ISC2 Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP) Practice Question
A SaaS provider is hit by a sustained DDoS attack that saturates bandwidth to its public marketing site and reporting dashboards. To meet contractual SLAs, the organization must keep the customer data-processing microservice reachable even if less critical components become unavailable. Which resiliency technique most directly supports this survivability requirement during the attack?
Perform weekly full backups of all application data to an off-site cold storage location.
Upgrade all external interfaces to require TLS 1.3 with strong cipher suites.
Freeze all production changes by enforcing an emergency change-control process until the attack subsides.
Apply graceful degradation that prioritizes the core data-processing service and intentionally sheds non-essential traffic.
Graceful degradation is a resiliency design approach that deliberately allows non-essential functions to slow down or fail so that mission-critical services retain the resources they need to remain operational. In a DDoS scenario, isolating and prioritizing the core data-processing microservice while letting marketing pages or analytics dashboards drop excess traffic preserves the essential function. Routine backups, stricter change control, or upgrading to TLS 1.3 all improve overall security or recovery capabilities, but they do not ensure that critical services stay alive in real time when resources are under active attack.
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ISC2 Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP)