Free Practice Questions for CompTIA CS0-002 Exam

The correct answer is B. Extract the server’s system timeline, verifying hashes and network connections during a certain time frame. A system timeline is a chronological record of the events and activities that occurred on a system, such as file creation, modification, or deletion, process execution, registry changes, or network connections. A system timeline can help an analyst to understand how an attacker compromised a server by showing the sequence of actions and artifacts left by the attacker. An analyst can also verify the hashes of the files and processes involved in the compromise and compare them with known malware signatures or databases. Additionally, an analyst can check the network connections made by the server during the compromise and identify the source and destination IP addresses, ports, and protocols used by the attacker1.

The communication plan is an important part of incident response, as it outlines how and when information about the incident should be shared with external entities.

A communication plan is a set of procedures and protocols that define how an organization should communicate with external entities during times of emergency or security incident. The plan typically outlines how and when information about the incident should be shared, and ensures that any relevant stakeholders are informed of the incident in a timely manner. It also serves as a guide for determining what information to share with outside parties. Here is a link to an article from CompTIA's website about the importance of a communication plan for incident response for your reference: https://www.comptia.org/content/incident-response-communication-plan

Third-party assessment. A third-party assessment is a process that explores the risk posed to your organization by third-party vendors along the supply chain. This process evaluates the likelihood that your business is exposed to different third-party risks such as compliance risk, operational risk, financial risk, security risk and cybersecurity risk1.

A third-party assessment can help the CSO gain a better understanding of the prospective company’s cybersecurity posture by:

Providing an independent and objective evaluation of the vendor’s security policies, controls, and practices.

Identifying any gaps or weaknesses in the vendor’s security posture that could compromise your organization’s data, systems, or reputation.

Recommending actions or improvements to mitigate or reduce the identified risks and enhance the vendor’s security performance.

A third-party assessment can also help the CSO identify risks in the supply chain by:

Mapping and tracing the data flow and dependencies among the vendor and its subcontractors or suppliers.

Assessing how the vendor and its subcontractors or suppliers safeguard data and comply with relevant regulations and standards.

Detecting any signs of malicious or negligent behavior by the vendor or its subcontractors or suppliers that could harm your organization or its customers.

This is the primary reason why financial institutions may share up-to-date threat intelligence information on a secure feed that is dedicated to their sector. Threat intelligence is the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information about current or potential threats to an organization’s assets, operations, or reputation. By sharing threat intelligence information, financial institutions can benefit from the collective knowledge, experience, and capabilities of their peers and partners, and enhance their situational awareness, threat detection, and incident response. Sharing threat intelligence information can also help financial institutions identify common attack patterns, trends, and techniques, as well as the malicious actors and indicators of compromise (IOCs) associated with them. IOCs are pieces of forensic data that can be used to identify potentially malicious activities or intrusions on a network or system, such as IP addresses, domains, URLs, file hashes, or email addresses

Data masking is a technique that replaces sensitive data with fictitious but realistic data, thus preventing unauthorized access to the original data. Reencrypting the data sets using AES-256 would provide a stronger level of encryption than Triple DES, which has been deprecated by NIST due to its vulnerability to attacks12

References: 1 What Is AES-256 Encryption? How Does It Work? - MUO 2 Archived NIST Technical Series Publication

Port 22 is the default port for Secure Shell (SSH), which is a protocol that allows remote access and administration of a server. If the server is dedicated to one function (web server) and unneeded services are disabled, then port 22 should be closed, because SSH is not necessary for a web server and could pose a security risk if exploited. Port 80, port 443, and port 1433 are ports that are needed for a web server, because they are used for HTTP, HTTPS, and SQL Server respectively. Reference: https://www.ssh.com/ssh/port

A memory dump is a snapshot of the contents of the random access memory (RAM) of a system at a given point in time. A memory dump can provide valuable information for a forensic examiner who is investigating possible malware compromise on an active endpoint device, such as running processes, open files, network connections, encryption keys, or malware artifacts. Creating a memory dump from RAM should be the first step that the examiner performs, as it preserves the volatile data that could be lost or altered if the system is powered off or rebooted1.

The vulnerability assessment report shows that the device is using SSLv3, which is an outdated and insecure protocol for secure communication over a network. SSLv3 has several known vulnerabilities, such as POODLE, that allow attackers to decrypt or modify the encrypted data. To remediate this issue, the analyst should recommend reconfiguring the device to support only connections leveraging TLSv1.2, which is a newer and more secure protocol that provides stronger encryption, authentication, and integrity protection for the data transmitted over the network.

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. It is an email authentication protocol that helps prevent spoofing and phishing attacks by verifying that the sender’s domain matches the domain in the email header. DMARC also provides a way for domain owners to specify how receivers should handle unauthenticated messages from their domain1

This command would most likely indicate if the email attachment is malicious, as it would display any JavaScript code embedded in the PDF file. JavaScript code can be used by attackers to execute malicious commands or scripts on the victim’s system when the PDF file is opened1. The strings command extracts the printable characters from a binary file, such as a PDF file, and the grep -i “