CySA+ Exam
DLP
A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is concerned the development team, which consists of contractors, has too much access to customer data. Developers use personal workstations, giving the company little to no visibility into the development activities. Which of the following would be BEST to implement to alleviate the CISO's concern?
Development of a hypothesis as part of threat hunting
A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) wants to upgrade an organization's security posture by improving proactive activities associated with attacks from internal and external threats. Which of the following is the MOST proactive tool or technique that feeds incident response capabilities?
Multifactor authentication
A SIEM solution alerts a security analyst of a high number of login attempts against the company's webmail portal. The analyst determines the login attempts used credentials from a past data breach. Which of the following is the BEST mitigation to prevent unauthorized access?
Adversary capability
A company was recently awarded several large government contracts and wants to determine its current risk from one specific APT. Which of the following threat modeling methodologies would be the MOST appropriate to use during this analysis?
Quarantine the web server
A companys incident response team is handling a threat that was identified on the network. Security analysts have determined a web server is making multiple connections from TCP port 445 outbound to servers inside its subnet as well as at remote sites. Which of the following is the MOST appropriate next step in the incident response plan?
Executing vendor compliance assessments against the organization's security controls & Completing a business impact assessment for all critical service providers
A compliance officer of a large organization has reviewed the firm's vendor management program but has discovered there are no controls defined to evaluate third-party risk or hardware source authenticity. The compliance officer wants to gain some level of assurance on a recurring basis regarding the implementation of controls by third parties. Which of the following would BEST satisfy the objectives defined by the compliance officer? (Choose two.)
start packet capturing to look for traffic that could be indicative of command and control from the miner
A cyber incident response analyst is investigating a suspected cryptocurrency miner on a company's server. Which of the following is the FIRST step the analyst should take?
establish a hypothesis
A cyber security analyst is contributing to a team hunt on an organizations endpoints. Which of the following should the analyst do FIRST?
static and dynamic analysis
A cybersecurity analyst has access to several threat feeds and wants to organize them while simultaneously comparing intelligence against network traffic. Which of the following would BEST accomplish this goal?
enables remote code execution that is being exploited in the wild
A cybersecurity analyst is reading a daily intelligence digest of new vulnerabilities. The type of vulnerability that should be disseminated FIRST is one that:
Diamond Model of Intrusion Analysis
A cybersecurity analyst is responding to an incident. The companys leadership team wants to attribute the incident to an attack group. Which of the following models would BEST apply to the situation?
Requirements analysis and collection planning
A cybersecurity analyst is supporting an incident response effort via threat intelligence. Which of the following is the analyst MOST likely executing?
VPN server behind the firewall
A cybersecurity analyst needs to rearchitect the network using a firewall and a VPN server to achieve the highest level of security. To BEST complete this task, the analyst should place the:
Encryption
A development team is testing a new application release. The team needs to import existing client PHI data records from the production environment to the test environment to test accuracy and functionality. Which of the following would BEST protect the sensitivity of this data while still allowing the team to perform the testing?
Establish a hosted SSO
A development team signed a contract that requires access to an on-premises physical server. Access must be restricted to authorized users only and cannot be connected to the Internet. Which of the following solutions would meet this requirement?
implement a software repository management tool
A development team uses open-source software and follows an Agile methodology with two-week sprints. Last month, the security team filed a bug for an insecure version of a common library. The DevOps team updated the library on the server, and then the security team rescanned the server to verify it was no longer vulnerable. This month, the security team found the same vulnerability on the server. Which of the following should be done to correct the cause of the vulnerability?
Adding a banner to incoming messages that identifies the messages as external
A finance department employee has received a message that appears to have been sent from the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), asking the employee to perform a wire transfer. Analysis of the email shows the message came from an external source and is fraudulent. Which of the following would work BEST to improve the likelihood of employees quickly recognizing fraudulent emails?
is implemented at the enterprise and system levels
A hybrid control is one that:
Packet analysis
A large amount of confidential data was leaked during a recent security breach. As part of a forensic investigation, the security team needs to identify the various types of traffic that were captured between two compromised devices. Which of the following should be used to identify the traffic?
Establish an alternate site with active replication to other regions
A large software company wants to move its source control and deployment pipelines into a cloud-computing environment. Due to the nature of the business, management determines the recovery time objective needs to be within one hour. Which of the following strategies would put the company in the BEST position to achieve the desired recovery time?
