Question

Difficulty: MediumThreat Detection and Vulnerability Management

A research institute manages high-performance simulation applications running on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances. The institute's security audit team requires a tool that can continuously scan the operating systems of these instances for known software vulnerabilities and analyze network paths to identify unintended exposure to the internet. Which AWS service is designed to perform these automated vulnerability assessments?

  1. A
    AWS CloudTrail
  2. Amazon InspectorAnswer
  3. C
    Amazon GuardDuty
  4. D
    AWS Shield

Answer

Amazon Inspector is the correct service because it automatically evaluates Amazon EC2 instances for software vulnerabilities and unintended network path exposure.
Amazon Inspector is designed to automatically discover and scan Amazon EC2 instances, container images, and AWS Lambda functions for software vulnerabilities (like CVEs) and unintended network exposure.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the core requirement of finding an AWS service that performs automated security assessments, scans for software vulnerabilities, and analyzes network paths on Amazon EC2 instances.
The target service must support host-level operating system scanning and network exposure analysis.
This distinguishes between services that monitor active API threats and those that audit static configuration and patching status.
2
Evaluate the capabilities of Amazon Inspector against other security services.
Amazon Inspector is the only service that performs automated vulnerability scans on host software and checks network accessibility, whereas GuardDuty is for active threat detection, CloudTrail is for auditing API events, and Shield is for DDoS protection.
Identifying the distinct functionality of each option ensures the selection of the correct service.

Key Concept

Continuous vulnerability assessment and network reachability analysis using Amazon Inspector.
Estimated Time:1m 0s
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