What SCS-C03 Questions and Answers feature?

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) customer managed keys areregional resources. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide and KMS documentation, a KMS key created in one AWS Regioncannot be used directly in another Region. When copying an encrypted Amazon Aurora DB snapshot across Regions, the destination Region must have access to a KMS keythat exists in that Region.

Because the original KMS key resides in us-east-1, it cannot be accessed or referenced in us-west-1. The correct and supported approach is tocreate a new customer managed KMS key in us-west-1and specify that key when performing the cross-Region snapshot copy. Amazon RDS automatically decrypts the snapshot using the source Region key and re-encrypts it using the destination Region key during the copy process.

Option A is invalid because KMS keys cannot be stored or transferred through AWS Secrets Manager. Options C and D are incorrect because IAM policies cannot grant cross-Region usage of a KMS key; KMS enforces strict regional boundaries regardless of IAM permissions.

AWS documentation clearly states thatcross-Region encrypted snapshot copies require a KMS key in the destination Region, making this approach mandatory for compliance and encryption continuity.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Key Management Service Developer Guide

Amazon Aurora Security Documentation

AWS abuse notifications are delivered as AWS Health events. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, Amazon EventBridge integrates natively with AWS Health and can be used to detect specific event types such as AWS_ABUSE_DOS_REPORT in near real time.

By creating an EventBridge rule that filters for the abuse report event type and publishes directly to Amazon SNS, the solution remains fully managed, low latency, and cost effective.

Polling APIs introduces delay and complexity. CloudTrail does not log abuse notifications. EventBridge with AWS Health is the recommended mechanism for reacting to AWS service events.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Health and EventBridge Integration

AWS Abuse Notification Handling

The findingInstanceCredentialExfiltrationindicates that credentials available to the EC2 instance (from the instance profile / IMDS) were likely stolen and then used from an unusual location. The fastest way todeny the malicious actor immediatelyis to invalidate the stolen, currently usable credentials. Because these aretemporary credentialsissued to the instance profile role, the correct first containment action is torevoke active sessionsfor that role so the stolen session credentials stop working. This directly blocks continued API use while you continue investigation and remediation.

Changing security groups (Option A) affects inbound network access to the website but does not stop an attacker from using stolen API credentials against AWS APIs. Installing agents and running assessments (Options B and C) are investigative steps that take time and do not immediately cut off the attacker’s current access. After revoking sessions, best practice incident response typically continues with additional containment and eradication steps such as rotating credentials, reviewing CloudTrail for actions taken, checking for persistence (new IAM users/keys, modified policies), patching the instance, and restricting IMDS (for example, enforcing IMDSv2) to reduce risk of further credential theft.