CASP 1

Question 1

An infrastructure team is at the end of a procurement process and has selected a vendor. As part of the final negotiations, 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 on 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. Mitigate the risk by asking the vendor to accept the in-country privacy principles
C. Require the solution owner to accept the identified risks and consequences
D. Review the entire procurement process to determine the lessons learned

Answer 1

C

Question 2

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

Answer 2

A

Question 3

Answer 3

B

Question 4

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 “phoned home” 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

Answer 4

A

Question 5

Answer 5

B

Question 6

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 timesensitive 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

Answer 6

A

Question 7

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

Answer 7

D

Question 8

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

Answer 8

B

Question 9

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

Answer 9

D

Question 10

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

Answer 10

F

Question 11

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

Answer 11

E

Question 12

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

Answer 12

C

Question 13

Answer 13

B

Question 14

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

Answer 14

D

Question 15

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:

The ICS supplier has specified that any software installed will result in lack of support.
There is no documented trust boundary defined between the SCADA and corporate networks.
Operational technology staff have to manage the SCADA equipment via the engineering workstation.
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

Answer 15

A

Question 16

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

Answer 16

A

Question 17

Answer 17

B

Question 18

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.

Answer 18

B

Question 19

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

Answer 19

B

Question 20

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

Answer 20

B

Question 21

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

Answer 21

D

Question 22

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

Answer 22

C

Question 23

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

Answer 23

B

Question 24

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 mediumimpact 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

Answer 24

C

Question 25

Answer 25

D

Question 26

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

Answer 26

D

Question 27

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

Answer 27

A

Question 28

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

Answer 28

B

Question 29

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
CompTIA CAS-003 Exam
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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

Answer 29

C

Question 30

Answer 30

B

Question 31

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

Answer 31

B

Question 32

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

Answer 32

B

Question 33

Answer 33

B

Question 34

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

Answer 34

D

Question 35

A. VLAN201, VLAN202, VLAN400
B. VLAN201, VLAN202, VLAN700
C. VLAN201, VLAN202, VLAN400, VLAN680, VLAN700
D. VLAN400, VLAN680, VLAN700

Answer 35

B

Question 36

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

Answer 36

D

Question 37

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

Answer 37

B

Question 38

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

Answer 38

D

Question 39

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

Answer 39

D

Question 40

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

Answer 40

B

Question 41

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 enable S/MIME
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

Answer 41

A

Question 42

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

Answer 42

C

Question 43

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

Answer 43

D

Question 44

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

Answer 44

B

Question 45

A software development team has spent the last 18 months developing a new web-based frontend 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

Answer 45

D

Question 46

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

Answer 46

D

Question 47

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: “” and “”. 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

Question 48

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

Answer 48

B

Question 49

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

Answer 49

C

Question 50

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

Answer 50

A

Question 51

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

Answer 51

C

Question 52

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

Answer 52

B

Question 53

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

Answer 53

C

Question 54

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

Answer 54

A