AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C02) — Question 17

A company hosts a web application on an Apache web server. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances that are in an Auto Scaling group. The company configured the EC2 instances to send the Apache web server logs to an Amazon CloudWatch Logs group that the company has configured to expire after 1 year.
Recently, the company discovered in the Apache web server logs that a specific IP address is sending suspicious requests to the web application. A security engineer wants to analyze the past week of Apache web server logs to determine how many requests that the IP address sent and the corresponding URLs that the IP address requested.
What should the security engineer do to meet these requirements with the LEAST effort?

Answer options

• A. Export the CloudWatch Logs group data to Amazon S3. Use Amazon Macie to query the logs for the specific IP address and the requested URL.
• B. Configure a CloudWatch Logs subscription to stream the log group to an Amazon OpenSearch Service cluster. Use OpenSearch Service to analyze the logs for the specific IP address and the requested URLs.
• C. Use CloudWatch Logs Insights and a custom query syntax to analyze the CloudWatch logs for the specific IP address and the requested URLs.
• D. Export the CloudWatch Logs group data to Amazon S3. Use AWS Glue to crawl the S3 bucket for only the log entries that contain the specific IP address. Use AWS Glue to view the results.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

The correct answer is C because CloudWatch Logs Insights allows for efficient querying of logs without the need for additional services or data transfers. Options A and D require exporting logs to S3 and using other services, which adds complexity and effort. Option B, while viable, involves setting up an OpenSearch Service cluster, which is more involved than using the built-in functionality of CloudWatch Logs Insights.