212-89 Sample Questions Answers

In cloud computing environments, the responsibility for providing and managing network services, as well as handling incidents related to these services, primarily falls on the cloud service provider. This includes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) models. The cloud service provider is tasked with ensuring the availability, integrity, and security of the network services they offer. This responsibility includes managing and responding to incidents that may affect these services, ranging from security breaches to performance issues. The cloud service provider employs a variety of tools and techniques to monitor the network, identify potential threats, and implement corrective actions to mitigate any impact on the services and their users.

WMIC (Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line) is a command-line tool that provides a unified interface for Windows management tasks, including the collection of system information. It allows administrators and forensic investigators to query the live system for information about running services, their process IDs, start modes, states, and statuses, among other data. The use of WMIC is particularly valuable in incident response scenarios for gathering volatile information from a system without having to install additional software, which might alter the state of the system being investigated. By executing specific WMIC commands, Clark can extract detailed information about the services running on a system at the time of the investigation, making it an essential tool for collecting volatile data in a forensically sound manner.

Turning off the infected machine is a common immediate response to contain a malware incident and prevent it from spreading to other systems on the network. This action halts any ongoing malicious activities by the malware, thereby limiting the potential for further damage or data exfiltration. However, it is essential to note that this step can lead to the loss of volatile data that might be useful for forensic analysis. Therefore, it is advisable only when it's critical to stop the malware immediately, and there's a strategy in place for forensic investigation that includes handling non-volatile data or when the preservation of volatile data is not possible.

In the context of US Federal Agencies, incidents are categorized based on their impact on operations, assets, or individuals. A DoS attack that prevents or impairs the authorized functionality of networks and is still ongoing without successful mitigation efforts typically falls under Category 2 (CAT 2). This category is designated for incidents that have a significant impact, requiring immediate reporting and response. The reporting timeframe of within 2 hours as mentioned aligns with the urgency associated with CAT 2 incidents, emphasizing the need for swift action to address the attack and restore normal operations.

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack aims to make a computer resource, network, or application unavailable to its intended users, thereby preventing legitimate users from using the service. This is achieved by overwhelming the target with a flood of internet traffic or sending information that triggers a crash. In contrast, fraud and theft involve the unauthorized acquisition of data or assets, unauthorized access refers to gaining entry into systems without permission, and malicious code or insider threat attacks relate to software designed to cause harm or unauthorized actions by trusted users within the organization. The specific intent of a DoS attack is to disrupt service, making it a distinct category focused on denial of availability.

For memory dump analysis, tools like Scylla and OllyDumpEx are more suited. These tools are designed to analyze and extract information from memory dumps, which can be crucial for understanding the state of a system at the time of an incident. Scylla is used for reconstructing imports in dumped binaries, while OllyDumpEx is an OllyDbg plugin used for dumping process memory. Both tools are valuable for incident handlers like Rinni who are performing memory dump analysis to uncover evidence or understand the behavior of malicious software.

Incident response orchestration refers to the process and technologies used to coordinate and streamline the response to security incidents. This approach ensures that incident response teams have clear procedures and workflows to follow, enabling them to act swiftly and effectively when dealing with security incidents. By orchestrating the response, organizations can minimize the impact of incidents, ensure consistent and thorough investigation and remediation activities, and improve their overall security posture. Incident response orchestration involves integrating various security tools, automating response actions where possible, and providing a centralized platform for managing incidents.

The term that describes the combination of strategies and services intended to restore data, applications, and other resources to the public cloud or dedicated service providers is "Cloud recovery." This term encompasses disaster recovery efforts focused on ensuring that an organization's digital assets can be quickly and effectively restored or moved to cloud environments in the event of data loss, system failure, or a disaster. Cloud recovery strategies are part of a broader disaster recovery and business continuity planning, ensuring minimal downtime and data loss by leveraging cloud computing's scalability and flexibility. Mitigation, analysis, and eradication are terms associated with other aspects of incident response and risk management, not specifically with the restoration of resources to cloud environments.

The scenario described, where Oscar receives an email with a link that contains a malicious URL redirecting to evilsite.org, exemplifies a vulnerability related to unvalidated redirects and forwards. This type of vulnerability occurs when a web application accepts untrusted input that could cause the web application to redirect the request to a URL contained within untrusted input. Attackers can exploit this vulnerability by crafting a malicious URL that leads unsuspecting users to phishing sites or other malicious websites, under the guise of a legitimate domain. This is distinct from malware, which refers to malicious software; SQL injection, which involves inserting malicious SQL queries through input fields to manipulate or exploit databases; and is not a term related to cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

Anti-forensics refers to techniques used to hinder the forensic analysis of a computer system. By hiding files in slack space, changing file headers, embedding suspicious files in executables, and altering metadata, BadGuy Bob is attempting to make it difficult for forensic analysts to find, analyze, and attribute the malicious activities and data on his laptop. These actions are designed to conceal evidence, manipulate digital artifacts, and obstruct investigations, making them clear examples of anti-forensic techniques. While such actions could be part of broader criminal activities, constituting a felony, and could be seen as adversarial mechanics or legal hostility in specific contexts, the most accurate classification of these techniques is anti-forensics.

Incident triage is the stage in the incident response process where the incident handler, like Mike, performs an initial assessment of the reported incident to determine its validity, severity, and potential impact. This includes analyzing the incident to verify if it is a genuine threat or a false positive. The purpose of incident triage is to prioritize incidents based on their criticality and ensure that resources are allocated effectively to address the most serious threats first. This stage is crucial for efficient incident management, as it helps in filtering out false alarms and focusing on real security incidents that require immediate attention.

By classifying and encrypting customer Personally Identifiable Information (PHI), you are specifically guarding against the risk of Sensitive Data Exposure. This OWASP security risk involves the accidental or unlawful exposure of protected data to unauthorized individuals. Encryption serves as a critical defense mechanism by ensuring that, even if data is accessed without authorization, it remains unintelligible and useless to the attacker without the decryption keys. Data classification further supports this by identifying which data is sensitive and requires such protections, ensuring that appropriate security controls are applied to prevent exposure.

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF or XSRF) is an attack that tricks the victim's browser into executing unauthorized actions on a website where they are currently authenticated. In this scenario, the attacker exploits the trust that a site has in the user's browser, effectively forcing the browser to perform actions without the user's knowledge or consent. For example, if the user is logged into their bank's website, an attacker could craft a malicious request to transfer funds without the user's direct interaction. CSRF attacks rely on authenticated sessions and typically target state-changing requests to compromise user or application data.

As of my last update, the most recent NIST standard for incident response was NIST Special Publication 800-61 Revision 2 (800-61r2), titled "Computer Security Incident Handling Guide." This document provides guidelines for establishing an effective incident response program, including preparation, detection and analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident activity.

ISO/IEC 27002 is a standard that provides best practice recommendations on information security controls for use by those responsible for initiating, implementing, or maintaining information security management systems (ISMSs). It covers areas such as risk assessment, human resource security, operational security, and communications security, among others, providing a framework for establishing, implementing, operating, monitoring, reviewing, maintaining, and improving an ISMS. ISO/IEC 27035 pertains to information security incident management, PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) deals with the security of cardholder data, and RFC 2196 is a guide for computer security incident response teams (CSIRTs), not a standard for implementing ISMSs.

The Barracuda Email Security Gateway is designed to manage and filter inbound and outbound email traffic to protect organizations from email-borne threats and data leaks. As an incident handler analyzing email headers to find out suspicious emails, using a tool like the Barracuda Email Security Gateway would be appropriate. This tool can help identify and block spam, phishing, malware, and other malicious email threats, making it easier to focus on analyzing potentially harmful emails more closely.

When a corporate network's servers are sending huge amounts of traffic to a specific website, as detected by the network's Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), this behavior is indicative of a Botnet attack. A Botnet is a network of compromised computers, often referred to as "bots," that are controlled remotely by an attacker, typically without the knowledge of the owners of the computers. The attacker can command these bots to execute distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, send spam, or conduct other malicious activities. In this scenario, the servers behaving as bots and targeting a website with large volumes of traffic suggests that they have been co-opted into a Botnet to potentially perform a DDoS attack on the website abc.xyz.

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is a primary source for cloud computing standards and guidelines, the five main actors in cloud computing are Consumer, Provider, Carrier, Auditor, and Broker. These roles are defined as follows:

Consumer: The person or organization that uses cloud computing services.

Provider: The entity that provides the cloud services to consumers.

Carrier: The organization that offers connectivity and transport services to cloud providers and consumers.

Auditor: An independent party that assesses and verifies the cloud services, security controls, and operations.

Broker: An entity that manages the use, performance, and delivery of cloud services, and negotiates relationships between cloud providers and consumers.

These actors play critical roles in the ecosystem of cloud computing, ensuring the services are delivered and used securely, efficiently, and effectively.

BinText is a lightweight text extraction tool that can be used to perform string search analysis within binary files. This functionality is crucial for incident handlers like Jason, who are tasked with analyzing memory dumps for malicious activity or indicators of compromise. By searching for specific strings or patterns that are known to be associated with malware, BinText helps in identifying potentially harmful actions that a program could perform, thus aiding in the investigation of malware incidents.

Viruses are a type of malicious software program designed to infect legitimate software programs. Once a virus is executed, it can corrupt or delete data on a computer, replicate itself, and spread to other files and systems. Unlike worms, which can spread across networks on their own, viruses usually require some form of user interaction, such as opening an infected email attachment or downloading and executing a malicious file, to propagate. Trojans and spyware, while also malicious software, serve different malicious purposes, such as creating backdoors for attackers (Trojans) or spying on users' activities (Spyware).

A side channel attack, as described in the scenario, involves an attacker using indirect methods to gather information from a system. In this case, Alice is exploiting the shared physical resources, specifically the processor cache, of a virtual machine host to steal data from another virtual machine on the same host. This type of attack does not directly breach the system through conventional means like breaking encryption but instead takes advantage of the information leaked by the physical implementation of the system, such as timing information, power consumption, electromagnetic leaks, or, as in this case, shared resource utilization, to infer the secret data.

Live data acquisition is the process of collecting volatile data from a system that is still running. Volatile data includes information stored in system memory (RAM), cache, and system and network configuration settings that are lost when the system is powered off. This method is essential for capturing data that can provide insights into the state of the system at the time of an incident, including active network connections, running processes, and the contents of memory. Marley must employ live data acquisition to ensure that this crucial and ephemeral data is not lost, which can be pivotal in understanding and responding to the incident effectively.

Eradication is the phase in the incident response process where the root cause of an incident is removed or eliminated, and all attack vectors are closed to prevent similar incidents in the future. This step follows the containment phase, where the immediate threat is isolated to prevent further damage, and precedes the recovery phase, where normal operations are restored. Eradication involves thoroughly removing malware, unauthorized access mechanisms, or any other elements used in the attack, and securing any vulnerabilities that were exploited. The goal is to ensure that the threat cannot re-emerge and that the systems are secure before they are returned to operational status.

A TCP Xmas scan is a type of network scanning technique used by attackers to identify open ports on a target machine. The name "Xmas" comes from the set of flags that are turned on within the packet, making it 'lit up like a Christmas tree'. Specifically, the FIN, PSH, and URG flags are set, which corresponds to the hexadecimal value 0X029 in the TCP header's flags field. Wireshark, a popular network protocol analyzer, allows users to create custom filters to detect specific types of network traffic, including malicious scanning attempts. By using the filtertcp.flags==0X029, Rose can detect packets that have these specific flags set, indicating a potential TCP Xmas scan attempt.

A Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack is characterized by flooding the network with a high volume of traffic to consume all available network resources, preventing intended or authorized users from accessing system, network, or applications. This type of attack aims to overwhelm the target's capacity to handle incoming requests, causing a denial of access to legitimate users. Unlike XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) attacks, URL manipulation, or SQL injection, which exploit vulnerabilities in web applications for unauthorized data access or manipulation, a DoS attack specifically targets the availability of services.

One of the key approaches to mitigating insider threats is ensuring that access control policies are strictly implemented and monitored. This includes the guideline that access granted to users should be thoroughly documented and vetted by a supervisor. This control helps ensure that users have only the access necessary to perform their job functions, reducing the risk of inappropriate access or misuse of information. Proper documentation and supervisor approval also ensure accountability and traceability of access decisions, which is crucial for detecting and responding to insider threats. The human resources department plays a vital role in this process, working closely with IT and security teams to enforce access control policies, conduct regular reviews of access rights, and manage the onboarding and offboarding process to ensure that access rights are appropriately updated.

The first step in securing an employee's account following an email hacking incident involves restoring access to the email services if necessary and immediately changing the password to prevent unauthorized access. This action ensures that the attacker is locked out of the account as quickly as possible. While enabling two-factor authentication, scanning links and attachments, and disabling automatic file sharing are important security measures, they come into play after ensuring that the compromised account is first secured by changing its password to halt any ongoing unauthorized access.

Autopsy is a digital forensics platform and graphical interface to The Sleuth Kit and other digital forensics tools. It is used by law enforcement, military, and corporate examiners to investigate what happened on a computer. Autopsy enables incident handlers to view the file system, retrieve deleted data, perform timeline analysis, and analyze web artifacts, among other functionalities. This tool is particularly useful during the incident response process for conducting in-depth investigations into the nature of a security incident, identifying the methods used by attackers, and recovering lost or compromised data.

In the context of information security, the Incident Manager (IM) plays a crucial role in handling incidents from both a management and technical perspective. The Incident Manager is responsible for overseeing the entire incident response process, coordinating with relevant stakeholders, ensuring that incidents are analyzed, contained, and eradicated efficiently, and that recovery processes are initiated promptly. They are pivotal in ensuring communication flows smoothly between technical teams and upper management and that all actions taken are aligned with the organization's broader security policies and objectives. Unlike network administrators, threat researchers, or forensic investigators who may play more specialized roles within the incident response process, the Incident Manager has a broad oversight role that encompasses both technical and managerial aspects to ensure a comprehensive and coordinated response to security incidents.

The correct sequence of steps involved in forensic readiness planning, based on the activities described, is as follows:

Identify the potential evidence required for an incident.

Determine the source of the evidence.

Define a policy that determines the pathway to legally extract electronic evidence with minimal disruption.

Establish a policy for securely handling and storing the collected evidence.

Identify if the incident requires full or formal investigation.

Train the staff to handle the incident and preserve the evidence.

Create a special process for documenting the procedure.

Pharming is a cyber attack intended to redirect a website's traffic to another, bogus website. By poisoning a DNS server's cache, attackers can redirect users from the site they intended to visit to one that is malicious, without the user's knowledge or any action on their part, such as clicking a deceptive link. This technique is particularly insidious because it can affect well-intentioned users who type the correct URL into their browsers but are still redirected. War driving involves searching for wireless networks from a moving vehicle, skimming refers to stealing credit card information using a device placed on ATMs or point-of-sale terminals, and pretexting is a form of social engineering where the attacker lies to obtain privileged data.

In the scenario described, Stanley aims to ensure that the digital evidence he collected is admissible in court. This means the evidence must be gathered, handled, and presented in a manner that complies with legal standards, ensuring it can be legally used in a trial. Admissibility is a crucial characteristic of digital evidence, as it must be relevant, authentic, and obtained without violating any laws or rights to privacy. The evidence must also be presented in a clear and comprehensible manner to be understood by the members of the jury, which further supports its admissibility in court.

