CISSP Practice Questions (501–520)

Answer: A

Rationale: The interoperability across multiple IM vendors complicates enforcing consistent encryption and filtering policies, increasing data leakage and malware risk.

Answer: A

Rationale: In a known-plaintext attack, the attacker has samples of both plaintext and ciphertext and uses them to deduce the encryption key or algorithm patterns.

Answer: B

Rationale: Budgets must ensure funding aligns with risk management priorities, balancing protection against potential losses realistically and cost-effectively.

Answer: B

Rationale: A warm site has infrastructure ready (power, environment, connectivity) but lacks up-to-date systems and data — offering a balance between cost and recovery speed.

Answer: D

Rationale: ISO 27001 requires retaining the right to audit outsourced processes to ensure controls remain effective and compliant.

Answer: D

Rationale: Digital signatures rely on asymmetric key pairs, allowing verification of the sender’s identity and ensuring non-repudiation.

Answer: A

Rationale: Implementing two-factor authentication (2FA) adds a critical layer of identity assurance to SSO, minimizing the risk from compromised credentials.

Answer: A

Rationale: A honeypot is designed to lure attackers and record unknown exploits, making it the best method for collecting data on zero-day attacks.

Answer: C

Rationale: The dark web can reveal data from previous breaches or exposed credentials — providing valuable threat intelligence for targeted penetration testing.

Answer: A

Rationale: Skipping QA steps bypasses the change management process, which ensures that all modifications are tested, reviewed, and approved before deployment.

Answer: A

Rationale: Proper information classification considers value, sensitivity, and legal obligations to determine protection requirements aligned with business risk.

Answer: C

Rationale: The ISCM strategy must be defined first — setting risk tolerance and priorities ensures the program aligns with organizational objectives.

Answer: A

Rationale: RAID 1 (mirroring) provides the highest redundancy and fault tolerance because all data is duplicated on another disk. RAID 5 provides parity-based redundancy but is less fault-tolerant.

Answer: C

Rationale: SDN centralizes control, allowing consistent security policies and faster incident responses across the network infrastructure.

Answer: C

Rationale: Network segmentation isolates compromised systems, limiting the intruder’s lateral movement while maintaining partial network operations.

Answer: C

Rationale: Activities such as log review and code inspection are forms of security control testing, ensuring controls work as intended.

Answer: B

Rationale: Data validation ensures input integrity, protecting against tampering and injection attacks — critical in financial applications.

Answer: C

Rationale: SCADA/ICS systems are often located in physically restricted or remote environments, making system access the most difficult aspect of the investigation.

Answer: A

Rationale: Each managed entity in a CMDB — hardware, software, or documentation — is referred to as a Configuration Item (CI).

Answer: A

Rationale: SDN supports policy-based network control and agility, crucial for scaling and managing cloud infrastructures dynamically.