Patch the required hosts with the correct updates and hot fixes, and rescan them for vulnerabilities & Remove the servers reported to have high and medium vulnerabilities
A monthly job to install approved vendor software updates and hot fixes recently stopped working. The security team performed a vulnerability scan, which identified several hosts as having some critical OS vulnerabilities, as referenced in the common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) database. Which of the following should the security team do NEXT to resolve the critical findings in the most effective manner? (Choose two.)
Apply the required patches to remediate the vulnerability
A network attack that is exploiting a vulnerability in the SNMP is detected. Which of the following should the cybersecurity analyst do FIRST?
Purpose limitation
A pharmaceutical company's marketing team wants to send out notifications about new products to alert users of recalls and newly discovered adverse drug reactions. The team plans to use the names and mailing addresses that users have provided. Which of the following data privacy standards does this violate?
Patching the underlying application server becomes the responsibility of the client
A product manager is working with an analyst to design a new application that will perform as a data analytics platform and will be accessible via a web browser. The product manager suggests using a PaaS provider to host the application. Which of the following is a security concern when using a PaaS solution?
$75,000
A security analyst discovers a vulnerability on an unpatched web server that is used for testing machine learning on Big Data sets. Exploitation of the vulnerability could cost the organization $1.5 million in lost productivity. The server is located on an isolated network segment that has a 5% chance of being compromised. Which of the following is the value of this risk?
federated authentication
A security analyst discovers accounts in sensitive SaaS-based systems are not being removed in a timely manner when an employee leaves the organization. To BEST resolve the issue, the organization should implement:
Network assets used in previous attacks attributed to the threat actor
A security analyst for a large financial institution is creating a threat model for a specific threat actor that is likely targeting an organization's financial assets. Which of the following is the BEST example of the level of sophistication this threat actor is using?
Create a security rule that blocks Internet access in the development VPC
A security analyst has discovered that developers have installed browsers on all development servers in the companys cloud infrastructure and are using them to browse the Internet. Which of the following changes should the security analyst make to BEST protect the environment?
Unknown threat
A security analyst has observed several incidents within an organization that are affecting one specific piece of hardware on the network. Further investigation reveals the equipment vendor previously released a patch. Which of the following is the MOST appropriate threat classification for these incidents?
Force a password reset for the impacted employees and revoke any tokens
A security analyst has received information from a third-party intelligence-sharing resource that indicates employee accounts were breached. Which of the following is the NEXT step the analyst should take to address the issue
Examine the server logs for further indicators of compromise of a web application
A security analyst has received reports of very slow, intermittent access to a public-facing corporate server. Suspecting the system may be compromised, the analyst runs the following commands: see image Based on the output from the above commands, which of the following should the analyst do NEXT to further the investigation?
Log collector
A security analyst implemented a solution that would analyze the attacks that the organization's firewalls failed to prevent. The analyst used the existing systems to enact the solution and executed the following command: $ sudo nc -1 -v -c maildemon . py 25 caplog, txt Which of the following solutions did the analyst implement?
a managed switch to segment the lab into a separate VLAN
A security analyst is building a malware analysis lab. The analyst wants to ensure malicious applications are not capable of escaping the virtual machines and pivoting to other networks. To BEST mitigate this risk, the analyst should use __________.
Thursdays logs
A security analyst is conducting a post-incident log analysis to determine which indicators can be used to detect further occurrences of a data exfiltration incident. The analyst determines backups were not performed during this time and reviews the following: SEE IMAGE Which of the following should the analyst review to find out how the data was exfiltrated?
Tool A is agent based & Tool B is unauthenticated
A security analyst is evaluating two vulnerability management tools for possible use in an organization. The analyst set up each of the tools according to the respective vendor's instructions and generated a report of vulnerabilities that ran against the same target server. Tool A reported the following: Tool B reported the following: Which of the following BEST describes the method used by each tool? (Choose two.)
Zero day
A security analyst is investigating a system compromise. The analyst verifies the system was up to date on OS patches at the time of the compromise. Which of the following describes the type of vulnerability that was MOST likely exploited?
Risk acceptance
A security analyst is providing a risk assessment for a medical device that will be installed on the corporate network. During the assessment, the analyst discovers the device has an embedded operating system that will be at the end of its life in two years. Due to the criticality of the device, the security committee makes a risk-based policy decision to review and enforce the vendor upgrade before the end of life is reached. Which of the following risk actions has the security committee taken?
