from adminrole, CloudWatch Events (now Amazon EventBridge) applies a custom pattern to match events containing that role's ARN or name and forwards them to SNS, and SNS delivers the notification to subscribers. The integration is event-driven and near-real-time, with no need for polling or querying, which makes it the ideal setup for immediate alerts.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SCS-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SCS-C02 exam.