CompTIA Server+ SK0-005 Practice Question

The correct answer is an orphaned service. An orphaned service is a service that remains on a system and continues to run even after the application it belongs to has been uninstalled. This creates a security vulnerability by leaving an unmanaged, and potentially unpatched, service listening on the network, as described in the scenario. A zombie process is a terminated process that remains in the process table and is not actively running or listening on a port. A misconfigured firewall rule could allow traffic to the open port, but the root cause of the port being open is the service itself. Improper privilege escalation is the act of a process or user gaining higher-level permissions, which is a different security issue than the one described.