Practice Test 1 Flashcards

Question

Gordon is conducting a risk assessment for his organization and determined the amount of damage that flooding is expected to cause to his facilities each year. What metric has Gordon identified? a. ALE b. ARO c. SLE d. EF

Answer 1

A. The annualized loss expectancy is the amount of damage that the organization expects to occur each year as the result of a given risk.

Answer 2

C. The whitelisting approach to application control allows users to install only those software packages specifically approved by administrators.. This would be an appropriate approach in a scenario where application installation needs to be tightly controlled.

Answer 3

A. This is a clear example of a denial-of-service attack—denying legitimate users authorized access to the system through the use of overwhelming traffic. It goes beyond a reconnaissance attack because the attacker is affecting the system, but it is not a compromise because the attacker did not attempt to gain access to the system. There is no reason to believe that a malicious insider was involved.

Answer 4

A. The Company ID is likely unique for each row in the table, making it the best choice for a primary key. There may be multiple companies that share the same name or ZIP code. Similarly, a single sales representative likely serves more than one company, making those fields unsuitable for use as a unique identifier.

Answer 5

C. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) includes data that can be used to distinguish or trace that person’s identity, and also includes information like their medical, educational, financial, and employment information. PHI is personal health information, EDI is electronic data interchange, and proprietary data is used to maintain an organization’s competitive advantage.

Answer 6

D. 129.53.44.124 is a valid public IP address and a legitimate destination for traffic leaving Bob’s network. 12.8.195.15 is a public address on Bob’s network and should not be a destination address on a packet leaving the network. 10.8.15.9 and 192.168.109.55 are both private IP addresses that should not be routed to the Internet.

Answer 7

D. Binary keyspaces contain a number of keys equal to 2 raised to the power of the number of bits. Two to the sixth power is 64, so a 6-bit keyspace contains 64 possible keys. The number of viable keys is usually smaller in most algorithms due to the presence of parity bits and other algorithmic overhead or security issues that restrict the use of some key values.

Answer 8

D. Research has shown that traditional methods of sanitizing files on SSDs were not reliable. SSDs remap data sectors as part of wear leveling, and erase commands are not consistently effective across multiple SSD brands. Zero fills can be performed on SSDs but may not be effective, much like erase commands. Degaussing doesn’t work on SSDs because they are flash media, rather than magnetic media. SSDs don’t have data remanence issues, but that doesn’t create the need to destroy them.

Answer 9

A. Encrypting the files reduces the probability that the data will be successfully stolen, so it is an example of risk mitigation. Deleting the files would be risk avoidance. Purchasing insurance would be risk transference. Taking no action would be risk acceptance.

Answer 10

C. Sampling should be done randomly to avoid human bias. Choosing a timeframe may miss historic issues or only account for the current administrator’s processes. Sampling is an effective process if it is done on a truly random sample of sufficient size to provide effective coverage of the userbase.

Answer 11

B. The European Data Protection Directive’s seven primary tenets are: Notice Choice Onward transfer Security Data integrity Access Enforcement

Answer 12

D. In a white box test, the attacker has access to full implementation details of the system, including source code, prior to beginning the test. In gray box testing, the attacker has partial knowledge. In black box testing, the attacker has no knowledge of the system and tests it from a user perspective. Blue boxes are a phone hacking tool and are not used in software testing.

Answer 13

C. The file clearly shows HTTP requests, as evidenced by the many GET commands. Therefore, this is an example of an application log from an HTTP server.

Answer 14

C. A blue box was used to generate the 2600 Hz tones that trunking systems required. White boxes included a dual-tone, multifrequency generator to control phone systems. Black boxes were designed to steal long-distance service by manipulating line voltages, and red boxes simulated the tones of coins being deposited into payphones.

Answer 15

B. Social engineering exploits humans to allow attacks to succeed. Since help desk employees are specifically tasked with being helpful, they may be targeted by attackers posing as legitimate employees. Trojans are a type of malware, whereas phishing is a targeted attack via electronic communication methods intended to capture passwords or other sensitive data. Whaling is a type of phishing aimed at high-profile or important targets.

Answer 16

C. Identity proofing that relies on a type of verification outside of the initial environment that required the verification is out-of-band identity proofing. This type of verification relies on the owner of the phone or phone number having control of it but removes the ability for attackers to use only Internet-based resources to compromise an account. Knowledge-based authentication relies on answers to preselected information, whereas dynamic knowledge–based authentication builds questions using facts or data about the user. Risk-based identity proofing uses risk-based metrics to determine whether identities should be permitted or denied access. It is used to limit fraud in financial transactions, such as credit card purchases. This is a valid form of proofing but does not necessairly use an out-of-band channel, such as SMS.

Answer 17

A. The modulo function is the remainder value left over after an integer division operation takes place.

Answer 18

C. A hybrid authentication service can provide authentication services in both the cloud and on-premise, ensuring that service outages due to interrupted links are minimized. An onsite service would continue to work during an Internet outage but would not allow the e-commerce website to authenticate. A cloud service would leave the corporate location offline. Outsourcing authentication does not indicate whether the solution is on or off-premise, and thus isn’t a useful answer.

Answer 19

C. Federation links identity information between multiple organizations. Federating with a business partner can allow identification and authorization to occur between them, making integration much easier. Single sign-on would reduce the number of times a user has to log in but will not facilitate the sharing of identity information. Multifactor can help secure authentication, but again, doesn’t help integrate with a third party. Finally, an Identity as a Service provider might provide federation but doesn’t guarantee it.

Answer 20

B. Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is frequently used to integrate cloud services and provides the ability to make authentication and authorization assertions. Active Directory integrations are possible but are less common for cloud service providers, and RADIUS is not typically used for integrations like this. Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) is used to provision users, resources, and services, not for authentication and authorization.

Answer 21

B. Rainbow tables use precomputed password hashes to conduct cracking attacks against password files. They may be frustrated by the use of salting, which adds a specified value to the password prior to hashing, making it much more difficult to perform precomputation. Password expiration policies, password complexity policies, and user education may all contribute to password security, but they are not direct defenses against the use of rainbow tables.

Answer 22

C. A honeypot is a decoy computer system used to bait intruders into attacking. A honeynet is a network of multiple honeypots that creates a more sophisticated environment for intruders to explore. A pseudoflaw is a false vulnerability in a system that may attract an attacker. A darknet is a segment of unused network address space that should have no network activity and, therefore, may be easily used to monitor for illicit activity.

Answer 23

C. The crossover error rate (CER) is the point where both the false acceptance rate and the false rejection rate cross. CER and ERR, or equal error rate, mean the same thing and are used interchangeably.

Answer 24

B. A Type 2 is something you have, like a smart card or hardware token. A Type 1 authentication factor is something you know. A Type 3 authentication factor is something you are, like a biometric identifier. There is no such thing as a Type 4 authentication factor.

