CompTIA Security+ Exam Study Guide
with Complete Solutions
D >>>Which if the following would a security specialist be able to determine upon
examination of a server's certificate?
A. CA public key
B. Server private
...
CompTIA Security+ Exam Study Guide
with Complete Solutions
D >>>Which if the following would a security specialist be able to determine upon
examination of a server's certificate?
A. CA public key
B. Server private key
C. CSR
D. OID
B >>>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
207.46.130.0:6666. Which of the following should the security analyst do to determine if
the compromised system still has an active connection?
A. tracert
B. netstat
C. ping
D. nslookup
B >>>Multiple organizations operating in the same vertical wants 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?
A. Shibboleth
B. RADIUS federation
C. SML
D. OAuth
E. OpenID connect
C >>>Which of the following BEST describes an important security advantage yielded
by implementing vendor diversity?
A. Sustainability
B. Homogeneity
C. Resiliency
D. Configurability
A >>>In a corporation where compute utilization spikes several times a year, the Chief
Information Officer has requested a cost-effective architecture to handle the variable
capacity demand. Which of the following characteristics BEST describes what the CIO
has requested?A. Elasticity
B. Scalability
C. High availability
D. Redundancy
B >>>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?
A. PFX
B. PEM
C. DER
D. CER
A >>>Which of the following attacks specifically impact data availability?
A. DDoS
B. Trojan
C. MITM
D. Rootkit
BD >>>A security analyst is hardening a server with the directory services role installed.
The analyst must ensure LDAP traffic cannot be monitored or sniffed and maintains
compatibility with LDAP clients. Which of the following should the analyst implement to
meet these requirements? (Select two)
A. Generate an X.509-compliant certificate that is signed by a trusted CA
B. Install and configure an SSH tunnel on the LDAP server
C. Ensure port 389 is open between the clients and the servers using the
communication
D. Ensure port 636 is open between the clients and the servers using the
communications
E. Remote the LDAP directory service role from the sercer
A >>>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?
A. Competitior
B. Hacktivist
C. Insider
D. Organized crime
A >>>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?A. URL hijacking
B. Reconnaissance
C. White box testing
D. Escalation of privilege
BE >>>Which of the following characteristics differentiate a rainbow table attack from a
brute force attack? (Select two)
A. Rainbow table attacks greatly reduce compute cycles at attack time
B. Rainbow tables must include precomputed hashes
C. Rainbow table attacks do not require access to hashed passwords
D. Rainbow table attacks must be performed on the network
E. Rainbow table attacks bypass maximum failed login restrictions
C >>>Which of the following best describes routine in which semicolons, dashes,
quotes, and commas are removed from a string?
A. Error handling to protect against program exploitation
B. Exception handling to protect against XSRF attacks
C. Input validation to protect against SQL injection
D. Padding to protect against string buffer overflows
C >>>A security analyst wishes to increase the security of an FTP server. Currently, all
traffic to the FTP server is unencrypted. Users connecting to the FTP server use a
variety of modern 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?
A. Require the SFTP protocol to connect to the file server
B. Use implicit TLS on the FTP server
C. Use explicit FTPS for connections
D. Use SSH tunneling to encrypt the FTP traffic
A >>>Which of the following explains why vendors publish MD5 values when the
provide software patches for their customers to download over the internet?
A. The recipient can verify integrity of the software patch
B. The recipient can verify the authenticity of the site used to download the patch
C. The recipient can request future updates to the software using the published MD5
value
D. The recipient can successfully activate the new software patch
D >>>Refer to the following code:
public class rainbow {public static void main (String [] args) {
object blue = null;
blue.hashcode (); }
}
Which of the following vulnerabilities would occur if this is executed?
A. Page exception
B. Pointer deference
C. NullPointerException
D. Missing null check
C >>>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:
Next, the teams what to re-enable the network shares. Which of the following BEST
describes this phase of the incident response process?
A. Eradication
B. Containment
C. Recovery
D. Lessons learned
A >>>An organization has determined it can tolerate a maximum of three hours of
downtime. Which of the following has been specified?
A. RTO
B. RPO
C. MTBF
D. MTTR
D >>>Which of the following types of keys is found in a key escrow?
A. Public
B. Private
C. Shared
D. Session
BC >>>A security analyst is reviewing the following output from an IPS:
[**] [1:2467:7] EXPLOIT IGMP IGAP message overflow attempt [**]
[Classification: Attempted Administrator Privilege Gain] [Priority: 1]
07/30-19:45:02.238185 250.19.18.71 -> 250.19.18.22
IGMP TTL:255 TOS: 0x0 ID: 9742 IpLen:20 DgmLen: 502 MF
Frag offset: 0x1FFF Frag Size: 0x01E2
[Xref => http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2004-0367]Given this output, which of the following can be concluded? (Select two)
A. The source IP of the attack is coming from 250.19.18.22
B. The source IP of the attack is coming from 250.19.18.71
C. The attacker sent a malformed IGAP packet, triggering the alert
D. The attacker sent a malformed TCP packet, triggering the alert
E. The TTL value is outside of the expected range, triggering the alert
AD >>>Despite having implemented password policies, users continue to set the same
weak passwords and reuse old passwords. Which of the following technical controls
would help prevent these policy violations? (Select two)
A. Password expiration
B. Password length
C. Password complexity
D. Password history
E. Password lockout
D >>>Which of the following types of cloud infrastructures would allow several
organizations with similar structures and interests to realize the benefits of shared
storage and resources?
