CompTIA Security+ Question L-82

Which of the following BEST describes the type of attack that is occurring?

A. Smurf Attack
B. Man in the middle
C. Backdoor
D. Replay
E. Spear Phishing
F. Xmas Attack
G. Blue Jacking
H. Ping of Death

Answer: A

Explanation:
The exhibit shows that all the computers on the network are being ‘pinged’. This indicates that the ping request was sent to the network broadcast address. We can also see that all the replies were received by one (probably with a spoofed address) host on the network. This is typical of a smurf attack.

A smurf attack is a type of network security breach in which a network connected to the Internet is swamped with replies to ICMP echo (PING) requests. A smurf attacker sends PING requests to an Internet broadcast address. These are special addresses that broadcast all received messages to the hosts connected to the subnet. Each broadcast address can support up to 255 hosts, so a single PING request can be multiplied 255 times. The return address of the request itself is spoofed to be the address of the attacker’s victim. All the hosts receiving the PING request reply to this victim’s address instead of the real sender’s address. A single attacker sending hundreds or thousands of these PING messages per second can fill the victim’s T-1 (or even T-3) line with ping replies, bring the entire Internet service to its knees. Smurfing falls under the general category of Denial of Service attacks — security attacks that don’t try to steal information, but instead attempt to disable a computer or network.

CompTIA Security+ Question L-52

Purchasing receives a phone call from a vendor asking for a payment over the phone. The phone number displayed on the caller ID matches the vendor’s number. When the purchasing agent asks to call the vendor back, they are given a different phone number with a different area code.
Which of the following attack types is this?

A. Hoax
B. Impersonation
C. Spear phishing
D. Whaling

Answer: B

Explanation:
In this question, the impersonator is impersonating a vendor and asking for payment. They have managed to ‘spoof’ their calling number so that their caller ID matches the vendor’s number. Impersonation is where a person, computer, software application or service pretends to be someone or something it’s not. Impersonation is commonly non-maliciously used in client/server applications. However, it can also be used as a security threat.

CompTIA Security+ Question L-16

A company’s employees were victims of a spear phishing campaign impersonating the CEO. The company would now like to implement a solution to improve the overall security posture by assuring their employees that email originated from the CEO. Which of the following controls could they implement to BEST meet this goal?

A. Spam filter
B. Digital signatures
C. Antivirus software
D. Digital certificates

Answer: B

Explanation:
A digital signature is a mathematical technique used to validate the authenticity and integrity of a message, software, or digital document. The digital equivalent of a handwritten signature or stamped seal, but offering far more inherent security, a digital signature is intended to solve the problem of tampering and impersonation in digital communications. Digital signatures can provide the added assurances of evidence to origin, identity and status of an electronic document, transaction or message, as well as acknowledging informed consent by the signer. Digital signatures are based on public key cryptography, also known as asymmetric cryptography. Using a public key algorithm such as RSA, one can generate two keys that are mathematically linked: one private and one public. To create a digital signature, signing software (such as an email program) creates a one-way hash of the electronic data to be signed. The private key is then used to encrypt the hash. The encrypted hash — along with other information, such as the hashing algorithm — is the digital signature. The reason for encrypting the hash instead of the entire message or document is that a hash function can convert an arbitrary input into a fixed length value, which is usually much shorter. This saves time since hashing is much faster than signing.

CompTIA Security+ Question K-99

After analyzing and correlating activity from multiple sensors, the security administrator has determined that a group of very well organized individuals from an enemy country is responsible for various attempts to breach the company network, through the use of very sophisticated and targeted attacks. Which of the following is this an example of?

A. Privilege escalation
B. Advanced persistent threat
C. Malicious insider threat
D. Spear phishing

Answer: B

Explanation:
Definitions of precisely what an APT is can vary widely, but can best be summarized by their named requirements: Advanced – Criminal operators behind the threat utilize the full spectrum of computer intrusion technologies and techniques. While individual components of the attack may not be classed as particularly “advanced” (e.g. malware components generated from commonly available DIY construction kits, or the use of easily procured exploit materials), their operators can typically access and develop more advanced tools as required. They combine multiple attack methodologies and tools in order to reach and compromise their target. Persistent – Criminal operators give priority to a specific task, rather than opportunistically seeking immediate financial gain. This distinction implies that the attackers are guided by external entities. The attack is conducted through continuous monitoring and interaction in order to achieve the defined objectives. It does not mean a barrage of constant attacks and malware updates. In fact, a “low-and-slow” approach is usually more successful. Threat – means that there is a level of coordinated human involvement in the attack, rather than a mindless and automated piece of code. The criminal operators have a specific objective and are skilled, motivated, organized and well funded.

CompTIA Security+ Question K-87

A user has unknowingly gone to a fraudulent site. The security analyst notices the following system change on the user’s host:
Old `hosts’ file:
127.0.0.1 localhost
New `hosts’ file:
127.0.0.1 localhost
5.5.5.5 www.comptia.com
Which of the following attacks has taken place?

A. Spear phishing
B. Pharming
C. Phishing
D. Vishing

Answer: B

Explanation:
We can see in this question that a fraudulent entry has been added to the user’s hosts file. This will point the URL: www.comptia.com to 5.5.5.5 instead of the correct IP address. Similar in nature to e-mail phishing, pharming seeks to obtain personal or private (usually financial related) information through domain spoofing. Rather than being spammed with malicious and mischievous e-mail requests for you to visit spoof Web sites which appear legitimate, pharming ‘poisons’ a DNS server (or hosts file) by infusing false information into the DNS server, resulting in a user’s request being redirected elsewhere. Your browser, however will show you are at the correct Web site, which makes pharming a bit more serious and more difficult to detect. Phishing attempts to scam people one at a time with an e-mail while pharming allows the scammers to target large groups of people at one time through domain spoofing.