Email Dossier is a tool designed to perform detailed investigations on email messages to verify their authenticity and trace their origin. It can analyze email headers and provide information about the route an email has taken, the servers it passed through, and potentially malicious links or origins. For an incident handler like Stenley, tasked with verifying the validity of emails and containing malicious email threats, Email Dossier serves as a practical tool for analyzing and validating emails received by employees. By using this tool, Stenley can identify fraudulent or suspicious emails, thereby helping to protect the organization from phishing attacks, malware distribution, and other email-based threats.

The DBCC LOG command is used in SQL Server environments to analyze the transaction log files of a database. It provides insights into the transactions that have occurred, which is crucial for forensic analysis in the event of an incident. The syntaxDBCC LOG(<database_name>, <output_level>)allows an incident handler to specify the level of detail they wish to retrieve from the log files. When an incident handler like Adam requires the full information on each operation along with the hex dump of the current transaction row, the output parameter should be set to 4. This level of output is the most verbose, providing comprehensive details about each transaction, including a hex dump which is essential for a deep forensic analysis. It helps in understanding the exact changes made by transactions, which can be pivotal in investigating incidents involving data manipulation or other unauthorized database activities.

In the context of incident handling and response (IH&R), the term "Point of contact" refers to individuals or departments within an organization that are designated to be contacted by the IH&R team in case of an incident. These personnel are crucial for the reporting process and for obtaining the necessary permissions to proceed with incident response activities. They serve as the liaison between the incident response team and other parts of the organization, external agencies, or partners involved in the incident response process. The point of contact is responsible for facilitating communication, coordinating actions, and ensuring that the appropriate stakeholders are engaged in the response to an incident. This role is pivotal in ensuring a swift and effective response to security incidents, minimizing damage, and restoring operations.

Not enabling default administrative accounts is crucial to ensuring accountability and minimizing the risk of insider attacks by privileged users. By disabling or renaming default accounts, organizations can better track the actions performed by individual administrators, reducing the risk of unauthorized or malicious activities going unnoticed. This practice is part of a broader approach to privilege management that includes limiting permissions to the minimum necessary and monitoring the use of administrative privileges.

In Wireshark, to identify ICMP ping sweep attempts, the filtericmp.type == 8 or icmp.type ==0is used. This filter captures ICMP echo requests and echo replies, which are indicative of ping commands. Type 8 represents an echo request used when a source sends a ping, and type 0 represents an echo reply, which is the response from the target. By filtering for these ICMP types, Miko can detect a surge in ping requests across the network, which could indicate a ping sweep attempt—an exploratory activity often used by attackers to discover active hosts on a network by sending ping requests to multiple addresses.

The GPG18 and Forensic readiness planning (SPF) principles outline various guidelines to enhance an organization's readiness for forensic investigation and response. Principle 5, which suggests that organizations should adopt a scenario-based Forensic Readiness Planning approach that learns from experience gained within the business, emphasizes the importance of being prepared for a wide range of potential incidents by leveraging lessons learned from past experiences. This approach helps in continuously improving forensic readiness and response capabilities by adapting to the evolving threat landscape and organizational changes.

In the context of an incident response team, the role of an internal auditor like David includes identifying, evaluating, and reporting on information security risks and vulnerabilities within the organization. His responsibility is to ensure that the organization's security controls are effective and to identify any security loopholes that could be exploited by attackers. Once identified, he reports these vulnerabilities to management so that they can take the necessary actions to mitigate the risks. This role is critical in maintaining theorganization's overall security posture and ensuring compliance with relevant laws, regulations, and policies.

User Behavior Analytics (UBA) is a cybersecurity process or tool that utilizes machine learning, algorithms, and statistical analyses to detect potentially harmful activities within an organization's network by comparing them against established patterns of users' behavior. It is particularly effective in identifying malicious internal actors or compromised users who may be conducting activities that deviate from their normal behavior patterns, such as accessing unauthorized data or systems, excessive file downloads, or unusual login times. UBA tools can flag these activities for further investigation, often before traditional security tools detect a breach. In contrast, SOC2 compliance reports, log forwarding, and syslog configuration are important for maintaining and auditing security standards and for infrastructure monitoring, but they are not primarily focused on detecting malicious behavior based on deviations from established user behavior patterns.

