SY0-501 : CompTIA Security+ Certification​​ : Part 11

SY0-501 : CompTIA Security+ Certification​​ : Part 11

1. 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?

   • Architecture evaluation
   • Baseline reporting
   • Whitebox testing
   • Peer review

2. 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?

   • Tailgating
   • Shoulder surfing
   • Impersonation
   • Hoax

3. 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?

   • Risk transference
   • Penetration test
   • Threat assessment
   • Vulnerability assessment

4. 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?

   • Transitive access
   • Spoofing
   • Man-in-the-middle
   • Replay

5. Which of the following use the SSH protocol?

   • Stelnet
   • SCP
   • SNMP
   • FTPS
   • SSL
   • SFTP

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

   • Taking pictures of proprietary information and equipment in restricted areas.
   • Installing soft token software to connect to the company’s wireless network.
   • Company cannot automate patch management on personally-owned devices.
   • Increases the attack surface by having more target devices on the company’s campus

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

   • MTBF
   • ALE
   • SLA
   • ARO

8. 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?

   • Elliptic curve
   • One-time pad
   • 3DES
   • AES-256

9. 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?

   • Configure testing and automate patch management for the application.
   • Configure security control testing for the application.
   • Manually apply updates for the application when they are released.
   • Configure a sandbox for testing patches before the scheduled monthly update.

10. 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?

    • 53
    • 110
    • 143
    • 443

11. 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?

    • The newly developed protocol will only be as secure as the underlying cryptographic algorithms used.
    • New protocols often introduce unexpected vulnerabilities, even when developed with otherwise secure and tested algorithm libraries.
    • A programmer should have specialized training in protocol development before attempting to design a new encryption protocol.
    • The obscurity value of unproven protocols against attacks often outweighs the potential for introducing new vulnerabilities.

12. 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?

    • Transport Encryption
    • Stream Encryption
    • Digital Signature
    • Steganography
    Explanation:
    Steganography is the process of hiding a message in another message so as to obfuscate its importance. It is also the process of hiding a message in a medium such as a digital image, audio file, or other file. In theory, doing this prevents analysts from detecting the real message. You could encode your message in another file or message and use that file to hide your message.

13. 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?

    • Incident management
    • Routine auditing
    • IT governance
    • Monthly user rights reviews

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

    • War chalking
    • Bluejacking
    • Bluesnarfing
    • Rogue tethering
    Explanation:
    Bluejacking is the sending of unsolicited messages over Bluetooth to Bluetooth-enabled devices such as mobile phones, PDAs or laptop computers, sending a vCard which typically contains a message in the name field (i.e., for bluedating or bluechat) to another Bluetooth-enabled device via the OBEX protocol.

15. 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?

    • An ephemeral key was used for one of the messages
    • A stream cipher was used for the initial email; a block cipher was used for the reply
    • Out-of-band key exchange has taken place
    • Asymmetric encryption is being used
    Explanation:
    Asymmetric algorithms use two keys to encrypt and decrypt data. These asymmetric keys are referred to as the public key and the private key. The sender uses the public key to encrypt a message, and the receiver uses the private key to decrypt the message; what one key does, the other one undoes.

16. 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?

    • Authority
    • Spamming
    • Social proof
    • Scarcity

17. Which of the following is the LEAST secure hashing algorithm?

    • SHA1
    • RIPEMD
    • MD5
    • DES

18. 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?

    • A virus on the administrator’s desktop would be able to sniff the administrator’s username and password.
    • Result in an attacker being able to phish the employee’s username and password.
    • A social engineering attack could occur, resulting in the employee’s password being extracted.
    • A man in the middle attack could occur, resulting the employee’s username and password being captured.

19. 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:

    • a threat.
    • a risk.
    • a false negative.
    • a false positive.

20. An auditor has identified an access control system that can incorrectly accept an access attempt from an unauthorized user. Which of the following authentication systems has the auditor reviewed?

    • Password-based
    • Biometric-based
    • Location-based
    • Certificate-based