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SCS-C02 · Question #178

A company is undergoing a layer 3 and layer 4 DDoS attack on its web servers running on AWS. Which combination of AWS services and features will provide protection in this scenario? (Choose three.)

The correct answer is A. Amazon Route 53 D. AWS Shield E. Network Load Balancer. AWS Shield (D) is the direct answer - it's purpose-built to detect and mitigate layer 3/4 DDoS attacks (SYN floods, UDP reflection, etc.) at both Standard and Advanced tiers. Amazon Route 53 (A) is automatically protected by Shield Standard and provides DNS-level resilience…

Submitted by yousef_jo· Mar 6, 2026Infrastructure Security

Question

A company is undergoing a layer 3 and layer 4 DDoS attack on its web servers running on AWS. Which combination of AWS services and features will provide protection in this scenario? (Choose three.)

Options

  • AAmazon Route 53
  • BAWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
  • CAmazon S3
  • DAWS Shield
  • ENetwork Load Balancer
  • FAmazon GuardDuty

How the community answered

(44 responses)
  • A
    73% (32)
  • B
    9% (4)
  • C
    14% (6)
  • F
    5% (2)

Explanation

AWS Shield (D) is the direct answer - it's purpose-built to detect and mitigate layer 3/4 DDoS attacks (SYN floods, UDP reflection, etc.) at both Standard and Advanced tiers. Amazon Route 53 (A) is automatically protected by Shield Standard and provides DNS-level resilience, allowing traffic to be rerouted away from overwhelmed endpoints during an attack. Network Load Balancer (E) operates at layer 4 (TCP/UDP), integrates natively with Shield, and can absorb and distribute volumetric attack traffic across multiple targets, preventing any single server from being overwhelmed.

The distractors fail because: ACM (B) only manages TLS/SSL certificates - it has no traffic-handling or mitigation role. S3 (C) is object storage and not relevant to protecting web server infrastructure from network-layer attacks. GuardDuty (F) is a detective control that identifies threats and generates alerts - it does not actively block or mitigate DDoS traffic.

Memory tip: Think of the three correct answers as forming a "DDoS defense stack from top to bottom" - Route 53 absorbs at DNS, NLB absorbs at the transport layer, and Shield is the engine powering protection at both. If a service's primary job is detection (GuardDuty) or encryption (ACM), it won't stop packets from hitting your servers.

Topics

#DDoS Protection#AWS Shield#Network Load Balancer#Route 53

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