Free Practice Questions for ISC CCSP Exam

The SOC 3 report is more of an attestation than a full evaluation of controls associated with a service provider.

Policy drives all programs and functions in the organization; the organization should not conduct any operations that don’t have a policy governing them. Penalties may or may not be an element of policy, and severity depends on the topic. Multifactor authentication and homomorphic encryption are red herrings here.

According to “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing,” in PaaS, “the capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment.

In legal terms, when “data processor” is defined, it refers to anyone who stores, handles, moves, or manipulates data on behalf of the data owner or controller. In the cloud computing realm, this is the cloud provider.

When we gather information about business requirements, we need to do a complete inventory, receive accurate valuation of assets (usually from the owners of those assets), and assess criticality; this collection of information does not tell us, objectively, how useful an asset is, however.

All of these answers are actually correct, but A is the best answer, because it is the most general, includes the others, and is therefore the optimum choice. This is a good example of the type of question that can appear on the actual exam.

A process is an administrative control; sometimes, the process includes elements of other types of controls (in this case, the access control mechanism might be a technical control, or it might be a physical control), but the process itself is administrative. Keystroke logging is a technical control (or an attack, if done for malicious purposes, and not for auditing); door locks are a physical control; and biometric authentication is a technological control.

Explanation

Accepted is not a risk acceptance category. The risk acceptance categories are minimal, low, moderate, high, and critical.

The biggest challenge for properly using any programmatic tools in data discovery is the actual quality of the data, including the data being uniform and well structured, labels being properly applied, and other similar facets. Without data being organized in such a manner, it is extremely difficult for programmatic tools to automatically synthesize and make determinations from it. The overall quantity of data, as well as the number of sources, does not pose an enormous challenge for data discovery programs, other than requiring a longer time to process the data. The language of the data itself should not matter to a program that is designed to process it, as long as the data is well formed and consistent.

PaaS should have the following key capabilities and characteristics:

- Support multiple languages and frameworks: PaaS should support multiple programming languages and frameworks, thus enabling the developers to code in whichever language they prefer or the design requirements specify. In recent times, significant strides and efforts have been taken to ensure that open source stacks are both supported and utilized, thus reducing “lock-in” or issues with interoperability when changing CSPs.

- Multiple hosting environments: The ability to support a wide variety of underlying hosting environments for the platform is key to meeting customer requirements and demands. Whether public cloud, private cloud, local hypervisor, or bare metal, supporting multiple hosting environments allows the application developer or administrator to migrate the application when and as required. This can also be used as a form of contingency and continuity and to ensure the ongoing availability.

- Flexibility: Traditionally, platform providers provided features and requirements that they felt suited the client requirements, along with what suited their service offering and positioned them as the provider of choice, with limited options for the customers to move easily. This has changed drastically, with extensibility and flexibility now afforded to meeting the needs and requirements of developer audiences. This has been heavily influenced by open source, which allows relevant plug-ins to be quickly and efficiently introduced into the platform.

- Allow choice and reduce lock-in: PaaS learns from previous horror stories and restrictions, proprietary meant red tape, barriers, and restrictions on what developers could do when it came to migration or adding features and components to the platform. Although the requirement to code to specific APIs was made available by the providers, they could run their apps in various environments based on commonality and standard API structures, ensuring a level of consistency and quality for customers and users.

- Ability to auto-scale: This enables the application to seamlessly scale up and down as required to accommodate the cyclical demands of users. The platform will allocate resources and assign these to the application as required. This serves as a key driver for any seasonal organizations that experience spikes and drops in usage.

We don’t have physical ownership, control, or even access to the devices holding the data, so physical destruction, including melting, is not an option. Overwriting is a possibility, but it is complicated by the difficulty of locating all the sectors and storage areas that might have contained our data, and by the likelihood that constant backups in the cloud increase the chance we’ll miss something as it’s being overwritten. Cryptoshredding is the only reasonable alternative. Cold fusion is a red herring.

Information rights management (IRM) technologies allow security controls and policies to be enforced on a data object regardless of where it resides. They also allow for extended controls such as expirations and copying restrictions, which are not available through traditional control mechanisms. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), virtual private network (VPN), and Transport Layer Security (TLS) are all technologies and protocols that are widely used with cloud implementations for secure access to systems and services and likely will be used in conjunction with other object data protection strategies.

An intrusion prevention system (IPS) can inspect traffic and detect any suspicious traffic based on a variety of factors, but it can also actively block such traffic. Although an IDS can detect the same types of suspicious traffic as an IPS, it is only design to alert, not to block. A firewall is only concerned with IP addresses, ports, and protocols; it cannot be used for the signature-based detection of traffic. A proxy can limit or direct traffic based on more extensive factors than a network firewall can, but it's not capable of using the same signature detection rules as an IPS.

A firewall is a technological control. The safe and extinguisher are physical controls and firing someone is an administrative control.

BCDR planning tends to focus so much on the failing over of services in the case of a disaster that recovery back to primary hosting after the disaster is often overlooked. In many instances, this can be just as complex a process as failing over, if not more so. Availability of staff, capacity at the BCDR site, and change management processes are typically integral to BCDR plans and are common components of them.