Setting up a computer forensics lab involves several critical steps that need to be executed in a logical and efficient order. The correct sequence starts with planning and budgeting (2), as it is essential to understand the scope, resources, and financial commitment required for the lab. The next step involves considering the physical location and structural design (1) to ensure the lab meets operational needs and security requirements. Work area considerations (3) follow, focusing on the layout and functionality of the workspace. Human resource considerations (6) are crucial next, to ensure the lab is staffed with qualified personnel. Physical security recommendations (4) are then implemented to protect the lab and its resources. Finally, forensic lab licensing (5) ensures the lab operates within legal and regulatory frameworks.

Omnipeek is a network analyzer tool that allows for the capture and analysis of data packets transmitted across a network. It is designed to provide deep insights into network traffic, enabling users to examine various aspects of the data packets, including network protocols, ports, devices, and potential issues in network transmission. This tool would be ideal for Chandler, who is targeting the Technote organization with the intent of intercepting and analyzing network traffic to obtain sensitive organizational information. Omnipeek's capabilities in packet analysis make it suitable for such activities, offering detailed visibility into the network's operation and data flows.

Logging User IDs (D) can pose privacy concerns and may conflict with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which emphasizes the protection of personal data and privacy. Therefore, while logging details such as Timestamps, Session IDs, and Source IP addresses are essential for security auditing to track when events occur, who is initiating sessions, and from where, care must be taken with User IDs. The handling of personally identifiable information (PII) must comply with privacy laws and organizational policies to safeguard individual privacy rights.

System characterization is the process of defining the boundaries of an IT system, which includes identifying the resources, information, and functionality that constitute the system. This process is crucial for understanding the scope of the system, the data it processes, and the technology it employs. By characterizing a system, incident handlers can better understand the system's normal operations and behaviors, which is essential for identifying anomalies that may indicate a security incident. System characterization involves documenting the hardware, software, network configuration, data flows, and other critical elements of the IT environment. This foundational knowledge supports effective incident handling by providing a baseline against which suspicious activities can be compared.

Ping sweeping is a technique used in network reconnaissance to identify which IP addresses in a range are active or live. By sending ICMP echo requests ("ping") to multiple hosts and observing which ones respond, an attacker or, in this case, a red team member like Allan, can determine which systems are up and potentially vulnerable to further exploration or attack. This method is foundational for mapping the network before deploying more targeted exploits or scans.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a framework used to manage digital certificates and public-key encryption. It enables secure electronic transfer of information for a range of network activities such as e-commerce, internet banking, and confidential email. PKI is fundamental to the management of encryption keys and digital certificates, ensuring the secure exchange of data over networks and verification of identity.

In the scenario where your company sells Software as a Service (SaaS) and is hosted on the cloud using it as a Platform as a Service (PaaS), your company is responsible for eradicating malware in your customer's database. This is because, as the SaaS provider, your company manages the software and is responsible for its security and maintenance, including the databases that store customer data. While the PaaS provider is responsible for the underlying infrastructure, platform, and possibly some middleware security aspects, the application layer security, including data and application management, falls to the SaaS provider. Building management would not be involved in digital security matters, and while customers are responsible for their data, the actual software maintenance and security in a SaaS model are the provider's responsibility.

Employee monitoring tools are primarily used by employers to detect and prevent malicious insider threats. These tools can track activities such as data access, data exfiltration attempts, unauthorized actions, and other behaviors that could indicate malicious intent or pose a risk to the organization's security. While such tools may also incidentally uncover issues like lost registry keys, conspiracies, or stolen credentials, their main purpose is to safeguard against insiders who might misuse their access to harm the organization, steal data, sabotage systems, or engage in espionage.