COMPTIA Sec+ 501

A high-security defense installation recently began utilizing large guard dogs that bark very loudly and excitedly at the slightest provocation. Which of the following types of controls does this BEST describe?

An incident responder receives a call from a user who reports a computer is exhibiting symptoms consistent with a malware infection. Which of the following steps should the responder perform NEXT?

Multiple organizations operating in the same vertical want to provide seamless wireless access for their employees as they visit the other organizations. Which of the following should be implemented if all the organizations use the native 802.1x client on their mobile devices?

An analyst wants to implement a more secure wifeless authentication for office access points. Which of the following technologies allows for encrypted authentication of wireless clients over TLS?

A security analyst is hardening an authentication server. One of the primary requirements is to ensure there is mutual authentication and delegation. Given these requirements, which of the following technologies should the analyst recommend and configure?

An organization wishes to provide better security for its name resolution services. Which of the following technologies BEST supports the deployment DNSSEC at the organization?

Ann, an employee in the payroll department, has contacted the help desk citing multiple issues with her device, including:
– Slow performance.
– Word documents, PDFs, and images no longer opening.
– A pop-up.
Ann states the issues began after she opened an invoice that a vendor emailed to her. Upon opening the invoice, she had to click several security warnings to view it in her word processor. With which of the following is the device MOST likely infected?

A department head at a university resigned on the first day of the spring semester. It was subsequently determined that the department head deleted numerous files and directories from the server-based home directory while the campus was closed. Which of the following policies or procedures co have prevented this from occurring?

Which of the following can be provided to an AAA system for the identification phase?

A company is using a mobile device deployment model in which employees use their personal devices for work at their own discretion. Some of the problems the company is encountering include the following:
– There is no standardization.
– Employees ask for reimbursement for their devices.
– Employees do not replace their devices often enough to keep them running efficiently.
– The company does not have enough control over the devices.
Which of the following is a deployment model that would help the company overcome these problems?

An organization finds that most help desk calls ate regarding account lockout due to a variety of applications running on different systems. Manager is looking for a solution to reduce the number of account lockouts while improving security. Which of the following is the BEST solution for this organization?

Which of the following threat actors is MOST likely to steal a company’s proprietary information to gain a market edge and reduce time to market?

When trying to log onto a company’s new ticketing system, some employees receive the following message:
Access denied: too many concurrent sessions.
The ticketing system was recently installed on a small VM with only the recommended hardware specifications. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause for this error message?

A network administrator at a small office wants to simplify the configuration of mobile clients connecting to an encrypted wireless network. Which of the following should be implemented if the administrator does not want to provide the wireless password or certificate to the employees?

A company is developing a new secure technology and requires computers being used for development to be isolated. Which of the following should be implemented to provide the MOST secure environment?

Which of the following explains why vendors publish MD5 values when they provide software patches for their customers to download over the Internet?

A database backup schedule consists of weekly full backups performed on Saturday at 12:00 A.M. and daily differential backups also performed at 12:00 A.M. If the database is restored on Tuesday afternoon, which of the following is the number of individual backups that would need to be applied to complete the database recovery?

An organization is using a tool to perform a source code review. Which of the following describes the case in which the tool incorrectly identifies the vulnerability?

A security analyst is diagnosing an incident in which a system was compromised from an external IP address. The socket identified on the firewall was traced to 207.46.130.66:66. Which of the following should the security analyst do to determine if the compromised system still has an active connection?

Which of the following BEST describes an important security advantage yielded by implementing vendor diversity?

Which of the following encryption methods does PKI typically use to securely protect keys?

Which of the following BEST describes a routine in which semicolons, dashes, quotes, and commas are removed from a string?

Which of the following is an important step to take BEFORE moving any installation packages from a test environment to production?

Which of the following cryptographic attacks would salting of passwords render ineffective?

A network administrator wants to implement a method of securing internal routing. Which of the following should the administrator implement?

Which of the following types of keys is found in a key escrow?

A senior incident response manager receives a call about some external IPs communicating with internal computers during off hours. Which of the following types of malware is MOST likely causing this issue?

