ISC2 CC Study Guide 2026

An Incident Response Plan (IRP) is a structured approach for handling security incidents, aiming to limit damage and reduce recovery time and costs. Its primary goal is to enable an organization to quickly identify, contain, eradicate, recover from, and learn from security breaches. This ensures a systematic and efficient response to protect assets and maintain business operations.

Least privilege means users are granted only the minimum permissions necessary to perform their job functions.

A VLAN is a logical grouping of network devices into separate broadcast domains even if they share the same physical infrastructure.

The principle of least privilege dictates that users, programs, or processes should be granted only the minimum necessary permissions or access rights required to perform their legitimate functions. This security best practice minimizes the potential damage from accidental errors, misuse, or malicious attacks by limiting the scope of what an compromised account can do. It reduces the attack surface and enhances overall system security.

Hardware tokens are possession-based 'something you have' authentication factors that generate one-time codes.

SFTP, or Secure File Transfer Protocol, is specifically designed for securely transferring files over a network. It uses SSH (Secure Shell) to provide a secure channel, encrypting both the data and commands during transmission. This ensures confidentiality and integrity of the files being moved between systems.