Answer 25

C. Steganography is the art of using cryptographic techniques to embed secret messages within other content. Steganographic algorithms work by making invisible alterations to files, such as modifying the least significant bits of the many bits that make up image files. VPNs may be used to obscure secret communications, but they provide protection in transit and can’t be used to embed information in an image. Watermarking does embed information in an image but with the intent of protecting intellectual property. A still image would not be used for a covert timing channel because it is a fixed file.

Answer 26

A. JavaScript is an interpreted language so the code is not compiled prior to execution, allowing Roger to inspect the contents of the code. C, C++, and Java are all compiled languages—a compiler produces an executable file that is not human-readable.

Answer 27

D. When a system is configured to use shadowed passwords, the /etc/passwd file contains only the character x in the place of a password. It would not contain any passwords, in either plaintext, encrypted, or hashed form.

Answer 28

D. Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is used for normal pings, as well as Pings of Death. Ping of Death describes attacks that were used to overflow poorly implemented ICMP handlers; Smurf attacks, which spoof broadcast pings to create huge amounts of traffic on a network; and ping floods, which are a type of denial-of-service attack.

Answer 29

D. The due care principle states that an individual should react in a situation using the same level of care that would be expected from any reasonable person. It is a very broad standard. The due diligence principle is a more specific component of due care that states an individual assigned a responsibility should exercise due care to complete it accurately and in a timely manner.

Answer 30

B. ISDN, cable modems, DSL, and T1 and T3 lines are all examples of broadband technology that can support multiple simultaneous signals. They are analog, not digital, and are not broadcast technologies.

Answer 31

C. Social engineering is the best answer, as it can be useful to penetration testers who are asked to assess whether staff members are applying security training and have absorbed the awareness messages the organization uses. Port and vulnerability scanning find technical issues that may be related to awareness or training issues but that are less likely to be directly related. Discovery can involve port scanning or other data-gathering efforts, but is also less likely to be directly related to training and awareness.

Answer 32

B. RAID level 5 is also known as disk striping with parity. It uses three or more disks, with one disk containing parity information used to restore data to another disk in the event of failure. When used with three disks, RAID 5 is able to withstand the loss of a single disk.

Answer 33

D. The Physical layer deals with the electrical impulses or optical pulses that are sent as bits to convey data.

Answer 34

A. In an IaaS server environment, the customer retains responsibility for most server security operations under the shared responsibility model. This includes managing OS security settings, maintaining host firewalls, and configuring server access control. The vendor would be responsible for all security mechanisms at the hypervisor layer and below.

Answer 35

B. Proactive monitoring, aka synthetic monitoring, uses recorded or generated traffic to test systems and software. Passive monitoring uses a network span, tap, or other device to capture traffic to be analyzed. Reactive and replay are not industry terms for types of monitoring.

Answer 36

D. Process isolation ensures that the operating system allocates a separate area of memory for each process, preventing processes from seeing each other’s data. This is a requirement for multilevel security systems.

Answer 37

B. The use of an eletcromagnetic coil inside the card indicates that this is a proximity card.

Answer 38

C. During a parallel test, the team actually activates the disaster recovery site for testing, but the primary site remains operational. During a full interruption test, the team takes down the primary site and confirms that the disaster recovery site is capable of handling regular operations. The full interruption test is the most thorough test but also the most disruptive. The checklist review is the least disruptive type of disaster recovery test. During a checklist review, team members each review the contents of their disaster recovery checklists on their own and suggest any necessary changes. During a tabletop exercise, team members come together and walk through a scenario without making any changes to information systems.

Answer 39

B. The Agile approach to software development embraces 12 core principles, found in the Agile Manifesto. One of these principles is that the best architecture, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. Another is that teams should welcome changing requirements at any step in the process. A third is that simplicity is essential. The Agile approach emphasizes delivering software frequently, not infrequently.

Answer 40

B. Hand geometry scanners assess the physical dimensions of an individual’s hand, but do not verify other unique factors about the individual, or even verify if they are alive. This means that hand geometry scanners should not be implemented as the sole authentication factor for secure environments. Hand geometry scanners do not have an abnormally high FRR, and do not stand out as a particular issue from an accessibility standpoint compared to other biometric systems.

Answer 41

A. The maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) is the amount of time that a business may be without a service before irreparable harm occurs. This measure is sometimes also called maximum tolerable outage (MTO).

Answer 42

D. Attacks that change a symlink between the time that rights are checked and the file is accessed, in order to access a file that the account does not have rights to, are time of check/time of use (TOC/TOU) attacks, a form of race condition. Unlinking removes names from a Linux filesystem, setuid allows a user to run an executable with the permissions of its owner, and tick/tock is not a type of attack or Linux command.

Answer 43

A. Smart cards are a Type II authentication factor, and include both a microprocessor and at least one certificate. Since they are something you have, they’re not a Type I or III authentication factor. Tokens do not necessarily contain certificates.

Answer 44

C. Masquerading (or impersonation) attacks use stolen or falsified credentials to bypass authentication mechanisms. Spoofing attacks rely on falsifying an identity like an IP address or hostname without credentials. Replay attacks are a more specific type of masquerading attack that relies on captured network traffic to reestablish authorized connections. Modification attacks occur when captured packets are modified and replayed to a system to attempt to perform an action.

Answer 45

C. A T1 (DS1) line is rated at 1.544 Mbps. ISDN is often 64 or 128 Kbps, and T3 lines are 44.736 Mbps.

Answer 46

C. This scenario describes separation of duties—not allowing the same person to hold two roles that, when combined, are sensitive. While two-person control is a similar concept, it does not apply in this case because the scenario does not say that either action requires the concurrence of two users.

Answer 47

C. The parol evidence rule states that when an agreement between two parties is put into written form, it is assumed to be the entire agreement unless amended in writing. The best evidence rule says that a copy of a document is not admissible if the original document is available. Real evidence and testimonial evidence are evidence types, not rules of evidence.

Answer 48

A. Network Address Translation (NAT) translates an internal address to an external address. VLANs are used to logically divide networks, BGP is a routing protocol, and S/NAT is a made-up term.

Answer 49

A. SSAE-16 does not assert specific controls. Instead it reviews the use and application of controls in an audited organization. It is an attestation standard, used for external audits, and forms part of the underlying framework for SOC 1, 2, and 3 reports.

Answer 50

D. A constrained user interface restricts what users can see or do based on their privileges. This can result in grayed-out or missing menu items, or other interface changes. Activity-based controls are called context-dependent controls, whereas controls based on the content of an object are content-dependent controls. Preventing unauthorized users from logging in is a basic authentication function.

Answer 51

B. The recovery time objective (RTO) is the amount of time expected to return an IT service or component to operation after a failure. The maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) is the longest amount of time that an IT service or component may be unavailable without causing serious damage to the organization. The recovery point objective (RPO) identifies the maximum amount of data, measured in time, that may be lost during a recovery effort. Service-level agreements (SLAs) are written contracts that document service expectations.

Answer 52

C. Class variables exist only once and share their value across all instances of that object class. Instance variables have different values for each instance. Member variables are the combination of class and instance variables associated with a particular class. Global variables do not exist in an object-oriented programming language.

