CompTIA CS0-003 Practice Test - Questions Answers, Page 3

The Cyber Kill Chain is a framework that describes the stages of a cyberattack from reconnaissance to actions on objectives. The exploitation stage is where attackers take advantage of the vulnerabilities they have discovered in previous stages to further infiltrate a target's network and achieve their objectives. In this case, the malicious actor has gained access to an internal network by means of social engineering and does not want to lose access in order to continue the attack. This indicates that the actor is in the exploitation stage of the Cyber Kill Chain. Official

Reference: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/cyber/cyber-kill-chain.html

Reconnaissance is the first stage in the Cyber Kill Chain and involves researching potential targets before carrying out any penetration testing. The reconnaissance stage may include identifying potential targets, finding their vulnerabilities, discovering which third parties are connected to them (and what data they can access), and exploring existing entry points as well as finding new ones. Reconnaissance can take place both online and offline. In this case, an analyst finds that an IP address outside of the company network is being used to run network and vulnerability scans across external-facing assets. This indicates that the analyst is witnessing reconnaissance activity by an attacker. Official

Reference: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/cyber/cyber-kill-chain.html

A social engineering attack is a type of cyberattack that relies on manipulating human psychology rather than exploiting technical vulnerabilities. A social engineering attack may involve deceiving, persuading, or coercing users into performing actions that benefit the attacker, such as clicking on malicious links, divulging sensitive information, or granting access to restricted resources. An obfuscated link is a link that has been disguised or altered to hide its true destination or purpose. Obfuscated links are often used by attackers to trick users into visiting malicious websites or downloading malware. In this case, an incident response analyst notices multiple emails traversing the network that target only the administrators of the company. The email contains a concealed URL that leads to an unknown website in another country. This indicates that the analyst is witnessing a social engineering attack using obfuscated links.

Application security scanning is a process that involves testing and analyzing applications for security vulnerabilities, such as injection flaws, broken authentication, cross-site scripting, and insecure configuration. Application security scanning can help identify and fix security issues before they become exploitable by attackers. Using application security scanning as part of the pipeline for the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) flow can help mitigate the problem of finding the same vulnerabilities in a critical application during security scanning. This is because application security scanning can be integrated into the development lifecycle and performed automatically and frequently as part of the CI/CD process.

Proprietary systems are systems that are owned and controlled by a specific vendor or manufacturer, and that use proprietary standards or protocols that are not compatible with other systems. Proprietary systems can pose a challenge for vulnerability management, as they may not allow users to access or modify their configuration, update their software, or patch their vulnerabilities. In this case, two of the critical systems cannot be upgraded due to a vendor appliance that the company does not have access to. This indicates that these systems and associated vulnerabilities are examples of proprietary systems as inhibitors to remediation

A cross-site scripting (XSS) attack is a type of web application attack that injects malicious code into a web page that is then executed by the browser of a victim user. A reflected XSS attack is a type of XSS attack where the malicious code is embedded in a URL or a form parameter that is sent to the web server and then reflected back to the user's browser. In this case, the Nmap scan shows that the web server is vulnerable to a reflected XSS attack, as it returns the characters > and ' without any filtering or encoding. The vulnerable parameter is id in the URL http://172.31.15.2/1.php?id=2.

The shell script function that could help identify possible network addresses from different source networks belonging to the same company and region is:

function y() { dig $(dig -x $1 | grep PTR | tail -n 1 | awk -F ''.in-addr'' '{print $1}').origin.asn.cymru.com TXT +short }

This function takes an IP address as an argument and performs two DNS lookups using the dig command. The first lookup uses the -x option to perform a reverse DNS lookup and get the hostname associated with the IP address. The second lookup uses the origin.asn.cymru.com domain to get the autonomous system number (ASN) and other information related to the IP address, such as the country code, registry, or allocation date. The function then prints the IP address and the ASN information, which can help identify any network addresses that belong to the same ASN or region

The function that would help the analyst identify IP addresses from the same country is:

function x() { info=$(geoiplookup $1) && echo ''$1 | $info'' }

This function takes an IP address as an argument and uses the geoiplookup command to get the geographic location information associated with the IP address, such as the country name, country code, region, city, or latitude and longitude. The function then prints the IP address and the geographic location information, which can help identify any IP addresses that belong to the same country.

The first action that should be completed to remediate the findings is to perform proper sanitization on all fields. Sanitization is a process that involves validating, filtering, or encoding any user input or data before processing or storing it on a system or application. Sanitization can help prevent various types of attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, or command injection, that exploit unsanitized input or data to execute malicious scripts, commands, or queries on a system or application. Performing proper sanitization on all fields can help address the most critical and common vulnerability found during the vulnerability assessment, which is XSS.