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This free CompTIA Security+ practice exam covers basic knowledge in the field of Information Systems Security. To pass the CompTIA Security+ exam, a candidate will need knowledge in Network Security, Compliance and operational security, threats and vulnerabilities, access control and identity management, cryptography, and application, data, and host security. This free practice test will test your knowledge and readiness for the CompTIA Security+ Examination.
The CEO of the company you work for has been receiving emails that appear to be from the local IT department. The emails address her user account, and instruct her to click a link in order to verify her password. Which type of attack is this?
Whaling is a phishing attempt that specifically targets high level employees or workers.
IPSec in tunnel mode encrypts a packet and attaches new headers. IPSec in transport mode uses the original headers, encrypting only the packet's data (payload).
In computing, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts the packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network It is used in virtual private networks (VPNs) IPsec includes protocols for establishing mutual authentication between agents at the beginning of a session and negotiation of cryptographic keys to use during the session IPsec can protect data flows between a pair of hosts (host-to-host), between a pair of security gateways (network-to-network), or between a security gateway and a host (network-to-host) IPsec uses cryptographic security services to protect communications over Internet Protocol (IP) networks
IPSec - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaYour supervisor asks you to implement a new KDC. Which of the following protocols is your supervisor planning to implement?
Kerberos is a type of Key Distribution Center (KDC) that supplies session tickets and session keys to authorized users on an Active Directory domain.
Kerberos () is a computer-network authentication protocol that works on the basis of tickets to allow nodes communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. Its designers aimed it primarily at a client–server model, and it provides mutual authentication—both the user and the server verify each other's identity. Kerberos protocol messages are protected against eavesdropping and replay attacks. Kerberos builds on symmetric-key cryptography and requires a trusted third party, and optionally may use public-key cryptography during certain phases of authentication. Kerberos uses UDP port 88 by default. The protocol was named after the character Kerberos (or Cerberus) from Greek mythology, the ferocious three-headed guard dog of Hades.
Kerberos (protocol) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaA Cognitive Password is a password used as a response to a question that pertains specifically to the user. Secret questions/answers used to reset passwords are cognitive passwords. (eg. What is your favorite food?) Social Media can be used to obtain information about a user and allow cognitive passwords to be easily guessed.
A cognitive password is a form of knowledge-based authentication that requires a user to answer a question, presumably something they intrinsically know, to verify their identity. Cognitive password systems have been researched for many years and are currently commonly used as a form of secondary access. They were developed to overcome the common memorability vs. strength problem that exists with the traditional password. Cognitive passwords, when compared to other password systems, can be measured through the usage of a memorability vs. guessability ratio.
Cognitive password - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaYour supervisor asked you to open the necessary ports for a 'secure telnet' What ports should you open?
Your supervisor is most likely describing SSH (Secure Socket Shell) which is protocol that allows secure access to servers. Functionally SSH is very similar to telnet but is encrypted for added security. SSH can also be used to encrypt any text based communication, for example SSH-FTP is FTP using SSH for encryption.
The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH applications are based on a client–server architecture, connecting an SSH client instance with an SSH server. SSH operates as a layered protocol suite comprising three principal hierarchical components: the transport layer provides server authentication, confidentiality, and integrity; the user authentication protocol validates the user to the server; and the connection protocol multiplexes the encrypted tunnel into multiple logical communication channels.SSH was designed on Unix-like operating systems, as a replacement for Telnet and for unsecured remote Unix shell protocols, such as the Berkeley Remote Shell (rsh) and the related rlogin and rexec protocols, which all use insecure, plaintext transmission of authentication tokens. SSH was first designed in 1995 by Finnish computer scientist Tatu Ylönen. Subsequent development of the protocol suite proceeded in several developer groups, producing several variants of implementation. The protocol specification distinguishes two major versions, referred to as SSH-1 and SSH-2. The most commonly implemented software stack is OpenSSH, released in 1999 as open-source software by the OpenBSD developers. Implementations are distributed for all types of operating systems in common use, including embedded systems.