Answer 53

B. Class B fire extinguishers use carbon dioxide, halon, or soda acid as their suppression material and are useful against liquid-based fires. Water may not be used against liquid-based fires because it may cause the burning liquid to splash, and many burning liquids, such as oil, will float on water.

Answer 54

D. Notifications and procedures like the signs posted at the company Chris works for are examples of directive access controls. Detective controls are designed to operate after the fact. The doors and the locks on them are examples of physical controls. Preventive controls are designed to stop an event, and could also include the locks that are present on the doors.

Answer 55

D. The seven principles that the International Safe Harbor Provisions spell out for handling personal information are notice, choice, onward transfer, access, security, data integrity, and enforcement.

Answer 56

C. The DMCA provides safe harbor protection for the operators of Internet service providers who only handle information as a common carrier for transitory purposes.

Answer 57

B. According to NIST SP 800-18, a system owner should update the system security plan when the system they are responsible for undergoes a significant change. Classification, selection of custodians, and designing ways to protect data confidentiality might occur if new data was added, but should have already been done otherwise.

Answer 58

B. Provisioning that occurs through an established workflow, such as through an HR process, is workflow-based account provisioning. If Alex had set up accounts for his new hire on the systems he manages, he would have been using discretionary account provisioning. If the provisioning system allowed the new hire to sign up for an account on their own, they would have used self-service account provisioning, and if there was a central, software-driven process, rather than HR forms, it would have been automated account provisioning.

Answer 59

C. As Alex has changed roles, he retained access to systems that he no longer administers. The provisioning system has provided rights to workstations and the application servers he manages, but he should not have access to the databases he no longer administers. Privilege levels are not specified, so we can’t determine if he has excessive rights. Logging may or may not be enabled, but it isn’t possible to tell from the diagram or problem.

Answer 60

C. When a user’s role changes, they should be provisioned based on their role and other access entitlements. De-provisioning and re-provisioning is time consuming and can lead to problems with changed IDs and how existing credentials work. Simply adding new rights leads to privilege creep, and matching another user’s rights can lead to excessive privileges due to privilege creep for that other user.

Answer 61

B. EAL2 assurance applies when the system has been structurally tested. It is the second-to-lowest level of assurance under the Common Criteria.

Answer 62

C. Before granting any user access to information, Adam should verify that the user has an appropriate security clearance as well as a business need to know the information in question.

Answer 63

B. During the preservation phase, the organization ensures that information related to the matter at hand is protected against intentional or unintentional alteration or deletion. The identification phase locates relevant information but does not preserve it. The collection phase occurs after preservation and gathers responsive information. The processing phase performs a rough cut of the collected information for relevance.

Answer 64

D. Nessus, OpenVAS, the Open Vulnerability Assessment scanner and manager, and SAINT are all vulnerability scanning tools. All provide port scanning capabilities as well but are more than simple port scanning tools.

Answer 65

D. In the subject/object model, the object is the resource being requested by a subject. In this example, Harry would like access to the document, making the document the object of the request.

Answer 66

C. The process of removing a header (and possibly a footer) from the data received from a previous layer in the OSI model is known as de-encapsulation. Encapsulation occurs when the header and/or footer are added. Payloads are part of a virus or malware package that are delivered to a target, and packet unwrapping is a made-up term.

Answer 67

C. Metasploit is a tool used to exploit known vulnerabilities. Nikto is a web application and server vulnerability scanning tool, Ettercap is a man-in-the-middle attack tool, and THC Hydra is a password brute-force tool.

Answer 68

C. Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) uses Requesting Authorities to issue SPML requests to a Provisioning Service Point. Provisioning Service Targets are often user accounts, and are required to be allowed unique identification of the data in its implementation. SAML is used for security assertions, SAMPL is an algebraic modeling language, and XACML is an access control markup language used to describe and process access control policies in an XML format.

Answer 69

D. The use of a probability/impact matrix is the hallmark of a qualitative risk assessment It uses subjective measures of probability and impact, such as “high” and “low,” in place of quantitative measures.

Answer 70

B. Mandatory access control systems can be hierarchical, where each domain is ordered and related to other domains above and below it; compartmentalized, where there is no relationship between each domain; or hybrid, where both hierarchy and compartments are used. There is no concept of bracketing in mandatory access control design.

Answer 71

C. RAID level 5 is also known as disk striping with parity. RAID 0 is called disk striping. RAID 1 is called disk mirroring. RAID 10 is known as a stripe of mirrors.

Answer 72

B. Category 5e and Category 6 UTP cable are both rated to 1000 Mbps. Cat 5 (not Cat 5e) is only rated to 100 Mbps, whereas Cat 7 is rated to 10 Gbps. There is no Cat 4e.

Answer 73

A. Developing a business impact assessment is an integral part of the business continuity planning effort. The selection of alternate facilities, activation of those facilities, and restoration of data from backup are all disaster recovery tasks.

Answer 74

D. Smurf attacks use a distributed attack approach to send ICMP echo replies at a targeted system from many different source addresses. The most effective way to block this attack would be to block inbound ICMP traffic. Blocking the source addresses is not feasible because the attacker would likely simply change the source addresses. Blocking destination addresses would likely disrupt normal activity. The Smurf attack does not use UDP, so blocking that traffic would have no effect.

Answer 75

C. Static packet filtering firewalls are known as first-generation firewalls and do not track connection state. Stateful inspection, application proxying, and next-generation firewalls all add connection state tracking capability.

Answer 76

A. TKIP is only used as a means to encrypt transmissions and is not used for data at rest. RSA, AES, and 3DES are all used on data at rest as well as data in transit.

Answer 77

C. Generational fuzzing is also known as intelligent fuzzing because it relies on the development of data models using an understanding of how the data is used by the program. Zzuf is a fuzzing program. Mutation simply modifies the inputs each time, and code based is not a description used for a type of fuzzing.

Answer 78

B. Latency is a delay in the delivery of packets from their source to their destination. Jitter is a variation in the latency for different packets. Packet loss is the disappearance of packets in transit that requires retransmission. Interference is electrical noise or other disruptions that corrupt the contents of packets.

Answer 79

B. Software tokens are flexible, with delivery options including mobile applications, SMS, and phone delivery. They have a relatively low administrative overhead, as users can typically self-manage. Biometrics require significant effort to register users and to deploy and maintain infrastructure, and require hardware at each authentication location. Both types of hardware tokens can require additional overhead for distribution and maintenance, and token failure can cause support challenges.

Answer 80

B. Web applications communicate with web browsers via an interface, making interface testing the best answer here. Regression testing might be used as part of the interface test, but is too specific to be the best answer. Similarly, the test might be a white box, or full knowledge test, but interface testing better describes this specific example. Fuzzing is less likely as part of a browser compatibility test, as it tests unexpected inputs, rather than functionality.

Answer 81

A. Role-based access control gives each user an array of permissions based on their position in the organization, such as the scheme shown here. Task-based access control is not a standard approach. Rule-based access controls use rules that apply to all subjects, which isn’t something we see in the list. Discretionary access control gives object owners rights to choose how the objects they own are accessed, which is not what this list shows.