A. Private
B. Hybrid
C. Public
D. Community
AF >>>A company is currently using the following configuration:
A security administrator needs to configure a new wireless setup with the following
configurations:
Which of the following forms of authentication are being used? (Select two)
A. PAP
B. PEAP
C. MSCAP
D. PEAP-MSCHAP
E. EAP
F. EAP-PEAP
A >>>An auditor wants to test the security posture of an organization by running a tool
that will display the following:
JIMS <00> UNIQUE
Registered
WORKGROUP <00> GROUPRegistered
JIMS <00> UNIQUE Registered
Which of the following commands should be used?
A. nbtstat
B. nc
C. arp
D. ipconfig
A >>>A company determines that is is prohibitively expansive 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?
A. Transferring the risk
B. Accepting the risk
C. Avoiding the risk
D. Migrating the risk
D >>>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:
Which of the following is a deployment model that would help the company overcome
these problems?
A. BYOD
B. VDI
C. COPE
D. CYOD
C >>>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?
A. SoC
B. ICS
C. IoT
D. MFD
AC >>>Users report the following message appears when browsing the company's site:
This website can not be trusted.
Which of the following actions should a security analyst take to resolve these
messages? (Select two)
A. Verify the certificate has not expired on the serverB. Ensure the certificate has a .pfx extension on the server
C. Update the root certificate into the client computer certificate store
D. Install the updated private key on the web server
E. have users clear their browsing history and relaunch the session
C >>>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 resources have been exceeded
B. The software is out of licenses
C. The VM does not have enough processing power
D. The firewall is misconfigured
AB >>>Joe, an employee, wants to show his colleagues how much he knows about
smartphones. Joe demonstrates a free movie application that he installed from a third
party on his corporate smartphone. Joe's colleagues were unable to find the application
in the app stores. Which of the following allowed Joe to install the application? (select
two)
A. Near-field communication
B. Rooting/ jailbreaking
C. Ad-hoc connections
D. Tethering
E. Sideloading
A >>>Which of the following can be provided to an AAA system for the identification
phase?
A. Username
B. Permissions
C. One-time token
D. Private certificate
B >>>Which of the following implements two-factor authentication?
A. A phone system requiring a PIN to make a call
B. An ATM requiring a credit card and PIN
C. A computer requiring username and password
D. A datacenter mantrap requiring fingerprint and iris scan
A >>>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. ACLs
B. HIPS
C. NAT
D. MAC filtering
C >>>A network administrator wants to implement a method of securing internal routing.
Which of the following should the administrator implement?
A. DMZ
B. NAT
C. VPN
D. PAT
ACG >>>A security administrator is developing controls for creating audit trails and
tracking if a PHI data breach is to occur. The administrator has been given the following
requirements:
Which of the following should the administrator implement to meet the above
requirements? (Select three)
A. Eliminate shared accounts
B. Create a standard naming convention for accounts
C. Implement usage auditing and review
D. Enable account lockout thresholds
E. Copy logs in real time to a secured WORM drive
F. Implement time-of-day restrictions
G. Perform regular permission audits and reviews
B >>>Which of the following encryption methods does PKI typically use to securely
project keys?
A. Elliptic curves
B. Digital signatures
C. Asymmetric
D. Obfuscation
C >>>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. False negative
B. True negative
C. False positive
D. True positive
A >>>An organizations;s internal auditor discovers that large sums of money have
recently been paid to a vendor that management does not recognize. The IT securitydepartment is asked to investigate the organization's ERP system to determine how the
accounts payable module has been used to make these vendor payments. The IT
security department finds the following security configuration for the accounts payable
module:
Which of the following changes to the security configuration of the accounts payable
module would BEST mitigate the risk?
A.
B.
C.
D.
E. Option A
F. Option B
G. Option C
H. Option D
D >>>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 could have prevented this from
occurring?
A. Time-of-day restrictions
B. Permission auditing and review
C. Offboarding
D. Account expirtation
B >>>A database backup schedule consists of weekly full backups performed on
Saturday at 12:00 am and daily differential backups also performed at 12:00 am. 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?
A. 1
B. 2
C. 3
D. 4
D >>>Which of the following security controls does an iris scanner provide?
A. Logical
B. Administrative
C. Corrective
D. Physical
E. Detective
F. DeterrentA >>>As part of a new industry regulation, companies are required to utilize secure,
standardized OS settings. A technical must ensure the OS settings are hardened.
Which of the following is the BEST way to do this?