Secure_Shell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaA mantrap is a device designed to physically trap a person in an enclosed area. Typically, this is a set of doors that cannot be opened simultaneously. The idea is that this will help to prevent tailgating, as the intruder will be momentarily trapped inside the same room as the authorized user.
A mantrap, security mantrap portal, airlock, sally port or access control vestibule is a physical security access control system comprising a small space with two sets of interlocking doors, such that the first set of doors must close before the second set opens. Airlocks have a very similar design, allowing free ingress and egress while also restricting airflow. In a manual mantrap, a guard locks and unlocks each door in sequence. An intercom and/or video camera are often used to allow the guard to control the trap from a remote location. In an automatic mantrap, identification may be required for each door, sometimes even different measures for each door. For example, a key may open the first door, but a personal identification number entered on a number pad opens the second. Other methods of opening doors include proximity cards or biometric devices such as fingerprint readers or iris recognition scans. Time of Flight sensors are used in high security environments. Metal detectors are often built in to prevent the entrance of people carrying weapons. This use is particularly frequent in banks and jewelry shops. Turnkey, installed systems are provided by some suppliers due to need for technically trained installers. Fire codes require that automatic mantraps allow exit from the intermediate space while denying access to a secure space such as a data center or research lab. A manually-operated mantrap may allow a guard to lock both doors, trapping a suspect between the doors for questioning or detainment.
Mantrap_(access_control) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaA Trojan Horse is a malicious program that disguises itself as a useful, harmless program. For example, a free instant messaging program that records keyboard input to obtain passwords, credit card numbers, etc would be considered a Trojan Horse.
In computing, a Trojan horse is any malware that misleads users of its true intent by disguising itself as a standard program. The term is derived from the ancient Greek story of the deceptive Trojan Horse that led to the fall of the city of Troy.Trojans are generally spread by some form of social engineering. For example, where a user is duped into executing an email attachment disguised to appear innocuous (e.g., a routine form to be filled in), or by clicking on a fake advertisement on social media or anywhere else. Although their payload can be anything, many modern forms act as a backdoor, contacting a controller who can then have unauthorized access to the affected computer. Ransomware attacks are often carried out using a Trojan. Unlike computer viruses and worms, Trojans generally do not attempt to inject themselves into other files or otherwise propagate themselves.
Trojan_horse_(computing) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaDENY UDP ANY SERVER eq 67 is the proper way of formatting an Access Control List (ACL) rule. The rule states that the firewall should deny any packet using UDP equal to port 67. You may also use the protocol name instead of port like so, DENY TCP ANY SERVER EQ TELNET.
A system administrator will generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) which will contain a public key. The CSR will be sent to a Certificate Authority (CA) which will issue a certificate for the administrator to use.
In cryptography, a certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is an entity that stores, signs, and issues digital certificates. A digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate. This allows others (relying parties) to rely upon signatures or on assertions made about the private key that corresponds to the certified public key. A CA acts as a trusted third party—trusted both by the subject (owner) of the certificate and by the party relying upon the certificate. The format of these certificates is specified by the X.509 or EMV standard. One particularly common use for certificate authorities is to sign certificates used in HTTPS, the secure browsing protocol for the World Wide Web. Another common use is in issuing identity cards by national governments for use in electronically signing documents.
Certificate_authority - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaWhat will best help you if you need to prevent cross-site scripting on your companies intranet webpage?
When accepting user information into a system, you should use input validation to filter and validate the data provided. This helps ensures the system is not allowing malicious code access to internal software, databases and confidential information.
In computer science, data validation is the process of ensuring data has undergone data cleansing to confirm they have data quality, that is, that they are both correct and useful. It uses routines, often called "validation rules", "validation constraints", or "check routines", that check for correctness, meaningfulness, and security of data that are input to the system. The rules may be implemented through the automated facilities of a data dictionary, or by the inclusion of explicit application program validation logic of the computer and its application. This is distinct from formal verification, which attempts to prove or disprove the correctness of algorithms for implementing a specification or property.
Data validation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaYou are a network administrator for a large business. Recently, you've noticed a large amount of unusual traffic and you suspect they are SYN attacks. What choice will help you defend against these attacks?
Flood Guards defend against DoS, DDoS, SYN floods, and other flooding type network attacks.
A SYN flood is a form of denial-of-service attack in which an attacker rapidly initiates a connection to a server without finalizing the connection. The server has to spend resources waiting for half-opened connections, which can consume enough resources to make the system unresponsive to legitimate traffic.The packet that the attacker sends is the SYN packet, a part of TCP's three-way handshake used to establish a connection.
SYN_flood - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaA Black Box test examines the workings of a program or system, without reviewing the code of the program itself.
Black-box testing is a method of software testing that examines the functionality of an application without peering into its internal structures or workings. This method of test can be applied virtually to every level of software testing: unit, integration, system and acceptance. It is sometimes referred to as specification-based testing.
Black-box_testing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaAfter a power outage, which of the following documents contains detailed information on the order in which the system should be restored?
A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a part of a Business Continuity Plan. A DRP defines the recovery procedures following a power outage, natural disaster, large data loss, etc.
Given organizations' increasing dependency on information technology to run their operations, Business continuity planning covers the entire organization, and Disaster recovery focuses on IT Auditing of documents covering an organization's business continuity and disaster recovery plans provides a third-party validation to stakeholders that the documentation is complete and does not contain material misrepresentations Lack of completeness can result in overlooking secondary effects, such as when vastly increased work-at-home overloads incoming recovery site telecommunications capacity, and the bi-weekly payroll that was not critical within the first 48 hours is now causing perceived problems in ever recovering, complicated by governmental and possibly union reaction
Disaster recovery plan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaHyper Text Transfer Protocol - Secure (HTTPS) uses TCP 443 as it's default protocol/port. HTTP (non-secure) uses TCP 80.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It uses encryption for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protocol is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or, formerly, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). The protocol is therefore also referred to as HTTP over TLS, or HTTP over SSL. The principal motivations for HTTPS are authentication of the accessed website and protection of the privacy and integrity of the exchanged data while it is in transit. It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks, and the bidirectional block cipher encryption of communications between a client and server protects the communications against eavesdropping and tampering. The authentication aspect of HTTPS requires a trusted third party to sign server-side digital certificates. This was historically an expensive operation, which meant fully authenticated HTTPS connections were usually found only on secured payment transaction services and other secured corporate information systems on the World Wide Web. In 2016, a campaign by the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the support of web browser developers led to the protocol becoming more prevalent. HTTPS is now used more often by web users than the original, non-secure HTTP, primarily to protect page authenticity on all types of websites, secure accounts, and keep user communications, identity, and web browsing private.
HTTPS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaYou're the admin of a large corporation's production computer system, with many users. How often should you review and audit your users rights?
Reviewing user rights should happen once a year. It is too lengthy of a process to do to often, but still needs to be done.
A Hardware Security Module (HSM) is a physical device used to manage digital signatures and certificates and keys.
A hardware security module (HSM) is a physical computing device that safeguards and manages secrets (most importantly digital keys), performs encryption and decryption functions for digital signatures, strong authentication and other cryptographic functions. These modules traditionally come in the form of a plug-in card or an external device that attaches directly to a computer or network server. A hardware security module contains one or more secure cryptoprocessor chips.
Hardware_security_module - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaSingle Sign On (SSO) describes the process of allowing a single set of credentials to validate a user across multiple independent systems. This is very common among Windows and Microsoft products, for example using Active Directory credentials on a SharePoint site collection.