Answer 82

D. Fire suppression systems do not stop a fire from occurring but do reduce the damage that fires cause. This is an example of reducing risk by lowering the impact of an event.

Answer 83

D. Patents and trade secrets can both protect intellectual property in the form of a process. Patents require public disclosure and have expiration dates while trade secrets remain in force for as long as they remain secret. Therefore, trade secret protection most closely aligns with the company’s goals.

Answer 84

D. The Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) is a suite of specifications used to handle vulnerability and security configuration information. The National Vulnerability Database provided by NIST uses SCAP. XACML is the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language, an OASIS standard used for access control decisions, and neither VSML nor SCML are industry terms.

Answer 85

B. The three components of the DevOps model are software development, operations, and quality assurance.

Answer 86

A. The Simple Security Property prevents an individual from reading information at a higher security level than his or her clearance allows. This is also known as the “no read up” rule. The Simple Integrity Property says that a user can’t write data to a higher integrity level than their own. The \*-Security Property says that users can’t write data to a lower security level than their own. The Discretionary Security Property allows the use of a matrix to determine access permissions.

Answer 87

B. The work breakdown structure (WBS) is an important project management tool that divides the work done for a large project into smaller components. It is not a project plan because it does not describe timing or resources. Test analyses are used during later phases of the development effort to report test results. Functional requirements may be included in a work breakdown structure, but they are not the full WBS.

Answer 88

B. Network Access Control (NAC) systems can be used to authenticate users, and then validate their system’s compliance with a security standard before they are allowed to connect to the network. Enforcing security profiles can help reduce zero-day attacks, making NAC a useful solution. A firewall can’t enforce system security policies, whereas an IDS can only monitor for attacks and alarm when they happen. Thus neither a firewall nor an IDS meets Kolin’s needs. Finally, port security is a MAC address–based security feature that can only restrict which systems or devices can connect to a given port.

Answer 89

C. This scenario violates the least privilege principle because an application should never require full administrative rights to run. Gwen should update the service account to have only the privileges necessary to support the application.

Answer 90

B. Trace coverage is not a type of structural coverage. Common types of structural coverage include statement, branch or decision coverage, loop coverage, path coverage, and data flow coverage.

Answer 91

A. During the information gathering and discovery phase of a penetration test, testers will gather information about the target. Whois can provide information about an organization, including IP ranges, physical addresses, and staff contacts. Nessus would be useful during a vulnerability detection phase, and Metasploit would be useful during exploitation. zzuf is a fuzzing tool and is less likely to be used during a penetration test.

Answer 92

C. Test directories often include scripts that may have poor protections or may have other data that can be misused. There is not a default test directory that allows administrative access to PHP. Test directories are not commonly used to store sensitive data, nor is the existence of a test directory a common indicator of compromise.

Answer 93

A. Directory indexing may not initially seem like an issue during a penetration test, but simply knowing the name and location of files can provide an attacker with quite a bit of information about an organization, as well as a list of potentially accessible files. XDRF is not a type of attack, and indexing is not a denial-of-service attack vector. Directory indexing being turned on is typically either due to misconfiguration or design, or because the server was not properly configured at setup, rather than being a sign of attack.

Answer 94

B. Cross-site tracing (XST) leverages the HTTP TRACE or TRACK methods, and could be used to steal a user’s cookies via cross-site scripting (XSS). The other options are not industry terms for web application or web server attacks or vulnerabilities.

Answer 95

D. The contents of RAM are volatile, meaning that they are only available while power is applied to the memory chips. EPROM, EEPROM, and flash memory are all nonvolatile, meaning that they retain their contents even when powered off.

Answer 96

C. Data loss prevention (DLP) systems specialize in the identification of sensitive information. In this case, Ursula would like to identify the presence of this information on endpoint devices, so she should choose an endpoint DLP control. Network-based DLP would not detect stored information unless the user transmits it over the network. Intrusion prevention systems (IPSs) are designed to detect and block attacks in progress, not necessarily the presence of sensitive information.

Answer 97

B. In the private cloud computing model, the cloud computing environment is dedicated to a single organization and does not follow the shared tenancy model. The environment may be built by the company in its own data center or built by a vendor at a co-location site.

Answer 98

D. Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) is designed to allow a system to continue operating without data loss in the event of a hard drive failure. Load balancing is designed to spread work across multiple servers. Intrusion prevention systems (IPSs) monitor systems and/or networks for potential attacks. Dual-power supplies protect against power supplies becoming a single point of failure.

Answer 99

D. Integrity ensures that unauthorized changes are not made to data while stored or in transit.

Answer 100

C. A star topology uses a central connection device. Ethernet networks may look like a star, but they are actually a logical bus topology that is sometimes deployed in a physical star.

Answer 101

C. Input validation ensures that the data provided to a program as input matches the expected parameters. Limit checks are a special form of input validation that ensure the value remains within an expected range, as is the case described in this scenario. Fail open and fail secure are options when planning for possible system failures. Buffer bounds are not a type of software control.

Answer 102

B. NIST SP 800-18 describes system owner responsibilities that include helping to develop system security plans, maintaining the plan, ensuring training, and identifying, implementing, and assessing security controls. A data owner is more likely to delegate these tasks to the system owner. Custodians may be asked to enforce those controls, whereas a user will be directly affected by them.

Answer 103

C. ESP’s Transport mode encrypts IP packet data but leaves the packet header unencrypted. Tunnel mode encrypts the entire packet and adds a new header to support transmission through the tunnel.

Answer 104

B. In level 2, the Repeatable level of the SW-CMM, an organization introduces basic life-cycle management processes. Reuse of code in an organized fashion begins and repeatable results are expected from similar projects. The key process areas for this level include Requirements Management, Software Project Planning, Software Project Tracking and Oversight, Software Subcontract Management, Software Quality Assurance and Software Configuration Management. Software Quality Management is a process that occurs during level 4, the Managed stage of the SW-CMM.

Answer 105

A. Key risk indicators (KRIs) are often used to monitor risk for organizations that establish an ongoing risk management program. Using automated data gathering and tools that allow data to be digested and summarized can provide predictive information about how organizational risks are changing. KPIs are key performance indicators, which are used to assess how an organization is performing. Quantitative risk assessments are good for point-in-time views with detailed valuation and measurement-based risk assessments, whereas a penetration test would provide details of how well an organization’s security controls are working.

Answer 106

D. The three-way handshake is SYN, SYN/ACK, ACK. System B should respond with “Synchronize and Acknowledge” to System A after it receives a SYN.

Answer 107

A. Systems that respond to ping will show the time to live for packets that reach them. Since TTL is decremented at each hop, this can help build a rough network topology map. In addition, some firewalls respond differently to ping than a normal system, which means pinging a network can sometimes reveal the presence of firewalls that would otherwise be invisible. Hostnames are revealed by a DNS lookup, and ICMP types allowed through a firewall are not revealed by only performing a ping. ICMP can be used for router advertisements, but pinging won’t show them!

