During a proactive threat hunting exercise, you discover that a critical production project has an...

Comprehensive and Detailed 150 to 250 words of Explanation From Exact Extract Google Security Operations Engineer documents:

To definitively determine "whether any actions were taken" by a specific identity, you must search the audit logs directly for that identity's activity. The scenario specifies two data repositories: a centralized Cloud Logging bucket (for recent/retention-period logs) and BigQuery (for historical logs).

According to Google Cloud Observability and Security Operations documentation, Cloud Audit Logs (specifically Admin Activity and Data Access logs) capture "Who did what, where, and when." The primary identifier for the actor in these logs is the protoPayload.authenticationInfo.principalEmail.

Option C is the only method that directly queries the activity logs for the specific actor.

Cloud Logging: You would use the Logging Query Language to filter: protoPayload.authenticationInfo.principalEmail="[IDENTITY_EMAIL]".

BigQuery: You would use SQL to query the exported tables: SELECT * FROM [DATASET.TABLE] WHERE protopayload_auditlog.authenticationInfo.principalEmail = "[IDENTITY_EMAIL]".

Options A and B focus on access potential (Recommender/Policy Analyzer) rather than historical actions. Option D (VPC Flow Logs) records network traffic 5-tuples and does not contain identity information (principal email), making it unsuitable for attributing API actions to a specific user.