CSOC Cybersecurity Fundamentals 2

Question 1

What is social engineering in the context of cybersecurity?

Accepted Answer

Manipulating people through psychological techniques to divulge confidential information or perform actions that compromise security

Answer

Social engineering exploits human psychology rather than technical vulnerabilities. Attackers manipulate targets into revealing credentials, clicking malicious links, or granting access by exploiting trust, fear, authority, or urgency.

Question 2

What is the purpose of multi-factor authentication (MFA) in securing systems?

Accepted Answer

MFA requires users to verify their identity using two or more independent factors, making account compromise significantly harder

Answer

MFA requires users to provide at least two independent verification factors — such as a password (something you know) plus a one-time code (something you have). Even if one factor is compromised, the attacker cannot access the account without the second factor.

Question 3

What is a 'denial of service' (DoS) attack?

Accepted Answer

An attack that overwhelms a system or network with traffic to make it unavailable to legitimate users

Answer

A denial of service attack floods a target system or network with excessive traffic or requests, exhausting resources and making the system unavailable to legitimate users. A Distributed DoS (DDoS) uses multiple sources to increase the attack volume.

Question 4

What is end-to-end encryption and what does it protect against?

Accepted Answer

Encryption where data is encrypted at the sender's end and decrypted only by the recipient, protecting it from interception in transit

Answer

End-to-end encryption ensures that data is encrypted before it leaves the sender and can only be decrypted by the intended recipient. Intermediaries including service providers cannot read the content, protecting it from MITM attacks and data breaches in transit.

Question 5

What is 'patch management' and why is it critical in cybersecurity?

Accepted Answer

The process of systematically identifying, testing, and applying software updates to fix known vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them

Answer

Patch management is the systematic process of keeping software up to date with security fixes. Unpatched systems are among the most common targets for attackers because known vulnerabilities are documented and exploit code is often publicly available.

CSOC Practice Test

CSOC Practice Test

CSOC Cybersecurity Fundamentals 2