Answer 108

C. Authorization defines what a subject can or can’t do. Identification occurs when a subject claims an identity, accountability is provided by the logs and audit trail that track what occurs on a system, and authorization occurs when that identity is validated.

Answer 109

A. The commercial classification scheme discussed by (ISC)2 includes four primary classification levels: confidential, private, sensitive, and public. Secret is a part of the military classification scheme.

Answer 110

B. All of these are objects. Although some of these items can be subjects, files, databases, and storage media can’t be. Processes and programs aren’t file stores, and of course none of these are users.

Answer 111

A. Testing for desired functionality is use case testing. Dynamic testing is used to determine how code handles variables that change over time. Misuse testing focuses on how code handles examples of misuse, and fuzzing feeds unexpected data as an input to see how the code responds.

Answer 112

C. When the author of a work is known, copyright protects that work for 70 years after the death of the author. Works created by a corporate author are protected for 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first.

Answer 113

C. These are examples of private IP addresses. RFC1918 defines a set of private IP addresses for use in internal networks. These private addresses including 10.0.0.0-10.255.255.255, 172.16.0.0-172.31.255.255, and 192.168.0.0-196.168.255.255 should never be routable on the public Internet.

Answer 114

B. A cognitive password authenticates users based on a series of facts or answers to questions that they know. Preset questions for cognitive passwords typically rely on common information about a user like their mother’s maiden name, or the name of their pet, and that information can frequently be found on the Internet. The best cognitive password systems let users make up their own questions.

Answer 115

D. A transformation procedure (TP) is the only process authorized to modify constrained data items (CDIs) within the Clark-Wilson model.

Answer 116

C. The blacklist approach to application control blocks certain prohibited packages but allows the installation of other software on systems. The whitelist approach uses the reverse philosophy and only allows approved software. Antivirus software would only detect the installation of malicious software after the fact. Heuristic detection is a variant of antivirus software.

Answer 117

C. Personal Health Information (PHI) is specifically defined by HIPAA to include information about an individual’s medical bills. PCI could refer to the payment card industry’s security standard but would only apply in relation to credit cards. PII is a broadly defined term for personally identifiable information, and personal billing data isn’t a broadly used industry term.

Answer 118

D. Yagis, panel antennas, cantennas, and parabolic antennas are all types of directional antenna. Omnidirectional antennas radiate in all directions, whereas these types of antennas are not necessarily signal boosting. Finally, rubber duck antennas are a type of omnidirectional pole antenna.

Answer 119

C. Function, statement, branch, and condition are all types of code coverage metrics. Penetration testing methodologies use phases like planning, discovery, scanning, exploit, and reporting. Fuzzing techniques focus on ways to provide unexpected inputs, whereas synthetic transactions are generated test data provided to validate applications and performance.

Answer 120

B. Organizations should train at least two individuals on every business continuity plan task. This provides a backup in the event the primary responder is not available.

Answer 121

B. In this scenario, all of the files on the server will be backed up on Monday evening during the full backup. Tuesday’s incremental backup will include all files changed since Monday’s full backup: files 1, 2, and 5. Wednesday’s incremental backup will then include all files modified since Tuesday’s incremental backup: files 3 and 6.

Answer 122

A. Susan is performing passive monitoring, which uses a network tap or span port to capture traffic to analyze it without impacting the network or devices that it is used to monitor. Synthetic, or active, monitoring uses recorded or generated traffic to test for performance and other issues. Signature based technologies include IDS, IPS, and antimalware systems.

Answer 123

A. While the differences between rights, permissions, and roles can be confusing, typically permissions include both the access and actions that you can take on an object. Rights usually refer to the ability to take action on an object, and don’t include the access to it. Privileges combine rights and permissions, and roles describe sets of privileges based on job tasks or other organizational artifacts.

Answer 124

C. One of the core capabilities of Infrastructure as a Service is providing servers on a vendor-managed virtualization platform. Web-based payroll and email systems are examples of Software as a Service. An application platform managed by a vendor that runs customer code is an example of Platform as a Service.

Answer 125

D. The exposure factor is the percentage of the facility that risk managers expect will be damaged if a risk materializes. It is calculated by dividing the amount of damage by the asset value. In this case, that is $750,000 in damage divided by the $2 million facility value, or 37.5%.

Answer 126

C. The annualized rate of occurrence is the number of times each year that risk analysts expect a risk to happen. In this case, the analysts expect fires will occur once every 50 years, or 0.02 times per year.

Answer 127

A. The annualized loss expectancy is calculated by multiplying the single loss expectancy (SLE) by the annualized rate of occurrence (ARO). In this case, the SLE is $750,000 and the ARO is 0.02. Multiplying these numbers together gives you the ALE of $15,000.

Answer 128

A. Congestion Window Reduced (CWR) and ECN-Echo (ECE) are used to manage transmission over congested links, and are rarely seen in modern TCP networks.

Answer 129

B. The Tower of Hanoi; Grandfather, Father, Son; and First In, First Out backup rotation strategies are all used to rotate backup tapes and other media. Key rotation is a cryptographic concept not related to disaster recovery media.

Answer 130

A. An application programming interface (API) allows external users to directly call routines within Fran’s code. They can embed API calls within scripts and other programs to automate interactions with Fran’s company. A web scraper or call center might facilitate the same tasks, but they do not do so in a direct integration. Data dictionaries might provide useful information but they also do not allow direct integration.

Answer 131

A. A fault is a momentary loss of power. Blackouts are sustained complete losses of power. Sags and brownouts are not complete power disruptions but rather periods of low voltage conditions.

Answer 132

A. Lauren’s team would benefit from a credential management system. Credential management systems offer features like password management, multifactor authentication to retrieve passwords, logging, audit, and password rotation capabilities. A strong password policy would only make maintenance of passwords for many systems a more difficult task if done manually. Single sign-on would help if all of the systems had the same sensitivity levels, but different credentials are normally required for higher sensitivity systems.

Answer 133

C. Windows systems will assign themselves an APIPA address between 169.254.0.1 and 169.254.255.254 if they cannot contact a DHCP server.

Answer 134

A. Enrollment, or registration, is the initial creation of a user account in the provisioning process. Clearance verification and background checks are sometimes part of the process that ensures that the identity of the person being enrolled matches who they claim to be. Initialization is not used to describe the provisioning process.

Answer 135

C. Repeated audit findings indicate a performance issue, making this a key performance indicator for Susan’s organization. Audit findings may demonstrate risk, but are not guaranteed to do so. Safeguard metrics and audit tracking metrics are not common industry terms.

Answer 136

D. The business or mission owner’s role is responsible for making sure systems provide value. When controls decrease the value that an organization gets, the business owner bears responsibility for championing the issue to those involved. There is not a business manager or information security analyst role in the list of NIST-defined data security roles. A data processor is defined but acts as a third-party data handler, and would not have to represent this issue in Olivia’s organization.

Answer 137

A. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) makes it a crime to invade the electronic privacy of an individual. It prohibits the unauthorized monitoring of email and voicemail communications.

