1.3.5 Log analysis for event validation - Effective log analysis is a crucial skill for AWS security professionals, especially in responding to incidents involving compromised resources and workloads. The AWS Certified Security Specialty SCS-C02 Exam Guide highlights how querying logs from services like CloudTrail, CloudWatch Logs, and VPC Flow Logs, using tools such as Athena and Detective, allows teams to validate alerts, pinpoint affected resources, and trace the root cause of attacks. In a real-world scenario, an e-commerce company detects credential exfiltration on an EC2 instance the security team validates the incident with GuardDuty and Athena, scopes the attack through CloudTrail and VPC Flow Logs, and uses Detective for deeper analysis. The team then preserves forensic evidence, isolates the affected resources, rotates compromised credentials, patches vulnerabilities, and sets up automated, ongoing monitoring to prevent future incidents. Centralizing and correlating logs across accounts, automating responses with Lambda and EventBridge, and ensuring log integrity are all essential best practices that support both operational and compliance needs. Overall, mastering log analysis not only enables fast, thorough responses to breaches but is also a key area of expertise for succeeding in the AWS Security Specialty exam and protecting cloud environments.