Single sign-on (SSO) is an authentication scheme that allows a user to log in with a single ID to any of several related, yet independent, software systems. True single sign-on allows the user to log in once and access services without re-entering authentication factors. It should not be confused with same-sign on (Directory Server Authentication), often accomplished by using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and stored LDAP databases on (directory) servers.A simple version of single sign-on can be achieved over IP networks using cookies but only if the sites share a common DNS parent domain.For clarity, a distinction is made between Directory Server Authentication (same-sign on) and single sign-on: Directory Server Authentication refers to systems requiring authentication for each application but using the same credentials from a directory server, whereas single sign-on refers to systems where a single authentication provides access to multiple applications by passing the authentication token seamlessly to configured applications. Conversely, single sign-off or single log-out (SLO) is the property whereby a single action of signing out terminates access to multiple software systems. As different applications and resources support different authentication mechanisms, single sign-on must internally store the credentials used for initial authentication and translate them to the credentials required for the different mechanisms. Other shared authentication schemes, such as OpenID and OpenID Connect, offer other services that may require users to make choices during a sign-on to a resource, but can be configured for single sign-on if those other services (such as user consent) are disabled. An increasing number of
Single_sign-on - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaYour organization has a web server that must be accessible by external users. Which of the following options is the best location for the server?
A Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), sometimes called a Perimeter Network , is a separate area of a network designated for externally facing systems and servers. It is the logical place for a web server that requires external access.
In computer security, a DMZ or demilitarized zone (sometimes referred to as a perimeter network or screened subnet) is a physical or logical subnetwork that contains and exposes an organization's external-facing services to an untrusted, usually larger, network such as the Internet. The purpose of a DMZ is to add an additional layer of security to an organization's local area network (LAN): an external network node can access only what is exposed in the DMZ, while the rest of the organization's network is protected behind a firewall. The DMZ functions as a small, isolated network positioned between the Internet and the private network.This is not to be confused with a DMZ host, a feature present in some home routers which frequently differs greatly from an ordinary DMZ. The name is from the term demilitarized zone, an area between states in which military operations are not permitted.
DMZ_(computing) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaAs a security administrator, you decide to force expiration of all user passwords. Which of the following best supports this reasoning?
By force expiring all passwords, every network user will be required to change their password at next login. This is a good method to reset all passwords if you suspect some have been obtained maliciously.
A password, sometimes called a passcode (for example in Apple devices), is secret data, typically a string of characters, usually used to confirm a user's identity. Traditionally, passwords were expected to be memorized, but the large number of password-protected services that a typical individual accesses can make memorization of unique passwords for each service impractical. Using the terminology of the NIST Digital Identity Guidelines, the secret is held by a party called the claimant while the party verifying the identity of the claimant is called the verifier. When the claimant successfully demonstrates knowledge of the password to the verifier through an established authentication protocol, the verifier is able to infer the claimant's identity. In general, a password is an arbitrary string of characters including letters, digits, or other symbols. If the permissible characters are constrained to be numeric, the corresponding secret is sometimes called a personal identification number (PIN). Despite its name, a password does not need to be an actual word; indeed, a non-word (in the dictionary sense) may be harder to guess, which is a desirable property of passwords. A memorized secret consisting of a sequence of words or other text separated by spaces is sometimes called a passphrase. A passphrase is similar to a password in usage, but the former is generally longer for added security.
Password - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaA zero-day attack is an attack that is still unknown to the vendor, software developer, and/or system administrators. It is an attack that is newly discovered by malicious users.
A zero-day (also known as a 0-day) is a computer-software vulnerability previously unknown to those who should be interested in its mitigation, like the vendor of the target software. Until the vulnerability is mitigated, hackers can exploit it to adversely affect programs, data, additional computers or a network. An exploit taking advantage of a zero-day is called a zero-day exploit, or zero-day attack. The term "zero-day" originally referred to the number of days since a new piece of software was released to the public, so "zero-day software" was obtained by hacking into a developer's computer before release. Eventually the term was applied to the vulnerabilities that allowed this hacking, and to the number of days that the vendor has had to fix them. Once the vendors learn of the vulnerability, they will usually create patches or advise workarounds to mitigate it. The more recently that the vendor has become aware of the vulnerability, the more likely it is that no fix or mitigation has been developed. Once a fix is developed, the chance of the exploit succeeding decreases as more users apply the fix over time. For zero-day exploits, unless the vulnerability is inadvertently fixed, such as by an unrelated update that happens to fix the vulnerability, the probability that a user has applied a vendor-supplied patch that fixes the problem is zero, so the exploit would remain available. Zero-day attacks are a severe threat.
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