CompTIA CAS-005 Practice Test - Questions Answers, Page 2

The best location to test a newly released feature for an internal application, without affecting the production environment, is the staging environment. Here's a detailed explanation:

Staging Environment: This environment closely mirrors the production environment in terms of hardware, software, configurations, and settings. It serves as a final testing ground before deploying changes to production. Testing in the staging environment ensures that the new feature will behave as expected in the actual production setup.

Isolation from Production: The staging environment is isolated from production, which means any issues arising from the new feature will not impact the live users or the integrity of the production data. This aligns with best practices in change management and risk mitigation.

Realistic Testing: Since the staging environment replicates the production environment, it provides realistic testing conditions. This helps in identifying potential issues that might not be apparent in a development or testing environment, which often have different configurations and workloads.

CompTIA Security+ SY0-601 Official Study Guide by Quentin Docter, Jon Buhagiar

NIST Special Publication 800-53: Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations

To create a collection of use cases for detecting known threats and include them in a centralized library for use across multiple companies with different vendors, Sigma rules are the best option. Here's why:

Centralized Rule Management: By using Sigma rules, the cybersecurity architect can create a centralized library of detection rules that can be easily shared and implemented across different detection and monitoring systems used by the acquired companies. This ensures consistency in threat detection capabilities.

Ease of Use and Flexibility: Sigma provides a structured and straightforward format for defining detection logic. It allows for the easy creation, modification, and sharing of rules, facilitating collaboration and standardization across the organization.

Building playbooks for different scenarios and performing regular table-top exercises directly addresses the issues identified in the lessons-learned review. Here's why:

Lost important information for further analysis: Playbooks outline step-by-step procedures for incident response, ensuring that team members know exactly what to document and how to preserve evidence.

Did not utilize the chain of communication: Playbooks include communication protocols, specifying who to notify and when. Regular table-top exercises reinforce these communication channels, ensuring they are followed during actual incidents.

Did not follow the right steps for a proper response: Playbooks provide a clear sequence of actions to be taken during various types of incidents, helping the team to respond in a structured and effective manner. Regular exercises allow the team to practice these steps, identifying and correcting any deviations from the plan.

Investing in better forensic tools (Option A) or requiring certifications (Option C) are also valuable, but they do not directly address the procedural and communication gaps identified. Publishing and enforcing the incident response policy (Option D) is important but not as practical and hands-on as playbooks and exercises in ensuring the team is prepared.

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NIST SP 800-61 Rev. 2, 'Computer Security Incident Handling Guide'

SANS Institute, 'Incident Handler's Handbook'

To mitigate the identified vulnerabilities, the following solutions are most appropriate:

A . Implementing data loss prevention (DLP): DLP solutions help prevent the unauthorized transfer of data outside the organization. This directly addresses the exfiltration of intellectual property by monitoring, detecting, and blocking sensitive data transfers.

E . Enabling modern authentication that supports Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): This significantly enhances security by requiring additional verification methods beyond just passwords. It addresses the issue of weak user passwords by making it much harder for unauthorized users to gain access, even if they obtain the password.

Other options, while useful in specific contexts, do not address all the vulnerabilities mentioned:

B . Deploying file integrity monitoring helps detect changes to files but does not prevent data exfiltration or address weak passwords.

C . Restricting access to critical file services improves security but is not comprehensive enough to mitigate all identified vulnerabilities.

D . Deploying directory-based group policies can enforce security policies but might not directly prevent data exfiltration or ensure strong authentication.

F . Implementing a version control system helps manage changes to files but is not a security measure for preventing the identified vulnerabilities.

G . Implementing a CMDB platform (Configuration Management Database) helps manage IT assets but does not address the specific security issues mentioned.

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NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, 'Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations'

CIS Controls, 'Control 13: Data Protection' and 'Control 16: Account Monitoring and Control'

The most appropriate solution for the systems engineer to deploy is SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux). Here's why:

Mandatory Access Control (MAC): SELinux enforces MAC policies, ensuring that only authorized users and processes can access specific resources. This helps in preventing unauthorized reading and modification of data and programs.

Access Vector Cache: SELinux utilizes an access vector cache (AVC) to improve performance. The AVC caches access decisions, reducing the need for repetitive policy lookups and thus improving system efficiency.