A. Use a vulnerability scanner
B. Use a configuration compliance scanner
C. Use a passive, in-line scanner
D. Use a protocol analyzer
C >>>A user has attempted to access data at a higher classification level than the
user's account is currently authorized to access. Which of the following access control
modules has been applied to this user's account?
A. MAC
B. DAC
C. RBAC
D. ABAC
B >>>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. An attacker can access and change the printer configuration
B. SNMP data leaving the printer will not be properly encrypted
C. An MITM attack can reveal sensitive information
D. An attacker can easily inject malicious code into the printer firmware
E. Attackers can use the PCL protocol to bypass the firewall of client computers
C >>>An organization finds that most help desk calls are regarding account lockout due
to a variety of applications running on different systems. Management 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?
A. Create multiple application accounts of each user
B. Provide secure tokens
C. Implement SSO
D. Utilize role-based access control
C >>>A user suspects someone has been accessing a home network without
permission by spoofing the MAC address of an authorized system. While attempting to
determine if an authorized user is logged into the home network, the user reviews the
wireless router, which shows the following table for systems that are currently on the
home network:
Hostname IP address MAC
MAC filterDadPC 192.168.1.10 00:1D:1A:44:17:B5 On
MomPC 192.168.1.15 21:14:D6:C5:42:A2 Off
JuniorPC 192.168.2.16 42:A7:D1:25:11:51 On
Unknown 192.168.1.18 10:B3:22:1A:FF:21 Off
Which of the following should be the NEXT step to determine if there is an unauthorized
user on the network?
A. Apply MAC filtering and see if the router drops any of the systems
B. Physically check each of the authorized systems to determine if they are logged onto
the network
C. Deny the "unknown" host because the hostname is not known and MAC filtering is
not applied to this host
D. Conduct a ping sweet of each of the authorized systems and see if an echo response
is received
AD >>>When performing data acquisition on a workstation, which of the following
should be captured based on memory volatility? (Select two)
A. USB-attached hard disk
B. Swap/pagefile
C. Mounted network storage
D. ROM
E. RAM
A >>>A systems administrator is reviewing the following information from a
compromised server:
Given the above information, which of the following processes was MOST likely
exploited via a remote bugger overflow attack?
A >>>An attacker compromises a public CA and issues unauthorized X.509 certificates
for Comapny.com. In the future, Company.com wants to mitigate the impact of similar
incidents. Which of the following would assist Company.com with its goal?
A. Certificate pinning
B. Certificate stapling
C. Certificate chaining
D. Certificate with extended validation
C >>>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. Shared accountB. Guest account
C. Service account
D. User account
D >>>A security administrator has found a hash in the environment known to belong to
malware. The administrator then finds this file to be in the preupdate area of the OS,
which indicates that it was pushed from the central patch system.
File: winx86_adobe_flash_upgrade.exe
Hash: 99ac28bede43ab869b853ba62c4ea243
The administrator pulls a report from the patch management system with the following
output:
Install Date Package Name Target Devices Hash
10/10/2017 java_11.2_x64.exe HQ PC's 01ab28bbde63aa879b35bba62cdes283
10/10/2017 winx86_adobe_flash_upgrade.exe HQ PC's
99ac28bede43ab869b853ba62c4ea243
Given the above outputs, which of the following MOST likely happened?
A. The file was corrupted after it left the patch system
B. The file was infected when the patch manager downloaded it
C. The file was not approved in the application whitelist system
D. The file was embedded with a logic bomb to evade detection
A >>>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 his certificate to the employees?
A. WPS
B. 802.1x
C. WPA2-PSK
D. TKIP
B >>>When connected to a secure WAP, which of the following encryption technologies
is MOST likely to be configured when connecting to WPA2-PSK?
A. DES
B. AES
C. MD5
D. WEP
B >>>A company has a data 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. Reduced cost
B. More searchable data
C. Better data classification
D. Expanded authority of the privacy officer
C >>>When configuring settings in a mandatory access control environment, which of
the following specifies the subjects that can access specific data objects?
A. Owner
B. System
C. Administrator
D. User
A >>>A high-security defense installation recently begun 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?
A. Deterrent
B. Preventive
C. Detective
D. Compensating
DE >>>A company's user lockout policy is enabled after five unsuccessful login
attempts. The help desk notices a user is repeatedly locked out over the course of a
workweek. Upon contacting the user, the help desk discovers the user is on vacation
and does not have network access. Which of the following types of attacks are MOST
likely occurring? (Select two)
A. Replay
B. Rainbow tables
C. Brute force
D. Pass the hash
E. Dictionary
D >>>Ann, an employee of the payroll department, has contacted the help desk citing
multiple issues with her device, including:
Ann states the issues began after she opened an invoice that a vendor emailed 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. Spyware
B. Crypto-malware
C. Rootkit
D. BackdoorD >>>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. Obtain a list of passwords used by the employee
B. Generate a report on outstanding projects the employee handled
C. Have the employee surrender company identification
D. Have the employee sign an NDA before departing
B >>>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?
A. A perimeter firewall and IDS
B. An air gapped computer network
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