A security administrator is trying to encrypt communication. For which of the following reasons should administrator take advantage of the Subject Alternative Name (SAM) attribute of a certificate?

A new mobile application is being developed in-house. Security reviews did not pick up any major flaws, however vulnerability scanning results show fundamental issues at the very end of the project cycle. Which of the following security activities should also have been performed to discover vulnerabilities earlier in the lifecycle?

A security administrator is creating a subnet on one of the corporate firewall interfaces to use as a DMZ which is expected to accommodate at most 14 physical hosts. Which of the following subnets would BEST meet the requirements?

A company has a security policy that specifies all endpoint computing devices should be assigned a unique identifier that can be tracked via an inventory management system. Recent changes to airline security regulations have cause many executives in the company to travel with mini tablet devices instead of laptops. These tablet devices are difficult to tag and track. An RDP application is used from the tablet to connect into the company network. Which of the following should be implemented in order to meet the security policy requirements?

The security administrator receives an email on a non-company account from a coworker stating that some reports are not exporting correctly. Attached to the email was an example report file with several customers’ names and credit card numbers with the PIN. Which of the following is the BEST technical controls that will help mitigate this risk of disclosing sensitive data?

A technician is configuring a wireless guest network. After applying the most recent changes the technician finds the new devices can no longer find the wireless network by name but existing devices are still able to use the wireless network. Which of the following security measures did the technician MOST likely implement to cause this Scenario?

A security administrator has been assigned to review the security posture of the standard corporate system image for virtual machines. The security administrator conducts a thorough review of the system logs, installation procedures, and network configuration of the VM image. Upon reviewing the access logs and user accounts, the security administrator determines that several accounts will not be used in production. Which of the following would correct the deficiencies?

Although a web enabled application appears to only allow letters in the comment field of a web form, malicious user was able to carry a SQL injection attack by sending special characters through the web comment field. Which of the following has the application programmer failed to implement?

An attacker discovers a new vulnerability in an enterprise application. The attacker takes advantage of the vulnerability by developing new malware. After installing the malware the attacker is provided with access to the infected machine. Which of the following is being described?

A security administrator returning from a short vacation receives an account lock-out message when attempting to log into the computer. After getting the account unlocked the security administrator immediately notices a large amount of emails alerts pertaining to several different user accounts being locked out during the past three days. The security administrator uses system logs to determine that the lock-outs were due to a brute force attack on all accounts that has been previously logged into that machine. Which of the following can be implemented to reduce the likelihood of this attack going undetected?

A bank requires tellers to get manager approval when a customer wants to open a new account. A recent audit shows that there have been four cases in the previous year where tellers opened accounts without management approval. The bank president thought separation of duties would prevent this from happening. In order to implement a true separation of duties approach the bank could do what?

A security administrator has been tasked with improving the overall security posture related to desktop machines on the network. An auditor has recently that several machines with confidential customer information displayed in the screens are left unattended during the course of the day. Which of the following could the security administrator implement to reduce the risk associated with the finding?

Company policy requires the use if passphrases instead if passwords. Which of the following technical controls MUST be in place in order to promote the use of passphrases?

During a routine audit, it is discovered that someone has been using a stale administrator account to log into a seldom used server. The person has been using the server to view inappropriate websites that are prohibited to end users. Which of the following could best prevent this from occurring again?

Which of the following should identify critical systems and components?

Which of the following works by implanting software on systems but delays execution until a specific set of conditions is met?

A web application is configured to target browsers and allow access to bank accounts to siphon money to a foreign account. This is an example of which of the following attacks?

Technicians working with servers hosted at the company’s datacenter are increasingly complaining of electric shocks when touching metal items which have been linked to hard drive failures. Which of the following should be implemented to correct this issue?

A portable data storage device has been determined to have malicious firmware. Which of the following is the BEST course of action to ensure data confidentiality?

A security administrator must implement a system to ensure that invalid certificates are not used by a custom developed application. The system must be able to check the validity of certificates even when internet access is unavailable. Which of the following MUST be implemented to support this requirement?