Answer 138

D. The kernel lies within the central ring, Ring 0. Ring 1 contains other operating system components. Ring 2 is used for drivers and protocols. User-level programs and applications run at Ring 3. Rings 0–2 run in privileged mode whereas Ring 3 runs in user mode.

Answer 139

B. The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) uses measures such as attack vector, complexity, exploit maturity, and how much user interaction is required as well as measures suited to local concerns. CVE is the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures dictionary, CNA is the CVE Numbering Authority, and NVD is the National Vulnerability Database.

Answer 140

C. An individual does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when any communication takes place using employer-owned communications equipment or accounts.

Answer 141

D. During a tabletop exercise, team members come together and walk through a scenario without making any changes to information systems. The checklist review is the least disruptive type of disaster recovery test. During a checklist review, team members each review the contents of their disaster recovery checklists on their own and suggest any necessary changes. During a parallel test, the team actually activates the disaster recovery site for testing but the primary site remains operational. During a full interruption test, the team takes down the primary site and confirms that the disaster recovery site is capable of handling regular operations. The full interruption test is the most thorough test but also the most disruptive.

Answer 142

C. OpenID is a widely supported standard that allows a user to use a single account to log into multiple sites, and Google accounts are frequently used with OpenID.

Answer 143

D. Risk acceptance occurs when an organization determines that the costs involved in pursuing other risk management strategies are not justified and they choose not to pursue any action.

Answer 144

D. Fred should choose a fiber-optic cable. Copper cable types like 10Base2, 5, and 10BaseT, as well as 100Base-T and 1000BaseT, fall far short of the distance required, whereas fiber-optic cable can run for miles.

Answer 145

C. Decentralized access control makes sense because it allows local control over access. When network connectivity to a central control point is a problem, or if rules and regulations may vary significantly from location to location, centralized control can be less desirable than decentralized control despite its challenges with consistency. Since the problem does not describe specific control needs, mandatory access control and rule-based access controls could fit the need but aren’t the best answer.

Answer 146

B. The U.S. government classifies data that could reasonably be expected to cause damage to national security if disclosed, and for which the damage can be identified or described, as Secret. The U.S. government does not use Classified in its formal four levels of classification. Top Secret data could cause exceptionally grave damage, whereas Confidential data could be expected to cause damage.

Answer 147

A. The purpose of a digital certificate is to provide the general public with an authenticated copy of the certificate subject’s public key.

Answer 148

D. The last step of the certificate creation process is the digital signature. During this step, the certificate authority signs the certificate using its own private key.

Answer 149

C. When an individual receives a copy of a digital certificate, he or she verifies the authenticity of that certificate by using the CA’s public key to validate the digital signature contained on the certificate.

Answer 150

A. Mike uses the public key that he extracted from Renee’s digital certificate to encrypt the message that he would like to send to Renee.

Answer 151

C. Wireshark is a network monitoring tool that can capture and replay communications sent over a data network, including Voice over IP (VoIP) communications. Nmap, Nessus, and Nikto are all security tools that may identify security flaws in the network, but they do not directly undermine confidentiality because they do not have the ability to capture communications.

Answer 152

B. Studies consistently show that users are more likely to write down passwords if they have more accounts. Central control of a single account is also easier to shut off if something does go wrong. Simply decreasing the number of accounts required for a subject doesn’t increase security by itself, and SSO does not guarantee individual system logging, although it should provide central logging of SSO activity. Since a SSO system was not specified, there is no way of determining whether a given SSO system provides better or worse encryption for authentication data.

Answer 153

D. Nonrepudiation is only possible with an asymmetric encryption algorithm. RSA is an asymmetric algorithm. AES, DES, and Blowfish are all symmetric encryption algorithms that do not provide nonrepudiation.

Answer 154

D. Modification of audit logs will prevent repudiation because the data cannot be trusted, and thus actions cannot be provably denied. The modification of the logs is also a direct example of tampering. It might initially be tempting to answer elevation of privileges and tampering, as the attacker made changes to files that should be protected, but this is an unknown without more information. Similarly, the attacker may have accessed the files, resulting in information disclosure in addition to tampering, but again, this is not specified in the question. Finally, this did not cause a denial of service, and thus that answer can be ignored.

Answer 155

C. Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) are all routing protocols and are associated with routers.

Answer 156

B. The Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) was used with WPA on existing hardware to replace WEP. TKIP has been replaced by CCMP and 802.1x since 2012. PEAP and EAP are both authentication protocols. Transport Layer Security (TLS) is used to secure web transactions and other network communications.

Answer 157

B. Each of the attributes linked to Ben’s access provides information for an attribute-based information control system. Attribute-based information controls like those described in NIST SP 800-162 can take many details about the user, actions, and objects into consideration before allowing access to occur. A role-based access control would simply consider Ben’s role, whereas both administrative and system discretionary access controls are not commonly used terms to describe access controls.

Answer 158

A. LOIC is an example of a distributed denial-of-service attack. It uses many systems to attack targets, combining their bandwidth and making it difficult to shut down the attack because of the number and variety of attackers. Ionization and Zombie horde attacks are both made-up answers. Teardrop attacks are an older type of attack that sends fragmented packets as a denial-of-service attack.

Answer 159

C. Certificates may only be added to a Certificate Revocation List by the certificate authority that created the digital certificate.

Answer 160

D. Remote journaling transfers transaction logs to a remote site on a more frequent basis than electronic vaulting, typically hourly. Transaction logging is not a recovery technique alone; it is a process for generating the logs used in remote journaling. In an electronic vaulting approach, automated technology moves database backups from the primary database server to a remote site on a scheduled basis, typically daily. Remote mirroring maintains a live database server at the backup site and mirrors all transactions at the primary site on the server at the backup site.

Answer 161

C. The Waiting state is used when a process is blocked waiting for an external event. The Running state is used when a process is executing on the CPU. The Ready state is used when a process is prepared to execute, but the CPU is not available. The Stopped state is used when a process terminates.

Answer 162

B. Operational investigations are performed by internal teams to troubleshoot performance or other technical issues. They are not intended to produce evidence for use in court and, therefore, do not have the rigid collection standards of criminal, civil, or regulatory investigations.

Answer 163

A. Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are designed to protect the confidentiality of an organization’s data, including trade secrets during and after the person’s employment. NDAs do not protect against deletion or availability issues, and non-compete agreements would be required to stop competition.

Answer 164

C. Adding a second factor can ensure that users who might be incorrectly accepted are not given access due to a higher than desired false acceptance rate (FAR) from accessing a system. The CER is the crossover between the false acceptance and false rejection rate (FRR), and is used as a way to measure the accuracy of biometric systems. Changing the sensitivity to lower the FRR may actually increase the FAR, and replacing a biometric system can be time consuming and expensive in terms of time and cost.

Answer 165

B. SOC 2 reports typically cover 6 months of operations. SOC 1 reports cover a point in time.

Answer 166

D. Over-the-shoulder reviews require the original developer to explain her code to a peer while walking through it. Email pass-around code reviews are done by sending code for review to peers. Pair programming requires two developers, only one of whom writes code while both collaborate. IDE forcing is not a type of code review; an IDE is an integrated development environment.

