ISC2 CC Practice Questions & Flashcards

A company's marketing pages are already public, so nothing on them is secret, and the site rarely goes down. An attacker manages to deface several pages with false claims about the business. Which security property was the attack MOST directly aimed at?

Defacement is unauthorized modification of published content, the definition of an integrity violation. Confidentiality doesn't apply to content that was already meant to be public. Availability would be the target if the pages went offline, but a defaced page still loads, it's simply wrong.

A government agency assigns every piece of data a sensitivity label and centrally enforces which cleared users may access which label, with no ability for even a senior data owner to grant an exception. Which access control model is in use?

Mandatory access control enforces classification labels and clearances centrally; users cannot grant, delegate or downgrade access no matter how senior they are, which matches the 'no exceptions' detail exactly. DAC would let the data owner decide, and RBAC and ABAC assign access by role or attribute rather than a fixed centrally-enforced label.

A network team is choosing between two monitoring appliances: one sits beside the traffic flow and can only alert on suspicious activity, while the other sits inline and can drop malicious packets before they ever reach their destination, at the cost of being able to cause an outage if it misfires. What is the KEY difference between these two devices?

The difference is placement and action: an IPS sits inline and can drop traffic, while an IDS sits beside it and only reports, which is exactly why an IPS false positive can cause the outage described.