A technician has installed new vulnerability scanner software on a server that is joined to the company domain. The vulnerability scanner is able to provide visibility over the patch posture of all company’s clients. Which of the following is being used?

The Chief Security Officer (CSO) at a multinational banking corporation is reviewing a plan to upgrade the entire corporate IT infrastructure. The architecture consists of a centralized cloud environment hosting the majority of data, small server clusters at each corporate location to handle the majority of customer transaction processing, ATMs, and a new mobile banking application accessible from smartphones, tablets, and the Internet via HTTP. The corporation does business having varying data retention and privacy laws. Which of the following technical modifications to the architecture and corresponding security controls should be implemented to provide the MOST complete protection of data?

While reviewing the monthly internet usage it is noted that there is a large spike in traffic classified as “unknown” and does not appear to be within the bounds of the organizations Acceptable Use Policy. Which of the following tool or technology would work BEST for obtaining more information on this traffic?

A network administrator wants to ensure that users do not connect any unauthorized devices to the company network. Each desk needs to connect a VoIP phone and computer. Which of the following is the BEST way to accomplish this?

An administrator has concerns regarding the traveling sales team who works primarily from smart phones. Given the sensitive nature of their work, which of the following would BEST prevent access to the data in case of loss or theft?

A user of the wireless network is unable to gain access to the network. The symptoms are:
– Unable to connect to both internal and Internet resources.
– The wireless icon shows connectivity but has no network access.
The wireless network is WPA2 Enterprise and users must be a member of the wireless security group to authenticate. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the connectivity issues?

A mobile device user is concerned about geographic positioning information being included in messages sent between users on a popular social network platform. The user turns off the functionality in the application, but wants to ensure the application cannot re-enable the setting without the knowledge of the user. Which of the following mobile device capabilities should the user disable to achieve the stated goal?

An organization has hired a penetration tester to test the security of its ten web servers. The penetration tester is able to gain root/administrative access in several servers by exploiting vulnerabilities associated with the implementation of SMTP, POP, DNS, FTP, Telnet, and IMAP. Which of the following recommendations should the penetration tester provide to the organization to better protect their web servers in the future?

A security engineer is faced with competing requirements from the networking group and database administrators. The database administrators would like ten application servers on the same subnet for ease of administration, whereas the networking group would like to segment all applications from one another. Which of the following should the security administrator do to rectify this issue?

A security analyst has been asked to perform a review of an organization’s software development lifecycle. The analyst reports that the lifecycle does not contain a phase in which team members evaluate and provide critical feedback of another developer’s code. Which of the following assessment techniques is BEST described in the analyst’s report?

An attacker wearing a building maintenance uniform approached a company’s receptionist asking for access to a secure area. The receptionist asks for identification, a building access badge and checks the company’s list approved maintenance personnel prior to granting physical access to the secure are. The controls used by the receptionist are in place to prevent which of the following types of attacks?

A security administrator is tasked with conducting an assessment made to establish the baseline security posture of the corporate IT infrastructure. The assessment must report actual flaws and weaknesses in the infrastructure. Due to the expense of hiring outside consultants, the testing must be performed using in-house or cheaply available resource. There cannot be a possibility of any requirement being damaged in the test. Which of the following has the administrator been tasked to perform?

A network administrator is attempting to troubleshoot an issue regarding certificates on a secure website. During the troubleshooting process, the network administrator notices that the web gateway proxy on the local network has signed all of the certificates on the local machine. Which of the following describes the type of attack the proxy has been legitimately programmed to perform?

Which of the following is the GREATEST risk to a company by allowing employees to physically bring their personal smartphones to work?

Which of the following is the summary of loss for a given year?

A Security Officer on a military base needs to encrypt several smart phones that will be going into the field. Which of the following encryption solutions should be deployed in this situation?

An organization relies heavily on an application that has a high frequency of security updates. At present, the security team only updates the application on the first Monday of each month, even though the security updates are released as often as twice a week. Which of the following would be the BEST method of updating this application?

