Amazon GuardDuty findings provide high-level detection of suspicious activity but are not designed for deep investigation on their own. The AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation explains that Amazon Detective is purpose-built to support rapid investigations by automatically collecting, correlating, and visualizing data from GuardDuty, AWS CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs. Detective enables security engineers to analyze API calls, user behavior, and resource interactions in context without making any changes to the environment.
Using read-only credentials ensures that the investigation does not impact the production application. Amazon Detective allows investigators to pivot directly from a GuardDuty finding into a detailed activity graph, showing which IAM user made anomalous calls, what resources were accessed, and how behavior deviated from the baseline. This significantly accelerates incident investigation.
Options A and C involve applying DenyAll policies, which are containment actions and could affect application availability. Option D requires manual analysis and setup and is slower than using Amazon Detective, which is designed for immediate investigative workflows.
AWS incident response guidance recommends using Detective for rapid, non-intrusive analysis after GuardDuty findings.
Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:
AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide
Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Detective Integration
AWS Incident Response Investigation Best Practices