Answer 167

A. The Time of Check to Time of Use (TOC/TOU) attack exploits timing differences between when a system verifies authorization and software uses that authorization to perform an action. It is an example of a race condition attack. The other three attacks mentioned do not depend on precise timing.

Answer 168

B. Encapsulation is a process that adds a header and possibly a footer to data received at each layer before handoff to the next layer. TCP wrappers are a host-based network access control system, attribution is determining who or what performed an action or sent data, and data hiding is a term from object-oriented programming that is not relevant here.

Answer 169

C. Salting adds random text to the password before hashing in an attempt to defeat automated password cracking attacks that use precomputed values. MD5 and SHA-1 are both common hashing algorithms, so using them does not add any security. Double-hashing would only be a minor inconvenience for an attacker and would not be as effective as the use of salting.

Answer 170

A. Guidelines provide advice based on best practices developed throughout industry and organizations, but they are not compulsory. Compliance with guidelines is optional.

Answer 171

C. Usernames are an identification tool. They are not secret, so they are not suitable for use as a password.

Answer 172

C. Regression testing ensures proper functionality of an application or system after it has been changed. Unit testing focuses on testing each module of a program instead of against its previous functional state. White and black box testing both describe the amount of knowledge about a system or application, rather than a specific type or intent for testing.

Answer 173

C. Risk transference involves shifting the impact of a potential risk from the organization incurring the risk to another organization. Insurance is a common example of risk transference.

Answer 174

A. The four canons of the (ISC)2 code of ethics are to protect society, the common good, necessary public trust and confidence, and the infrastructure; act honorably, honestly, justly, responsibly, and legally; provide diligent and competent service to principals; and advance and protect the profession.

Answer 175

C. A trust that allows one forest to access another’s resources without the reverse being possible is an example of a one-way trust. Since Jim doesn’t want the trust path to flow as the domain tree is formed, this trust has to be nontransitive.

Answer 176

B. Susan’s team is performing static analysis, which analyzes nonrunning code. Dynamic analysis uses running code, whereas gray box assessments are a type of assessment done without full knowledge. Fuzzing feeds unexpected inputs to a program as part of dynamic analysis.

Answer 177

A. 201.19.7.45 is a public IP address. RFC 1918 addresses are in the ranges 10.0.0.0–0.255.255.255, 172.16.0.0–172.31.255.255, and 192.168.0.0–192.168.255.255. APIPA addresses are assigned between 169.254.0.0 to 169.254.255.254, and 127.0.0.1 is a loopback address (although technically the entire 127.x.x.x network is reserved for loopback).

Answer 178

A. Risks are the combination of a threat and a vulnerability. Threats are the external forces seeking to undermine security, such as the hacker in this case. Vulnerabilities are the internal weaknesses that might allow a threat to succeed. In this case the missing patch is the vulnerability. In this scenario, if the hacker attempts a SQL injection attack (threat) against the unpatched server (vulnerability), the result is website defacement.

Answer 179

C. The three categories of data destruction are clear (overwriting with nonsensitive data), purge (removing all data), and destroy (physical destruction of the media). Degaussing is an example of a purging technique.

Answer 180

A. Hot sites contain all of the hardware and data necessary to restore operations and may be activated very quickly.

Answer 181

B. Syslog uses UDP port 514. TCP-based implementations of syslog typically use port 6514. The other ports may look familiar because they are commonly used TCP ports: 443 is HTTPS, 515 is the LPD print service, and 445 is used for Windows SMB.

Answer 182

B. PSH is a TCP flag used to clear the buffer, resulting in immediately sending data, and URG is the TCP urgent flag. These flags are not present in UDP headers.

Answer 183

B. Fagan inspection is a highly formalized review and testing process that uses planning, overview, preparation, inspection, rework, and follow-up steps. Static inspection looks at code without running it, dynamic inspection uses live programs, and interface testing tests where code modules interact.

Answer 184

D. The system is set to overwrite the logs and will replace the oldest log entries with new log entries when the file reaches 20 MB. The system is not purging archived logs because it is not archiving logs. Since there can only be 20 MB of logs, this system will not have stored too much log data, and the question does not provide enough information to know if there will be an issue with not having the information needed.

Answer 185

B. Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) provides the ability to encrypt and thus provides confidentiality, as well as limited authentication capabilities. It does not provide availability, nonrepudiation, or integrity validation.

Answer 186

A. Alejandro is in the first stage of the incident response process, detection. During this stage, the intrusion detection system provides the initial alert, and Alejandro performs preliminary triaging to determine if an intrusion is actually taking place and whether the scenario fits the criteria for activating further steps of the incident response process (which include response, mitigation, reporting, recovery, remediation, and lessons learned).

Answer 187

C. After detection of a security incident, the next step in the process is response, which should follow the organization’s formal incident response procedure. The first step of this procedure is activating the appropriate teams, including the organization’s computer security incident response team (CSIRT).

Answer 188

C. The root cause analysis examines the incident to determine what allowed it to happen and provides critical information for repairing systems so that the incident does not recur. This is a component of the remediation step of the incident response process because the root cause analysis output is necessary to fully remediate affected systems and processes.

Answer 189

D. When using symmetric cryptography, the sender encrypts a message using a shared secret key and the recipient then decrypts the message with that same key. Only asymmetric cryptography uses the concept of public and private key pairs.

Answer 190

A. Business logic errors are most likely to be missed by automated functional testing. If a complete coverage code test was conducted, runtime, input validation, and error handling issues are likely to have been discovered by automated testing. Any automated system is more likely to miss business logic errors, because humans are typically necessary to understand business logic issues.

Answer 191

A. During the Lessons Learned phase, analysts close out an incident by conducting a review of the entire incident response process. This may include making recommendations for improvements to the process that will streamline the efficiency and effectiveness of future incident response efforts.

Answer 192

B. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits attempts to circumvent copyright protection mechanisms placed on a protected work by the copyright holder.

Answer 193

B. Linda should choose a warm site. This approach balances cost and recovery time. Cold sites take a very long time to activate, measured in weeks or months. Hot sites activate immediately but are quite expensive. Mutual assistance agreements depend on the support of another organization.

Answer 194

B. Half-duplex communications allow only one side to send at a time. Full-duplex communications allow both parties to send simultaneously, whereas simplex communications describe one-way communications. A suplex would be a bad idea for most communications—it is a wrestling move!

Answer 195

D. Gray box testing is a blend of crystal (or white) box testing that provides full information about a target, and black box testing, which provides little or no knowledge about the target.

Answer 196

A. Test coverage is computed using the formula test coverage = number of use cases tested/total number of use cases. Code coverage is assessed by the other formulas, including function, conditional, and total code coverage.

Answer 197

C. TCP, UDP, and other transport layer protocols like SSL and TLS operate at the Transport layer.

Answer 198

C. Deterrence is the first functional goal of physical security mechanisms. If a physical security control presents a formidable challenge to a potential attacker, they may not attempt the attack in the first place.

