CompTIA Security+ Question E-100

Various employees have lost valuable customer data due to hard drives failing in company provided laptops. It has been discovered that the hard drives used in one model of laptops provided by the company has been recalled by the manufactory, The help desk is only able to replace the hard drives after they fail because there is no centralized records of the model of laptop given to each specific user. Which of the following could have prevented this situation from occurring?

A. Data backups
B. Asset tracking
C. Support ownership
D. BYOD policies

Answer: A

CompTIA Security+ Question E-99

A technician is deploying virtual machines for multiple customers on a single physical host to reduce power consumption in a data center. Which of the following should be recommended to isolate the VMs from one another?

A. Implement a virtual firewall
B. Install HIPS on each VM
C. Virtual switches with VLANs
D. Develop a patch management guide

Answer: C

Explanation:
A virtual local area network (VLAN) is a hardware-imposed network segmentation created by switches. VLANs are used for traffic management. VLANs can be used to isolate traffic between network segments.

CompTIA Security+ Question E-98

A security administrator must implement a wireless encryption system to secure mobile devices’ communication. Some users have mobile devices which only support 56-bit encryption. Which of the following wireless encryption methods should be implemented?

A. RC4
B. AES
C. MD5
D. TKIP

Answer: A

Explanation:
RC4 is popular with wireless and WEP/WPA encryption. It is a streaming cipher that works with key sizes between 40 and 2048 bits, and it is used in SSL and TLS.

CompTIA Security+ Question E-97

Which of the following would provide the STRONGEST encryption?

A. Random one-time pad
B. DES with a 56-bit key
C. AES with a 256-bit key
D. RSA with a 1024-bit key

Answer: A

Explanation:
One-time pads are the only truly completely secure cryptographic implementations.

They are so secure for two reasons. First, they use a key that is as long as a plaintext message. That means there is no pattern in the key application for an attacker to use. Also, one-time pad keys are used only once and then discarded. So even if you could break a one-time pad cipher, that same key would never be used again, so knowledge of the key would be useless.

CompTIA Security+ Question E-96

When creating a public / private key pair, for which of the following ciphers would a user need to specify the key strength?

A. SHA
B. AES
C. DES
D. RSA

Answer: D

Explanation:
RSA (an asymmetric algorithm) uses keys of a minimum length of 2048 bits.

CompTIA Security+ Question E-95

A security technician is attempting to access a wireless network protected with WEP. The technician does not know any information about the network. Which of the following should the technician do to gather information about the configuration of the wireless network?

A. Spoof the MAC address of an observed wireless network client
B. Ping the access point to discover the SSID of the network
C. Perform a dictionary attack on the access point to enumerate the WEP key
D. Capture client to access point disassociation packets to replay on the local PC’s loopback

Answer: A

Explanation:
With ARP spoofing (also known as ARP poisoning), the MAC (Media Access Control) address of the data is faked. By faking this value, it is possible to make it look as if the data came from a network that it did not. This can be used to gain access to the network, to fool the router into sending data here that was intended for another host, or to launch a DoS attack. In all cases, the address being faked is an address of a legitimate user, and that makes it possible to get around such measures as allow/deny lists. Note: As an example, the initialization vector (IV) that WEP uses for encryption is 24-bit, which is quite weak and means that IVs are reused with the same key. By examining the repeating result, it was easy for attackers to crack the WEP secret key. This is known as an IV attack.

CompTIA Security+ Question E-94

Upper management decides which risk to mitigate based on cost. This is an example of:

A. Qualitative risk assessment
B. Business impact analysis
C. Risk management framework
D. Quantitative risk assessment

Answer: D

Explanation:
Quantitative analysis / assessment is used to the show the logic and cost savings in replacing a server for example before it fails rather than after the failure. Quantitative assessments assign a dollar amount.

CompTIA Security+ Question E-93

RADIUS provides which of the following?

A. Authentication, Authorization, Availability
B. Authentication, Authorization, Auditing
C. Authentication, Accounting, Auditing
D. Authentication, Authorization, Accounting

Answer: D

Explanation:
The Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS) networking protocol offers centralized Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) management for users who make use of a network service. It is for this reason that A, B, and C: are incorrect.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RADIUS

CompTIA Security+ Question E-92

Which of the following secure file transfer methods uses port 22 by default?

A. FTPS
B. SFTP
C. SSL
D. S/MIME

Answer: B

Explanation:
SSH uses TCP port 22. All protocols encrypted by SSH, including SFTP, SHTTP, SCP, SExec, and slogin, also use TCP port 22.