300-740 Sample Questions Answers

The alert identifies known malicious communication from a host with Conduit software installed. Conduit is flagged as spyware/malware by Cisco Secure Analytics.

A: Alerting the incident response team is standard procedure when high-priority threats are confirmed.

E: Quarantining the host via endpoint isolation (e.g., Secure Endpoint or network-based access control) is a critical action to prevent lateral movement.

Blocking the IP alone (B) does not stop internal damage. Shutting down the host (D) prematurely removes forensic evidence. Uninstalling the software (C) should occur later during recovery after analysis.

The Cisco SAFE architecture uses the concept of Secure Domains as foundational blocks. These domains represent areas of the network (e.g., Branch, Data Center, Cloud, Edge) that require specific security controls. Each domain aligns with controls across visibility, segmentation, threat protection, and identity services.

Directory traversal attacks exploit improper file path validations to access unauthorized directories and files. To prevent this, it is critical to restrict what areas of the file system an application or user can access. Limiting file system permissions prevents attackers from gaining access to sensitive areas even if a traversal vulnerability exists.

As explained in SCAZT Section 4 (Application and Data Security, Pages 85–87), enforcing minimal privileges and file system segmentation is a key defense against such attacks.

In IKEv1 policy configuration for Cisco ASA, two key commands are required to define the encryption and hashing algorithms:

A: encryption aes-256 defines the encryption method for the IKE SA.

E: hash sha-256 ensures SHA-256 is used as the integrity mechanism during IKE phase 1.

According to Cisco documentation and SCAZT (Section 1: Cloud Security Architecture, Pages 19–22), these two components are essential to negotiating a secure VPN tunnel. The provided config uses group 1 (modp768), which is weak by today’s standards and could also lead to negotiation failure. However, from the available options, encryption and hash are the two required for tunnel success.

Based on the alert of “Geographically Unusual Remote Access” from Secure Cloud Analytics and the SSH logs from foreign IPs, this device (linux-gcp-east-4c) has likely been compromised. According to SCAZT Section 6: Threat Response (Pages 114–117):

B: Isolating/quarantining the host is an immediate incident response step to prevent lateral movement and data exfiltration.

E: A firewall rule blocking inbound SSH to the GCP VM from external sources would be the appropriate access control response to prevent recurrence.

Options A and C (reinstallation) may be used later during recovery but are not immediate containment steps. Blocking outgoing SSH (Option D) is less relevant than restricting inbound SSH in this scenario.

The screenshot from Cisco ISE shows a configuration of a “File Condition” posture check that verifies the existence and version of the “Srv.sys” file in the System32 directory. This is a known method to validate if a Windows device has received a critical security patch (in this case, one related to protection against the WannaCry vulnerability, MS17-010). Cisco ISE does not rely solely on a patch management system for this type of validation but can use specific file version and path checks. Therefore, the correct posture condition is File Condition.

When integrating Duo Authentication Proxy with Active Directory for multifactor authentication (MFA), you must:

Configure the Identity Source in the Duo Admin Panel as Active Directory (not SAML), since it’s using the Authentication Proxy.

Configure the authentication proxy settings in the [sso] section to communicate with both AD and the Duo cloud.

This setup allows Active Directory to be the primary identity store while Duo provides the second authentication factor.

The JSON configuration shown is missing a specific Layer 4 parameter definition for port 25 (SMTP). Although the protocol (proto: 6, which is TCP) is defined, without specifying the actual port in the l4_params array, traffic filtering will not trigger on SMTP. Therefore, the engineer must add "port": [25, 25] to the l4_params section to ensure traffic on port 25 is blocked.

According to the SCAZT guide, the “Always-on” deployment mode for Cisco Secure DDoS (including integration with Secure Web Application Firewall solutions) provides continuous protection for both volumetric and application-layer attacks. This deployment model ensures that all traffic flows through the scrubbing and WAF infrastructure without requiring traffic redirection only during attack events. It provides real-time mitigation and immediate detection, which is essential to address both volumetric attacks (e.g., SYN floods) and Layer 7 (application-layer) attacks such as HTTP floods and injection-based threats.

While “Hybrid” and “On-demand” modes are useful for specific use cases, only “Always-on” offers continuous and comprehensive protection required for environments that demand consistent uptime and threat prevention.

After Cloudlock is integrated with Salesforce, full visibility into objects and data requires that Cloudlock has the “View All Data” permission enabled on the connected Salesforce account. This permission allows the Cloudlock API connection to access all user data, regardless of individual field-level or sharing rules. Without it, Cloudlock will be limited in its visibility scope.

As per SCAZT (Section 4: Application and Data Security, Pages 86–89), integration with SaaS platforms like Salesforce must include enabling comprehensive data visibility to perform effective risk analysis and policy enforcement.

The Zero Trust model relies on the principle of "never trust, always verify" and includes continuous verification based on real-time data. According to SCAZT Section 1 (Cloud Security Architecture, Pages 14–17), user and device behavior are key elements for continuous verification. Behavioral analytics evaluates deviations from typical activity, such as time of login, geolocation, access frequency, and resource usage to adapt trust levels dynamically. This is central to adaptive access control and risk-based authentication.

Automation of containment and response actions—such as isolating compromised endpoints and applying predefined security policies—is a critical capability of Cisco’s XDR and SecureX platform. According to SCAZT Section 6: Threat Response (Pages 112–117), automating threat containment allows security teams to rapidly limit the blast radius of incidents and improve mean time to respond (MTTR), without relying solely on manual intervention.

Rule 1 is a “deny all” rule placed at the top of the access control policy. Because Cisco firewalls process rules sequentially from top to bottom, Rule 1 is blocking all traffic—including RDP (Rule 2) and HTTPS (Rule 3). To allow specific traffic, the “deny all” catch-all rule should be placed last so that the specific allow rules are evaluated first.

SCAZT Section 3 (Network and Cloud Security, Pages 69–74) discusses rule hierarchy and clearly states that allow rules must precede any general deny policies to ensure intended traffic is matched correctly. This best practice is essential when dealing with multi-cloud access control.

Zero Trust is based on the concept of “never trust, always verify.” It ensures that no user or device is inherently trusted, even if they are inside the corporate network. Cisco’s Zero Trust Architecture implements continuous trust verification for every access request, using identity, device posture, and behavior analysis.

SCAZT Section 1 (Cloud Security Architecture, Pages 13–17) describes how Cisco’s Zero Trust model authenticates and authorizes access before permitting resource interaction.