Enforce unique session IDs for the application
A security analyst is reviewing a web application. If an unauthenticated user tries to access a page in the application, the user is redirected to the login page. After successful authentication, the user is then redirected back to the original page. Some users have reported receiving phishing emails with a link that takes them to the application login page but then redirects to a fake login page after successful authentication. Which of the following will remediate this software vulnerability?
The system is scanning ajgidwle.com for PII
A security analyst is reviewing packet captures from a system that was compromised. The system was already isolated from the network, but it did have network access for a few hours after being compromised. When viewing the capture in a packet analyzer, the analyst sees the following: see image Which of the following can the analyst conclude?
The IP address was blacklisted
A security analyst is reviewing the following log from an email security service. see image Which of the following BEST describes the reason why the email was blocked?
Directory traversal exploit
A security analyst is reviewing the following web server log: GET %2f..%2f..%2f.. %2f.. %2f.. %2f.. %2f../etc/passwd Which of the following BEST describes the issue?
grep -v javashark chat.log
A security analyst is reviewing the logs from an internal chat server. The chat.log file is too large to review manually, so the analyst wants to create a shorter log file that only includes lines associated with a user demonstrating anomalous activity. Below is a snippet of the log: see image Which of the following commands would work BEST to achieve the desired result?
This is a false negative, and the new computers need to be updated by the desktop team
A security analyst is reviewing vulnerability scan results and notices new workstations are being flagged as having outdated antivirus signatures. The analyst observes the following plugin output: Antivirus is installed on the remote host: Installation path: C:\Program Files\AVProduct\Win32\ Product Engine: 14.12.101 - Engine Version: 3.5.71 - Scanner does not currently have information about AVProduct version 3.5.71. It may no longer be supported. The engine version is out of date. The oldest supported version from the vendor is 4.2.11.The analyst uses the vendor's website to confirm the oldest supported version is correct. Which of the following BEST describes the situation?1
ICMP is being blocked by a firewall
A security analyst is trying to determine if a host is active on a network. The analyst first attempts the following: SEE IMAGE Which of the following would explain the difference in results?
Increase the network segmentation
A security analyst needs to reduce the overall attack surface. Which of the following infrastructure changes should the analyst recommend?
To reduce the attack surface
A security analyst on the threat-hunting team has developed a list of unneeded, benign services that are currently running as part of the standard OS deployment for workstations. The analyst will provide this list to the operations team to create a policy that will automatically disable the services for all workstations in the organization. Which of the following BEST describes the security analyst's goal?
memory corruption
A security analyst received a SIEM alert regarding high levels of memory consumption for a critical system. After several attempts to remediate the issue, the system went down. A root cause analysis revealed a bad actor forced the application to not reclaim memory. This caused the system to be depleted of resources. Which of the following BEST describes this attack?
A password-spraying attack was performed against the organization
A security analyst received an alert from the SIEM indicating numerous login attempts from users outside their usual geographic zones, all of which were initiated through the web-based mail server. The logs indicate all domain accounts experienced two login attempts during the same time frame. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of this issue?
proxy to block all connections to <malwaresource>.
A security analyst suspects a malware infection was caused by a user who downloaded malware after clicking http://<malwaresource>/a.php in a phishing email.To prevent other computers from being infected by the same malware variation, the analyst should create a rule on the __________.
Uncredentialled scan
A security analyst wants to identify which vulnerabilities a potential attacker might initially exploit if the network is compromised. Which of the following would provide the BEST results?
Geofencing
A security team wants to make SaaS solutions accessible from only the corporate campus. Which of the following would BEST accomplish this goal?
Add TXT @ "v=spf1 mx include:_spf.comptia.org גˆ'all" to the DNS record
A security technician is testing a solution that will prevent outside entities from spoofing the company's email domain, which is comptia.org. The testing is successful, and the security technician is prepared to fully implement the solution. Which of the following actions should the technician take to accomplish this task?
FPGA applications are easily cloned, increasing the possibility of intellectual property theft
A small electronics company decides to use a contractor to assist with the development of a new FPGA-based device. Several of the development phases will occur off-site at the contractor's labs. Which of the following is the main concern a security analyst should have with this arrangement?
Ensure both power supplies on the SAN are serviced by separate circuits, so that if one circuit goes down, the other remains powered.
A storage area network (SAN) was inadvertently powered off while power maintenance was being performed in a datacenter. None of the systems should have lost all power during the maintenance. Upon review, it is discovered that a SAN administrator moved a power plug when testing the SAN's fault notification features. Which of the following should be done to prevent this issue from reoccurring?