Answer 199

A. In an automated recovery, the system can recover itself against one or more failure types. In a manual recovery approach, the system does not fail into a secure state but requires an administrator to manually restore operations. In an automated recovery without undue loss, the system can recover itself against one or more failure types and also preserve data against loss. In function recovery, the system can restore functional processes automatically.

Answer 200

A. Skip should use SCP—Secure Copy is a secure file transfer method. SSH is a secure command-line and login protocol, whereas HTTP is used for unencrypted web traffic. Telnet is an unencrypted command-line and login protocol.

Answer 201

C. The California Online Privacy Protection Act requires that commercial websites that collect personal information from users in California conspicuously post a privacy policy. The Act does not require compliance with the EU DPD, nor does it use the DPD concepts of notice or choice, and it does not require encryption of all personal data.

Answer 202

B. Callback disconnects a remote user after their initial connection, and then calls them back at a preauthorized number. CallerID can help with this but can be spoofed, making callback a better solution. CHAP is an authentication protocol, and PPP is a dial-up protocol. Neither will verify a phone number.

Answer 203

A. The reference monitor is a component of the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) that validates access to resources.

Answer 204

B. Iris scans have a longer useful life than many other types of biometric factors because they don’t change throughout a person’s lifespan (unless the eye itself is damaged). Iris scanners can be fooled in some cases by high-resolution images of an eye, and iris scanners are not significantly cheaper than other scanners.

Answer 205

B. Personnel retention deals with what happens when employees leave and share proprietary data. A data breach occurs when data is stolen or lost, and data exfiltration occurs when attackers or insiders extract data from an organization. Finally, nonproprietary data sharing should result in very little harm.

Answer 206

C. They need a key for every possible pair of users in the cryptosystem. The first key would allow communication between Matthew and Richard. The second key would allow communication between Richard and Christopher. The third key would allow communication between Christopher and Matthew.

Answer 207

A. The Gramm Leach Bliley Act is an example of civil law. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act are all examples of criminal law.

Answer 208

C. The SMTP protocol does not guarantee confidentiality between servers, making TLS or SSL between the client and server only a partial measure. Encrypting the email content can provide confidentiality; digital signatures can provide nonrepudiation.

Answer 209

D. The single quotation mark in the input field is a telltale sign that this is a SQL injection attack. The quotation mark is used to escape outside of the SQL code’s input field, and the text following is used to directly manipulate the SQL command sent from the web application to the database.

Answer 210

C. Record retention policies describe how long the organization should retain data and may also specify how and when destruction should occur. Classification policies describe how and why classification should occur and who is responsible, whereas availability and audit policies may be created for specific purposes.

Answer 211

A. The goal of the business continuity planning process is to ensure that your recovery time objectives are all less than your maximum tolerable downtimes.

Answer 212

C. The Remediation phase of incident handling focuses on conducting a root cause analysis to identify the factors contributing to an incident and implementing new security controls, as needed.

Answer 213

A. The S/MIME secure email format uses the P7S format for encrypted email messages. If the recipient does not have a mail reader that supports S/MIME, the message will appear with an attachment named smime.p7s.

Answer 214

A. Aggregation is a security issue that arises when a collection of facts has a higher classification than the classification of any of those facts standing alone. An inference problem occurs when an attacker can pull together pieces of less sensitive information from multiple sources and use them to derive information of greater sensitivity. In this case, only a single source was used. SQL injection is a web application exploit. Multilevel security is a system control that allows the simultaneous processing of information at different classification levels.

Answer 215

B. Polyinstantiation allows the storage of multiple different pieces of information in a database at different classification levels to prevent attackers from conducting aggregation or inference attacks. Kim could store incorrect location information in the database at lower classification levels to prevent the aggregation attack in this scenario. Input validation, server-side validation, and parameterization are all techniques used to prevent web application attacks and are not effective against inference attacks.

Answer 216

B. The tail number is a database field because it is stored in the database. It is also a primary key because the question states that the database uniquely identifies aircraft using this field. Any primary key is, by definition, also a candidate key. There is no information provided that the tail number is a foreign key used to reference a different database table.

Answer 217

B. Foreign keys are used to create relationships between tables in a database. The database enforces referential integrity by ensuring that the foreign key used in a table has a corresponding record with that value as the primary key in the referenced table.

Answer 218

B. The waterfall model uses an approach that develops software sequentially, spending quite a bit of time up front on the development and documentation of requirements and design. The spiral and agile models focus on iterative development and are appropriate when requirements are not well understood or iterative development is preferred. DevOps is an approach to integrating development and operations activities and is not an SDLC model.

Answer 219

A. The data owner is a senior manager who bears ultimate responsibility for data protection tasks. The data owner typically delegates this responsibility to one or more data custodians.

Answer 220

C. A unique salt should be created for each user using a secure generation method and stored in that user’s record. Since attacks against hashes rely on building tables to compare the hashes against, unique salts for each user make building tables for an entire database essentially impossible—the work to recover a single user account may be feasible, but large scale recovery requires complete regeneration of the table each time. A single salt allows rainbow tables to be generated if the salt is stolen or can be guessed based on frequently used passwords. Creating a unique salt each time a user logs in does not allow a match against a known salted hashed password.

Answer 221

D. NIST SP800-53 describes three processes: Examination, which is reviewing or analyzing assessment objects like specifications, mechanisms, or activities Interviews, which are conducted with individuals or groups of individuals Testing, which involves evaluating activities or mechanisms for expected behavior when used or exercised Knowing the details of a given NIST document in depth can be challenging. To address a question like this, first eliminate responses that do not make sense; here, a mechanism cannot be interviewed, and test and assess both mean the same thing. This leaves only one correct answer.

Answer 222

B. Anomaly-based intrusion detection systems may identify a zero-day vulnerability because it deviates from normal patterns of activity. Signature-based detection methods would not be effective because there are no signatures for zero-day vulnerabilities. Strong patch management would not be helpful because, by definition, zero-day vulnerabilities do not have patches available. Full-disk encryption would not detect an attack because it is not a detective control.

Answer 223

B. Credential management systems provide features designed to make using and storing credentials in a secure and controllable way. AAA systems are authorization, authentication, and accounting systems. Two-factor authentication and Kerberos are examples of protocols.

Answer 224

A. The emergency response guidelines should include the immediate steps an organization should follow in response to an emergency situation. These include immediate response procedures, a list of individuals who should be notified of the emergency, and secondary response procedures for first responders. They do not include long-term actions such as activating business continuity protocols, ordering equipment, or activating disaster recovery sites.

Answer 225

D. A mantrap uses two sets of doors, only one of which can open at a time. A mantrap is a type of preventive access control, although its implementation is a physical control.

Answer 226

B. When following the separation-of-duties principle, organizations divide critical tasks into discrete components and ensure that no one individual has the ability to perform both actions. This prevents a single rogue individual from performing that task in an unauthorized manner and is also known as two-person control.