Security Mechanisms: SELinux provides a robust framework to enforce security policies and prevent bypassing of application security mechanisms. It controls access based on defined policies, ensuring that security measures are consistently applied.

Privilege Escalation and Process Interference: SELinux limits the ability of processes to escalate privileges and interfere with each other by enforcing strict access controls. This containment helps in isolating processes and minimizing the risk of privilege escalation attacks.

CompTIA Security+ SY0-601 Study Guide by Mike Chapple and David Seidl

NSA's Guide to the Secure Configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (SELinux)

NIST Special Publication 800-53: Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations

The security engineer should modify the following to fix the email migration issues:

Email CNAME Record: The email CNAME record must be changed to a type A record pointing to 192.168.1.10. This is because CNAME records should not be used where an IP address (A record) is required. Changing it to an A record ensures direct pointing to the correct IP.

TXT Record for DMARC: The TXT record must be changed to 'v=dmarc ip4:192.168.1.10 include

.com -all'. This ensures proper configuration of DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) to include the correct IP address and the email service provider domain.

DMARC: Ensuring the DMARC record is correctly set up helps in preventing email spoofing and phishing, aligning with email security best practices.

CompTIA Security+ SY0-601 Study Guide by Mike Chapple and David Seidl

RFC 7489: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC)

NIST Special Publication 800-45: Guidelines on Electronic Mail Security

The best action to address the requirement of accessing the historian server within a SCADA system is to isolate the historian server for connections only from the SCADA environment. Here's why:

Security and Isolation: Isolating the historian server ensures that only authorized devices within the SCADA environment can connect to it. This minimizes the attack surface and protects sensitive data from unauthorized access.

Access Control: By restricting access to the historian server to only SCADA devices, the organization can better control and monitor interactions, ensuring that only legitimate queries and data retrievals occur.

Best Practices for Critical Infrastructure: Following the principle of least privilege, isolating critical components like the historian server is a standard practice in securing SCADA systems, reducing the risk of cyberattacks.

CompTIA Security+ SY0-601 Study Guide by Mike Chapple and David Seidl

NIST Special Publication 800-82: Guide to Industrial Control Systems (ICS) Security

ISA/IEC 62443 Standards: Security for Industrial Automation and Control Systems

The technique that best addresses the issue of insider threats from employees who have individual access to encrypted material is key splitting. Here's why:

Key Splitting: Key splitting involves dividing a cryptographic key into multiple parts and distributing these parts among different individuals or systems. This ensures that no single individual has complete access to the key, thereby mitigating the risk of insider threats.

Increased Security: By requiring multiple parties to combine their key parts to access encrypted material, key splitting provides an additional layer of security. This approach is particularly useful in environments where sensitive data needs to be protected from unauthorized access by insiders.

Compliance and Best Practices: Key splitting aligns with best practices and regulatory requirements for handling sensitive information, ensuring that access is tightly controlled and monitored.

CompTIA Security+ SY0-601 Study Guide by Mike Chapple and David Seidl

NIST Special Publication 800-57: Recommendation for Key Management

ISO/IEC 27002:2013: Information Technology - Security Techniques - Code of Practice for Information Security Controls

By employing key splitting, organizations can effectively reduce the risk of insider threats and enhance the overall security of encrypted material.

On-path decryption attacks, such as BEAST (Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS) and other related vulnerabilities, often exploit weaknesses in the implementation of CBC (Cipher Block Chaining) mode. To mitigate these attacks, the following actions are recommended:

B . Removing support for CBC-based key exchange and signing algorithms: CBC mode is vulnerable to certain attacks like BEAST. By removing support for CBC-based ciphers, you can eliminate one of the primary vectors for these attacks. Instead, use modern cipher modes like GCM (Galois/Counter Mode) which offer better security properties.

C . Adding TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA256: This cipher suite uses Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral (ECDHE) for key exchange, which provides perfect forward secrecy. It also uses AES in GCM mode, which is not susceptible to the same attacks as CBC. SHA-256 is a strong hash function that ensures data integrity.

CompTIA Security+ Study Guide

NIST SP 800-52 Rev. 2, 'Guidelines for the Selection, Configuration, and Use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) Implementations'

OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) guidelines on cryptography and secure communication