Identify potentially affected systems by creating a correlation search in the SIEM based on the network traffic
A team of security analysts has been alerted to potential malware activity. The initial examination indicates one of the affected workstations is beaconing on TCP port 80 to five IP addresses and attempting to spread across the network over port 445. Which of the following should be the teams NEXT step during the detection phase of this response process?
sha256sum ~/Desktop/file.pdf
A user receives a potentially malicious email that contains spelling errors and a PDF document. A security analyst reviews the email and decides to download the attachment to a Linux sandbox for review. Which of the following commands would MOST likely indicate if the email is malicious?
Line 3
A user's computer has been running slowly when the user tries to access web pages. A security analyst runs the command netstat -aon from the command line and receives the following output: see image Which of the following lines indicates the computer may be compromised?
Compatibility mode
Bootloader malware was recently discovered on several company workstations. All the workstations run Windows and are current models with UEFI capability. Which of the following UEFI settings is the MOST likely cause of the infections?
Install and IDS on the network between the switch and the legacy equipment
An analyst is working with a network engineer to resolve a vulnerability that was found in a piece of legacy hardware, which is critical to the operation of the organization's production line. The legacy hardware does not have third-party support, and the OEM manufacturer of the controller is no longer in operation. The analyst documents the activities and verifies these actions prevent remote exploitation of the vulnerability. Which of the following would be the MOST appropriate to remediate the controller?
Minutes from meetings in which risk assessment activities addressing the servers were discussed
An audit has revealed an organization is utilizing a large number of servers that are running unsupported operating systems. As part of the management response phase of the audit, which of the following would BEST demonstrate senior management is appropriately aware of and addressing the issue?
Encrypt the binaries using an authenticated AES-256 mode of operation
An incident responder successfully acquired application binaries off a mobile device for later forensic analysis. Which of the following should the analyst do NEXT?
tracert 10.79.95.173
An information security analyst is compiling data from a recent penetration test and reviews the following output: SEE IMAGE The analyst wants to obtain more information about the web-based services that are running on the target. Which of the following commands would MOST likely provide the needed information?
Sanitization policy
An information security analyst is reviewing backup data sets as part of a project focused on eliminating archival data sets. Which of the following should be considered FIRST prior to disposing of the electronic data?
Data loss prevention
An information security analyst is working with a data owner to identify the appropriate controls to preserve the confidentiality of data within an enterprise environment. One of the primary concerns is exfiltration of data by malicious insiders. Which of the following controls is the MOST appropriate to mitigate risks?
use Wireshark to capture packets between SCADA devices and the management system
An information security analyst observes anomalous behavior on the SCADA devices in a power plant. This behavior results in the industrial generators overheating and destabilizing the power supply. Which would BEST identify potential indicators of compromise?
A simulated breach scenario involving the incident response team
An organization developed a comprehensive incident response policy. Executive management approved the policy and its associated procedures. Which of the following activities would be MOST beneficial to evaluate personnels familiarity with incident response procedures?
Threat hunting
An organization has not had an incident for several months. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) wants to move to a more proactive stance for security investigations. Which of the following would BEST meet that goal?
Create one cloud account and three separate VPCs for each environment. Create security rules to allow access to and from each environment
An organization is moving its infrastructure to the cloud in an effort to meet the budget and reduce staffing requirements. The organization has three environments: development, testing, and production. These environments have interdependencies but must remain relatively segmented. Which of the following methods would BEST secure the company's infrastructure and be the simplest to manage and maintain?
TPM
An organization that handles sensitive financial information wants to perform tokenization of data to enable the execution of recurring transactions. The organization is most interested in a secure, built-in device to support its solution. Which of the following would MOST likely be required to perform the desired function?
Legal requirements
As part of a review of incident response plans, which of the following is MOST important for an organization to understand when establishing the breach notification period?
Simulation
As part of an exercise set up by the information security officer, the IT staff must move some of the network systems to an off-site facility and redeploy them for testing. All staff members must ensure their respective systems can power back up and match their gold image. If they find any inconsistencies, they must formally document the information. Which of the following BEST describes this test?
DLP
Data spillage occurred when an employee accidentally emailed a sensitive file to an external recipient. Which of the following controls would have MOST likely prevented this incident?
Limit communications to pre-authorized parties to ensure response efforts remain confidential.
During a cyber incident, which of the following is the BEST course of action?
A firewall rule that will block traffic from the specific IP addresses
During an investigation, a security analyst determines suspicious activity occurred during the night shift over the weekend. Further investigation reveals the activity was initiated from an internal IP going to an external website. Which of the following would be the MOST appropriate recommendation to prevent the activity from happening in the future?
