Security Operations Questions And Answers For CISSP Interview

Introduction

Security operations secure the company's digital world and keep everything running smoothly. It involves many intelligent strategies to deal with cyber threats and secure essential data and systems. It also works as an emergency responder and prioritizes keeping company data safe. In a nutshell, security operations ensure that the digital fortress of a company stays solid and resilient. 

Learn the most asked interview questions and answers on Security Operations in CISSP.

Q1: What’s the Fundamental Idea in Keeping Information Secure That Suggests Giving People Access Only to What They Need for Their Jobs?

Ans: The core concept in information security is the "principle of least privilege" or "minimum necessary access." This means individuals should only have access to what's strictly essential for their roles. 

Sticking to this principle is vital for solid security, whether you call it the least privilege or minimum necessary access. It forms the foundation for administrative security controls, ensuring that individuals only have access to what's crucial for their tasks. This way, potential security risks are minimized, and a more secure environment is established.

Q2: What Strategy Can Organizations Use to Reduce the Risk of Individuals Having Excessive Privileges, Especially in Critical Functions, and Handle Potential Disruptions Like Unexpected Absences?

Ans: To mitigate risks tied to individuals holding too many privileges, organizations employ a "Rotation of Duties" or "Job Rotation." This approach ensures that no single person continuously handles critical functions. By preventing uninterrupted control, it addresses various issues, including scenarios like an unexpected absence (the "hit by a bus" situation). 

If the loss of an individual would significantly impact operations, job rotation provides additional coverage for their responsibilities, offering a practical way to handle potential disruptions and maintain operational stability.

Q3: What Administrative Control Do Organizations Commonly Use to Assess Individuals’ Backgrounds, Particularly During Hiring?

Ans: Organizations frequently utilize background checks, also referred to as background investigations or pre-employment screening, as a standard administrative control. Typically conducted as part of the pre-employment screening process, these checks vary in depth. 

While some organizations perform basic checks, including criminal record verification, others delve deeper by confirming employment history, obtaining credit reports, and, in some instances, requiring drug screening. 

This comprehensive approach ensures a thorough assessment of individuals' backgrounds, aiding organizations in making informed decisions during the hiring process.

Q4: What Are the Four Basic Types of Disk-Based Forensic Data, and How Do They Contribute to the Analysis of Digital Information?

Ans: The four fundamental types of disk-based forensic data are:

• Allocated space: Marked portions actively containing data on a disk partition.
• Unallocated space: Regions on a disk partition without active data, including never-allocated portions and those marked unallocated after file deletion.
• Slack space is extra space within clusters (minimum file system allocation size) that may contain old data or be exploited by attackers to conceal information.
• "Bad" blocks/clusters/sectors: Sectors with physical defects ignored by the operating system that attackers could intentionally use to hide data. These types aid forensic analysts in unraveling digital information during investigations.

Q5: What Is Network Forensics’ Primary Focus, and How Does It Differ From Network Intrusion Detection?

Ans: Network forensics primarily focuses on examining data in motion, specifically geared towards gathering evidence for legal purposes and admissibility in court. Emphasizing data integrity and the legality of the collection process, network forensics differs from network intrusion detection, which is operationally oriented. 

Network forensics recognizes that evidence often traverses networks and may not be stored on a hard drive, expanding the scope beyond traditional file recovery and file system analysis associated with computer forensics. This legal-centric approach ensures a comprehensive understanding of digital activities for investigative purposes.

Q6: What Actions Are Typically Taken During the Response Phase of Incident Response, and Why Is Capturing Volatile Data Before Shutting Down a System Considered a Significant Trend?

Ans: During the response phase of incident response, the incident response team engages with affected systems to prevent further damage. Actions may include isolating traffic, powering off the system, or taking it off the network to control the incident's scope and severity. 

Notably, this phase involves creating a binary forensic backup of systems, capturing data bit by bit. An essential trend is capturing volatile data before shutting down a system. This ensures critical information is preserved, reflecting the modern approach where organizations prioritize capturing real-time data before any potential loss during the shutdown process.

Q7: What Is the Primary Objective of the Mitigation Phase (Eradication) in Incident Response, and Why Must Organizations Understand the Root Cause of an Incident During This Phase?

Ans: The primary goal of the mitigation phase (eradication) in incident response is to comprehend the incident's cause, enabling the reliable cleaning and eventual restoration of the system in the recovery phase. To achieve successful recovery, understanding the incident's cause is imperative. 

This knowledge ensures that affected systems can be restored to a known good state without significant risk of compromise persisting. It's a common misconception for organizations to remove apparent malware, thinking it's sufficient. 

However, the mitigation phase emphasizes the need to identify the root cause, as the visible malware may merely be a symptom, leaving the underlying cause undiscovered.

Q8: What Are the Four Types of Events in Intrusion Detection Systems (Ids), and How Can They Be Illustrated Using the Examples of the Conficker Worm and a User Surfing the Web?

Ans: In Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), there are four event types:

• True Positive: NIDS alerts correctly when the Conficker worm spreads on a trusted network.
• True Negative: NIDS remains silent when users surf the Web to an allowed site.
• False Positive: NIDS incorrectly alerts when a user surfs the Web to an allowed site.
• False Negative: NIDS remains silent when the Conficker worm spreads on a trusted network.

These events are exemplified through scenarios involving the Conficker worm and a user's web surfing, illustrating the accuracy or inaccuracy of IDS alerts in different situations.

