CompTIA Security+ SY0-701 Practice Question

The specific behaviors outlined – notably the unanticipated system slowdowns, printing of documents without user commands, and unwarranted system restarts – are classic manifestations of a virus infection on a computer. A virus typically engages system resources, causing performance degradation, and can execute unauthorized tasks such as issuing print jobs or rebooting the computer. The cross-departmental propagation suggests the virus could be disseminating through mediums such as network drives, emails, or compromised files. A simple misconfiguration is unlikely to result in this diverse set of symptoms manifesting similarly across multiple disparate departments. While hardware failure can cause system issues, it would not lead to network-wide symptoms. Script kiddie activities, typically representing low-skill-level threats often using pre-made tools, would not commonly result in the widespread and uniform symptoms seen here.