A technician must configure a firewall to block external DNS traffic from entering a network. Which of the following ports should they block on the firewall?

A software development company needs to share information between two remote servers, using encryption to protect it. A programmer suggests developing a new encryption protocol, arguing that using an unknown protocol with secure, existing cryptographic algorithm libraries will provide strong encryption without being susceptible to attacks on other known protocols. Which of the following summarizes the BEST response to the programmer’s proposal?

A security technician would like to obscure sensitive data within a file so that it can be transferred without causing suspicion. Which of the following technologies would BEST be suited to accomplish this?

A supervisor in your organization was demoted on Friday afternoon. The supervisor had the ability to modify the contents of a confidential database, as well as other managerial permissions. On Monday morning, the database administrator reported that log files indicated that several records were missing from the database. Which of the following risk mitigation strategies should have been implemented when the supervisor was demoted?

Which of the following attack types is being carried out where a target is being sent unsolicited messages via Bluetooth?

Joe is exchanging encrypted email with another party. Joe encrypts the initial email with a key. When Joe receives a response, he is unable to decrypt the response with the same key he used initially. Which of the following would explain the situation?

Recently several employees were victims of a phishing email that appeared to originate from the company president. The email claimed the employees would be disciplined if they did not click on a malicious link in the message. Which of the following principles of social engineering made this attack successful?

Which of the following is the LEAST secure hashing algorithm?

An employee uses RDP to connect back to the office network. If RDP is misconfigured, which of the following security exposures would this lead to?

Joe, the security administrator, sees this in a vulnerability scan report:
“The server 10.1.2.232 is running Apache 2.2.20 which may be vulnerable to a mod_cgi exploit.”
Joe verifies that the mod_cgi module is not enabled on 10.1.2.232. This message is an example of what?

A security analyst wishes to increase the security of an FTP server. Currently, all trails to the FTP server is unencrypted. Users connecting to the FTP server use a variety of modem FTP client software. The security analyst wants to keep the same port and protocol, while also still allowing unencrypted connections. Which of the following would BEST accomplish these goals?

Which of the following would a security specialist be able to determine upon examination of a server’s certificate?

A security consultant discovers that an organization is using the PCL protocol to print documents, utilizing the default driver and print settings. Which of the following is the MOST likely risk in this situation?

A botnet has hit a popular website with a massive number of GRE-encapsulated packets to perform a DDoS attack News outlets discover a certain type of refrigerator was exploited and used to send outbound packets to the website that crashed. To which of the following categories does the refrigerator belong?

Ann, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a company, is putting together a hardware budget for the next 10 years. She is asking for the average lifespan of each hardware device so that she is able to calculate when she will have to replace each device. Which of the following categories BEST describes what she is looking for?

A security guard has informed the Chief Information Security Officer that a person with a tablet has been walking around the building. The guard also noticed strange white markings in different areas of the parking lot. The person is attempting which of the following types of attacks?

A system administrator is configuring a site-to-site VPN tunnel. Which of the following should be configured on the VPN concentrator during the IKE phase?

A network operations manager has added a second row of server racks in the datacenter. These racks face the opposite direction of the first row of racks. Which of the following is the reason the manager installed the racks this way?

Phishing emails frequently take advantage of high-profile catastrophes reported in the news. Which of the following principles BEST describes the weakness being exploited?

New magnetic locks were ordered for an entire building. In accordance with company policy, employee safety is the top priority. In case of a fire where electricity is cut, which of the following should be taken into consideration when installing the new locks?

A company hires a consulting firm to crawl its Active Directory network with a non-domain account looking for unpatched systems. Actively taking control of systems is out of scope, as is the creation of new administrator accounts. For which of the following is the company hiring the consulting firm?

Two users need to send each other emails over unsecured channels. The system should support the principle of non-repudiation. Which of the following should be used to sign the users’ certificates?

Multiple employees receive an email with a malicious attachment that begins to encrypt their hard drives and mapped shares on their devices when it is opened. The network and security teams perform the following actions:
– Shut down all network shares.
– Run an email search identifying all employees who received the malicious message.
– Reimage all devices belonging to users who opened the attachment.
Next, the teams want to re-enable the network shares. Which of the following BEST describes this phase of the incident response process?

Which of the following specifically describes the exploitation of an interactive process to access otherwise restricted areas of the OS?

Anne, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), has reported that she is getting multiple telephone calls from someone claiming to be from the helpdesk. The caller is asking to verify her network authentication credentials because her computer is broadcasting across the network. This is MOST likely which of the following types of attacks?

An administrator discovers the following log entry on a server:
Nov 12 2013 00:23:45 httpd[2342]: GET /app2/prod/proc/process.php?input=change;cd%20../../../etc;cat%20shadow
Which of the following attacks is being attempted?

A security team wants to establish an Incident Response plan. The team has never experienced an incident. Which of the following would BEST help them establish plans and procedures?

Which of the following would verify that a threat does exist and security controls can easily be bypassed without actively testing an application?

Which of the following technologies would be MOST appropriate to utilize when testing a new software patch before a company-wide deployment?

A system administrator needs to implement 802.1x whereby when a user logs into the network, the authentication server communicates to the network switch and assigns the user to the proper VLAN. Which of the following protocols should be used?

Which of the following types of cloud Infrastructures would allow several organizations with similar structures and interests to realize shared storage and resources?

Which of the following implements two-factor authentication?

A company is terminating an employee for misbehavior. Which of the following steps is MOST important in the process of disengagement from this employee?

A systems administrator is attempting to recover from a catastrophic failure in the datacenter. To recover the domain controller, the systems administrator needs to provide the domain administrator credentials. Which of the following account types is the systems administrator using?

A penetration tester is crawling a target website that is available to the public. Which of the following represents the actions the penetration tester is performing?

When systems, hardware, or software are not supported by the original vendor, it is a vulnerability known as what?

As part of a new industry regulation, companies are required to utilize secure, standardized OS settings. A technician must ensure the OS settings are hardened. Which of the following is the BEST way to do this?

A user has attempted to access data at a higher classification level than the user’s account is currency authorized to access. Which of the following access control models has been applied to this user’s account?

A company determines that it is prohibitively expensive to become compliant with new credit card regulations. Instead, the company decides to purchase insurance to cover the cost of any potential loss. Which of the following is the company doing?

An organization has determined it can tolerate a maximum of three hours of downtime. Which of the following has been specified?

An attacker compromises a public CA and issues unauthorized X.509 certificates for Company.com. In the future, impact of similar incidents. Which of the following would assist Company.com with its goal?

Malicious traffic from an internal network has been detected on an unauthorized port on an application server. Which of the following network-based security controls should the engineer consider implementing?

A company wants to host a publicly available server that performs the following functions:
– Evaluates MX record lookup.
– Can perform authenticated requests for A and AAA records.
– Uses RRSIG.
Which of the following should the company use to fulfill the above requirements?

Which of the following attack types BEST describes a client-side attack that is used to mandate an HTML iframe with JavaScript code via web browser?

A company has a data classification system with definitions for “Private” and “Public”. The company’s security policy outlines how data should be protected based on type. The company recently added the data type “Proprietary”. Which of the following is the MOST likely reason the company added this data type?

A security administrator is developing training for corporate users on basic security principles for personal email accounts. Which of the following should be mentioned as the MOST secure way for password recovery?

A company researched the root cause of a recent vulnerability in its software. It was determined that the vulnerability was the result of two updates made in the last release. Each update alone would not have resulted in the vulnerability. In order to prevent similar situations in the future, the company should improve which of the following?

A computer on a company network was infected with a zero-day exploit after an employee accidently opened an email that contained malicious content. The employee recognized the email as malicious and was attempting to delete it, but accidently opened it. Which of the following should be done to prevent this scenario from occurring again in the future?

A company wants to ensure that the validity of publicly trusted certificates used by its web server can be determined even during an extended internet outage. Which of the following should be implemented?