Q9: Why Is Defense-In-Depth Essential for Organizations, and How Does Endpoint Security Contribute to This Approach, Particularly When Traditional Network-Centric Measures Are Bypassed?

Ans: Defense in depth is crucial for organizations to enhance security, and endpoint security plays a pivotal role in this strategy. Despite employing perimeter firewalls, IDS, and other network-centric measures, the potential compromise of an endpoint necessitates additional protective layers. 

Endpoints are frequent targets of attacks, making it imperative to have preventive and detective capabilities directly on the endpoints. Modern endpoint security suites go beyond traditional antivirus software, encompassing a range of products. 

Doing so provides an additional layer of security measures, extending the defensive depth beyond the gateway or network perimeter, ensuring a more comprehensive and robust security posture.

Q10: What Is Application Whitelisting’s Primary Focus in Endpoint Security, and What Are the Potential Weaknesses Associated With This Approach?

Ans: Application whitelisting in endpoint security's primary focus is to proactively identify safe binaries for execution on a system. Establishing a baseline of known-good binaries prevents any unauthorized binary from running. However, a weakness arises when an attacker exploits a "known good" binary for malicious purposes.

Whitelisting techniques include allowing binaries based on factors such as signing via a trusted code signing digital certificate, matching a known good cryptographic hash, or having a trusted full path and name. The last approach is the weakest, as attackers can replace a trusted binary with a malicious version.

Despite this weakness, application whitelisting is deemed superior to application blacklisting, where known bad binaries are banned, offering a proactive and more secure approach to endpoint security.

Q11: What Is the Purpose of Honeypots in the Context of Information Security, and Why Is It Significant for Internal Honeypots to Remain Uncompromised?

Ans: Honeypots attract attackers, enabling information security researchers and network defenders to analyze network-based attacks. These systems are designed solely for research purposes and have no production value.

Internal honeypots are particularly valuable as they provide high-value warnings of internal malware or attackers. They must remain uncompromised. If compromised, they suggest a failure in preventive and detective controls like firewalls and IDSs. While internet-facing honeypots are often compromised, internal ones should never be, indicating the effectiveness of internal security measures.

Two types of honeypots are low-interaction, simulating systems through scripted network actions, and high-interaction, running actual operating systems in hardware or virtualized environments.

Q12: What Distinguishes Honeynets From Traditional Honeypots, and How Do Honeypots Contribute to Organizations in Terms of Discovering Adversary Activity?

Ans: Honeynets stand out from traditional honeypots as they constitute a network encompassing multiple systems and services instead of a single system or instrumented decoy services. Unlike traditional honeypots, honeynets involve an entire network devoid of legitimate devices.

Similar to standard honeypots, the primary goal of a honeynet is to enable organizations to discover adversary activity. By simulating an entire network, honeynets offer a broader scope for detecting malicious behavior and tactics employed by adversaries. 

Additionally, honeynets may include a Honeywell (honeynet firewall) to minimize the risk of the honeynet being exploited to attack other systems, adding a layer of protection to the overall network security posture.

Q13: What Is the Primary Goal of a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (Raid), and How Does It Aim to Mitigate the Risk Associated With Hard Disk Failures?

Ans: The primary goal of a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) is to mitigate the risk associated with hard disk failures. While a single full backup tape may be sufficient for recovery in the event of a hard disk failure, the time required for recovery can surpass the acceptable recovery time set by the organization, especially when dealing with a large amount of data.

RAID achieves this goal through various RAID levels, each representing different approaches to disk array configurations. These configurations differ in terms of the number of disks needed to meet their goals and their capabilities in providing reliability and performance advantages. 

By distributing data across multiple disks and incorporating redundancy, RAID enhances fault tolerance and ensures continued operation even when individual disks fail.

Q14: Why is a clear understanding of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning essential for information security professionals?

Ans: A clear understanding of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning (BCP and DRP) is essential for information security professionals, especially for CISSP® candidates. This understanding includes grasping the distinct concepts of BCP and DRP and recognizing their interrelationship.

Analyzing various potential disasters that can threaten an organization is a critical element. Information security professionals should appreciate the disruptive events that could trigger a response in Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity. 

Equally important is assessing the likelihood or occurrence associated with these potential disasters. This comprehensive understanding enables professionals to develop effective strategies for mitigating risks and ensuring an organization's resilience in the face of unforeseen events.

Q15: What are the critical phases in the general process of disaster recovery, and why is the safety of an organization's personnel emphasized as a top priority during recovery efforts?

Ans: The general process of disaster recovery involves several key phases:

• Response: Immediate actions to address the disruption.
• Activation of the Recovery Team: Mobilizing the team responsible for recovery.
• Tactical Communication: Ongoing communication about the disaster and recovery status.
• Assessment of Damage: Further evaluation of the impact caused by the disruptive event.
• Recovery of Critical Assets and Processes: Restoration of vital assets and processes.

While organizations and experts may differ in naming or number of phases, the processes remain similar. However, a consistent priority across all phases is the safety of personnel. 

Regardless of the efficiency or success of restoration efforts, ensuring personnel safety is paramount. This principle emphasizes that business concerns should never compromise the well-being of an organization's personnel during disaster recovery efforts.

Conclusion

Security operations play a crucial role in safeguarding digital assets, and JanBask Training's CISSP courses are an invaluable resource to empower professionals in this domain. These courses provide a deep understanding of Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery Planning, and various security measures. 

By enrolling in JanBask's CISSP courses, professionals can enhance their capabilities, becoming adept guardians capable of navigating complex cybersecurity challenges.