Final answer:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances hosted in AWS can be protected using Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Security Groups, Access Control Lists (ACL), and Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway.
Step-by-step explanation:
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances hosted in AWS can be protected using several tools and services. Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) provides networking isolation and security by allowing you to create a logically isolated section in the AWS cloud. Security Groups act as a virtual firewall, controlling inbound and outbound traffic for EC2 instances.
Access Control Lists (ACL) are an optional layer of security that act as a firewall for controlling traffic between subnets in a VPC. Finally, the Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway allows your instances in a private subnet to access the internet while preventing inbound connections from reaching them.