CLF-C02 Practice Question 54: Vulnerability Scanning
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 6 · question 4 of 10
A security team must find known software vulnerabilities (CVEs) in the company's Amazon EC2 instances and in the container images it stores in Amazon ECR. It does not want to schedule scans manually, and resources should be checked again automatically whenever a new CVE that affects them is published. Which AWS service meets these requirements?
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Answer:
Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability management service. It automatically discovers workloads (EC2 instances, container images in Amazon ECR, and Lambda functions) and continually scans them for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. There are no assessment scans to schedule. Inspector rescans resources when something changes that could introduce a vulnerability, such as a new package being installed or a new CVE being published, and each finding includes a risk score adjusted to your environment.
Option A, Amazon GuardDuty, is a threat detection service. It looks for signs of malicious activity and compromised resources, not for unpatched software packages. Option B, AWS Config, records resource *configurations* and evaluates them against rules, for example whether EBS volumes are encrypted. It does not scan installed software for CVEs. Option C, Amazon Macie, discovers sensitive data such as PII in Amazon S3. It has nothing to do with vulnerabilities in instances or images.
Reference: What is Amazon Inspector?