CompTIA Security+ Question I-58

Without validating user input, an application becomes vulnerable to all of the following EXCEPT:

A. Buffer overflow.
B. Command injection.
C. Spear phishing.
D. SQL injection.

Answer: C

Explanation:
Input validation is a defensive technique intended to mitigate against possible user input attacks, such as buffer overflows and fuzzing. Input validation checks every user input submitted to the application before processing that input. The check could be a length, a character type, a language type, or a domain.

CompTIA Security+ Question G-98

Mike, a user, states that he is receiving several unwanted emails about home loans. Which of the following is this an example of?

A. Spear phishing
B. Hoaxes
C. Spoofing
D. Spam

Answer: D

Explanation:
Spam is most often considered to be electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited email. However, if a long-lost brother finds your email address and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it is unsolicited. Real spam is generally email advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup. In addition to wasting people’s time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Consequently, there are many organizations, as well as individuals, who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. But because the Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail. However, some online services have instituted policies to prevent spammers from spamming their subscribers. There is some debate about why it is called spam, but the generally accepted version is that it comes from the Monty Python song, “Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam”. Like the song, spam is an endless repetition of worthless text. Another school of thought maintains that it comes from the computer group lab at the University of Southern California who gave it the name because it has many of the same characteristics as the lunch meat Spam: Nobody wants it or ever asks for it. No one ever eats it; it is the first item to be pushed to the side when eating the entree. Sometimes it is actually tasty, like 1% of junk mail that is really useful to some people. The term spam can also be used to describe any “unwanted” email from a company or website -­typically at some point a user would have agreed to receive the email via subscription list opt-in -­a newer term called graymail is used to describe this particular type of spam.

CompTIA Security+ Question F-75

A recent spike in virus detections has been attributed to end-users visiting www.compnay.com. The business has an established relationship with an organization using the URL of www.company.com but not with the site that has been causing the infections. Which of the following would BEST describe this type of attack?

A. Typo squatting
B. Session hijacking
C. Cross-site scripting
D. Spear phishing

Answer: A

Explanation:
Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking or fake url, is a form of cybersquatting, and possibly brandjacking which relies on mistakes such as typographical errors made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser. Should a user accidentally enter an incorrect website address, they may be led to any URL (including an alternative website owned by a cybersquatter).

The typosquatter’s URL will usually be one of four kinds, all similar to the victim site address: (In the following, the intended website is “example.com”) A common misspelling, or foreign language spelling, of the intended site: exemple.com A misspelling based on typing errors: xample.com or examlpe.com A differently phrased domain name: examples.com A different top-level domain: example.org

Once in the typosquatter’s site, the user may also be tricked into thinking that they are in fact in the real site; through the use of copied or similar logos, website layouts or content.

CompTIA Security+ Question E-12

Which of the following BEST describes the type of attack that is occurring? (Select TWO).

A. DNS spoofing
B. Man-in-the-middle
C. Backdoor
D. Replay
E. ARP attack
F. Spear phishing
G. Xmas attack

Answer: A,E

Explanation:
We have a legit bank web site and a hacker bank web site. The hacker has a laptop connected to the network. The hacker is redirecting bank web site users to the hacker bank web site instead of the legit bank web site. This can be done using two methods: DNS Spoofing and ARP Attack (ARP Poisoning).

A: DNS spoofing (or DNS cache poisoning) is a computer hacking attack, whereby data is introduced into a Domain Name System (DNS) resolver’s cache, causing the name server to return an incorrect IP address, diverting traffic to the attacker’s computer (or any other computer). A domain name system server translates a human-readable domain name (such as example.com) into a numerical IP address that is used to route communications between nodes. Normally if the server doesn’t know a requested translation it will ask another server, and the process continues recursively. To increase performance, a server will typically remember (cache) these translations for a certain amount of time, so that, if it receives another request for the same translation, it can reply without having to ask the other server again. When a DNS server has received a false translation and caches it for performance optimization, it is considered poisoned, and it supplies the false data to clients. If a DNS server is poisoned, it may return an incorrect IP address, diverting traffic to another computer (in this case, the hacker bank web site server).

E: Address Resolution Protocol poisoning (ARP poisoning) is a form of attack in which an attacker changes the Media Access Control (MAC) address and attacks an Ethernet LAN by changing the target computer’s ARP cache with a forged ARP request and reply packets. This modifies the layer -Ethernet MAC address into the hacker’s known MAC address to monitor it. Because the ARP replies are forged, the target computer unintentionally sends the frames to the hacker’s computer first instead of sending it to the original destination. As a result, both the user’s data and privacy are compromised. An effective ARP poisoning attempt is undetectable to the user. ARP poisoning is also known as ARP cache poisoning or ARP poison routing (APR).

CompTIA Security+ Question D-27

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) receives a suspicious voice mail warning of credit card fraud. No one else received the voice mail. Which of the following BEST describes this attack?

A. Whaling
B. Vishing
C. Spear phishing
D. Impersonation

Answer: A

Explanation:
Whaling is a specific kind of malicious hacking within the more general category of phishing, which involves hunting for data that can be used by the hacker. In general, phishing efforts are focused on collecting personal data about users. In whaling, the targets are high-ranking bankers, executives or others in powerful positions or job titles. Hackers who engage in whaling often describe these efforts as “reeling in a big fish,” applying a familiar metaphor to the process of scouring technologies for loopholes and opportunities for data theft. Those who are engaged in whaling may, for example, hack into specific networks where these powerful individuals work or store sensitive data. They may also set up keylogging or other malware on a work station associated with one of these executives. There are many ways that hackers can pursue whaling, leading C-level or top-level executives in business and government to stay vigilant about the possibility of cyber threats.