The system memory
During an investigation, a security analyst identified machines that are infected with malware the antivirus was unable to detect. Which of the following is the BEST place to acquire evidence to perform data carving?
DST 172.10.3.5.
During routine monitoring, a security analyst discovers several suspicious websites that are communicating with a local host. The analyst queries for IP192.168.50.2 for a 24-hour period: see image To further investigate, the analyst should request PCAP for SRC 192.168.50.2 and __________.
anomalous traffic signatures
For machine learning to be applied effectively toward security analysis automation, it requires what?
firewalls and UTM devices
The inability to do remote updates of certificates, keys, software, and firmware is a security issue commonly associated with:
nmap ""sS ""O <system> -P0
When attempting to do a stealth scan against a system that does not respond to ping, which of the following Nmap commands BEST accomplishes that goal?
It enables standard checklist and vulnerability analysis expressions for automation
Which of the following BEST articulates the benefit of leveraging SCAP in an organizations cybersecurity analysis toolset?
SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle)
Which of the following BEST describes the process by which code is developed, tested, and deployed in small batches?
Acceptable use policy
Which of the following policies would state an employee should not disable security safeguards, such as host firewalls and antivirus, on company systems?
Data owner
Which of the following roles is ultimately responsible for determining the classification levels assigned to specific data sets?
Authorized, intentional, malicious
Which of the following sets of attributes BEST illustrates the characteristics of an insider threat from a security perspective?
Stress testing
Which of the following software assessment methods would be BEST for gathering data related to an applications availability during peak times?
parameterized queries & input validation
Which of the following software security best practices would prevent an attacker from being able to run arbitrary SQL commands within a web application?
Retention
Which of the following types of policies is used to regulate data storage on the network?
API integration
Which of the following will allow different cloud instances to share various types of data with a minimal amount of complexity?
public relations
Which of the following would MOST likely be included in the incident response procedure after a security breach of customer PII?
Configure filesystem encryption
Which of the following would a security engineer recommend to BEST protect sensitive system data from being accessed on mobile devices?
This is an encoded WAF bypass
While analyzing logs from a WAF, a cybersecurity analyst finds the following: GET /form.php?id=463225%2b%2575%256e%2569%256f%256e%2b%2573%2574%2box3133333731,1223,1224&name=&state=ILג€Which of the following BEST describes what the analyst has found
placed in an isolated network segment, authenticated on the IT side, and forwarded into the ICS network
While planning segmentation for an ICS environment, a security engineer determines IT resources will need access to devices within the ICS environment without compromising security. To provide the MOST secure access model in this scenario, the jumpbox should be __________.
Data classification matrix
An analyst is investigating an anomalous event reported by the SOC. After reviewing the system logs, the analyst identifies an unexpected addition of a user with root-level privileges on the endpoint. Which of the following data sources will BEST help the analyst to determine whether this event constitutes an incident?
Identify SLA requirements for monitoring and logging
An analyst is participating in the solution analysis process for a cloud-hosted SIEM platform to centralize log monitoring and alerting capabilities in the SOC.Which of the following is the BEST approach for supply chain assessment when selecting a vendor?
192.168.1.10
After a breach involving the exfiltration of a large amount of sensitive data, a security analyst is reviewing the following firewall logs to determine how the breach occurred: SEE IMAGE Which of the following IP addresses does the analyst need to investigate further?
Tokenization of sensitive data
An analyst has been asked to provide feedback regarding the controls required by a revised regulatory framework. At this time, the analyst only needs to focus on the technical controls. Which of the following should the analyst provide an assessment of?
RTOS (real time operating system)
An analyst is performing penetration testing and vulnerability assessment activities against a new vehicle automation platform. Which of the following is MOST likely an attack vector that is being utilized as part of the testing and assessment?
the execution of unauthorized actions against a database
It is important to parameterize queries to prevent what?
Segment the servers and systems used by the business unit from the rest of the network
The security team at a large corporation is helping the payment-processing team to prepare for a regulatory compliance audit and meet the following objectives: -Reduce the number of potential findings by the auditors. -Limit the scope of the audit to only devices used by the payment-processing team for activities directly impacted by the regulations. -Prevent the external-facing web infrastructure used by other teams from coming into scope. -Limit the amount of exposure the company will face if the systems used by the payment-processing team are compromised. Which of the following would be the MOST effective way for the security team to meet these objectives?