An administrator intends to configure an IPSec solution that provides ESP with integrity protection, but not confidentiality protection. Which of the following AES modes of operation would meet this integrity-only requirement?

The Chief Security Officer (CSO) has issued a new policy that requires that all internal websites be configured for HTTPS traffic only. The network administrator has been tasked to update all internal sites without incurring additional costs. Which of the following is the best solution for the network administrator to secure each internal website?

A security program manager wants to actively test the security posture of a system. The system is not yet in production and has no uptime requirement or active user base. Which of the following methods will produce a report which shows vulnerabilities that were actually exploited?

A new intern in the purchasing department requires read access to shared documents. Permissions are normally controlled through a group called “purchasing”, however, the purchasing group permissions allow write access. Which of the following would be the BEST course of action?

A business has recently deployed laptops to all sales employees. The laptops will be used primarily from home offices and while traveling, and a high amount of wireless mobile use is expected. To protect the laptops while connected to untrusted wireless networks, which of the following would be the BEST method for reducing the risk of having the laptops compromised?

A security engineer is configuring a system that requires the X.509 certificate information to be pasted into a form field in Base64 encoded format to import it into the system. Which of the following certificate formats should the engineer use to obtain the information in the required format?

When configuring settings in a mandatory access control environment, which of the following specifies the subjects that can access specific data objects?

A systems administrator is reviewing the following information from a compromised server:
(see image)
Given the above information, which of the following processes was MOST likely exploited via a remote buffer overflow attack?

A Chief Executive Officer (CEO) suspects someone in the lab testing environment is stealing confidential information after working hours when no one else is around. Which of the following actions can help to prevent this specific threat?

A company hires a third-party firm to conduct an assessment of vulnerabilities exposed to the Internet. The firm informs the company that an exploit exists for an FTP server that had a version installed from eight years ago. The company has decided to keep the system online anyway, as no upgrade exists form the vendor. Which of the following BEST describes the reason why the vulnerability exists?

An organization uses SSO authentication for employee access to network resources. When an employee resigns, as per the organization’s security policy, the employee’s access to all network resources is terminated immediately. Two weeks later, the former employee sends an email to the help desk for a password reset to access payroll information from the human resources server. Which of the following represents the BEST course of action?

Joe, a user, wants to send Ann, another user, a confidential document electronically. Which of the following should Joe do to ensure the document is protected from eavesdropping?

A director of IR is reviewing a report regarding several recent breaches. The director compiles the following statistic’s:
– Initial IR engagement time frame
– Length of time before an executive management notice went out
– Average IR phase completion
The director wants to use the data to shorten the response time. Which of the following would accomplish this?

To reduce disk consumption, an organization’s legal department has recently approved a new policy setting the data retention period for sent email at six months. Which of the following is the BEST way to ensure this goal is met?

A security administrator is configuring a new network segment, which contains devices that will be accessed by external users, such as web and FTP server. Which of the following represents the MOST secure way to configure the new network segment?

Which of the following types of attacks precedes the installation of a rootkit on a server?

Which of the following cryptographic algorithms is irreversible?

A security analyst receives an alert from a WAF with the following payload:
var data= “<test test test>” ++ <../../../../../../etc/passwd>”
Which of the following types of attacks is this?

A workstation puts out a network request to locate another system. Joe, a hacker on the network, responds before the real system does, and he tricks the workstation into communicating with him. Which of the following BEST describes what occurred?

A development team has adopted a new approach to projects in which feedback is iterative and multiple iterations of deployments are provided within an application’s full life cycle. Which of the following software development methodologies is the development team using?

A security analyst wants to harden the company’s VoIP PBX. The analyst is worried that credentials may be intercepted and compromised when IP phones authenticate with the BPX. Which of the following would best prevent this from occurring?

An organization is comparing and contrasting migration from its standard desktop configuration to the newest version of the platform. Before this can happen, the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) voices the need to evaluate the functionality of the newer desktop platform to ensure interoperability with existing software in use by the organization. In which of the following principles of architecture and design is the CISO engaging?