AICPA CPA-Auditing Exam Prep
CPA Auditing and Attestation (AUD) (Page 69 )

• Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed NoSQL database service. It stores and retrieves application data, but it does not provide the complete environment for building, testing, and deploying predictive analytics models.
• Azure Machine Learning is the appropriate service for this requirement. It supports creating experiments, training and testing models, and deploying them for predictions.
• Azure Machine Learning Studio provides the browser-based interface for these tasks.

• Accept: Acknowledge the risk without taking additional action.
• Transfer: Shift the risk’s impact to another party, such as through insurance or outsourcing.
• Mitigate: Reduce the likelihood or impact, such as by implementing controls.
• Avoid: Eliminate the activity or situation that creates the risk.

Box 1: No

• configure_azure_monitor() configures Azure Monitor and the OpenTelemetry pipeline.
• LangChain requires its own instrumentation or callback tracer, such as AzureAIOpenTelemetryTracer.
• You must pass the tracer to the LangChain execution configuration so chains, tools, prompts, and model calls become spans in Application Insights.

Box 2: Yes

text 
OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=customer-agent 
OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=invoice-agent

• IaaS: You deploy and manage virtual machines, including the operating system and installed software. Azure manages the physical datacenter, hosts, and networking infrastructure.
• PaaS: Azure manages the infrastructure and operating system, while you deploy and manage your application code. Examples include Azure App Service and Azure Functions.

• LastName: Required.
• FirstName: Optional.
• AccountId: Optional; a Contact may be associated with an Account later or remain private, depending on organization settings.
• Name: A compound display field made from first and last name; it isn’t entered as a separate field.

• ?? ?? ?? ??
• ?? NFS ?? SMB ?? ??
• ?? ???? ???
• ?? IP ??? ???? ?? ???
• ??? ?? ???? ?????

• B: ????? NFS ? Snowball Edge? ?? ?? ? AWS? ?? ? S3
• D: ????? NFS ? ????/Direct Connect ? File Gateway ? S3

• Minimum and maximum values
• Number of distinct values
• NULL information
• Other metadata used for pruning

• Matching hashes: The software likely has not changed.
• Different hashes: The software was modified or corrupted.

• Encryption: Protects confidentiality by making data unreadable; it does not primarily detect changes.
• Baselines: Define an approved system or configuration state, but they are not the specific integrity mechanism here.
• Tokenization: Replaces sensitive data with substitute values.

• Suspended an operator who correctly refused to use unsafe equipment.
• Rewarded another operator for using the equipment despite the broken safety guard.

• A — Management is not particularly concerned with managing risks.

• B — Employees will perceive that management does not care about health and safety risks.

• C — This factory’s safety record is likely to be poor.

Statement 1 — Correct

Statement 2 — Correct

• Third-party attestation: Provides independent confirmation, often for formal compliance reporting, but is not usually performed frequently.
• Penetration testing: Attempts to exploit vulnerabilities; it focuses on technical security, not overall compliance procedures.
• Vulnerability scans: Identify known technical weaknesses in systems, but do not evaluate whether policies and processes meet compliance requirements.

• C — Create a form extension and implement validation

• D — Use Chain of Command (CoC) with a form extension class

1. It examines the source MAC address and learns it on the incoming port.
2. It examines the destination MAC address.
3. If the destination MAC is already in the MAC/CAM table, it forwards the frame only through the associated port.
4. If the destination MAC is unknown, it performs unknown-unicast flooding:

• Accept: Acknowledging the risk without taking additional action.
• Transfer: Moving the risk’s financial impact to a third party, such as an insurer.
• Mitigate: Reducing the likelihood or impact through controls, such as patching or employee training.
• Avoid: Eliminating the activity that creates the risk.

• S3 Glacier Deep Archive is designed for long-term archival data with very infrequent access and has a lower storage cost than S3 One Zone-IA.
• The documents are copies stored elsewhere, so reduced availability and delayed retrieval are acceptable.
• An S3 interface VPC endpoint allows private access from the VPC without exposing the bucket through the public internet.
• A bucket policy can restrict access to requests coming through that endpoint.

• One physical NIC is active and carries traffic.
• Another NIC remains on standby.
• If the active uplink fails, traffic switches to the backup uplink.
• This provides redundancy without requiring special switch-side link aggregation configuration.

• Balance-SLB: Distributes traffic based on source load balancing; not the default.
• Balance-TCP: Uses dynamic TCP traffic balancing and generally requires appropriate network-switch configuration.
• No Uplink Bond: Incorrect because vs0 is normally configured with redundant uplinks.

• Two-part tariff pricing: $10 per unit
• Dual pricing: $20 per unit

Two-part tariff pricing

Dual pricing

• Division X, the seller, is credited with the market price: \(\$20\)
• Division Y, the buyer, is charged the marginal cost: \(\$10\)

• A — If there is no demand, there should be no production.

• B — Not all sales equal profit.

• C — Stocking up on inventory is bad for business.

• D — All costs, except materials, are considered fixed.

• E — Departments should operate at full capacity regardless of bottlenecks.

• A. IDS attack signatures: An IDS mainly detects suspicious network traffic. It is not the best control for scanning uploaded documents.
• C. Load balancer: Distributes traffic among servers and can improve availability, but does not specifically detect malware.
• D. WAF: Protects web applications from attacks such as SQL injection and command injection. It may inspect web requests, but malware scanning of PDF files is not its primary function.

• Vulnerability scanner: Identifies technical weaknesses in systems, applications, or devices.
• Penetration test: Simulates attacks to determine whether vulnerabilities can be exploited.
• SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol): Uses standardized formats and protocols for automated vulnerability, configuration, and compliance checks.
• Illumination tool: Maps and analyzes broader supply-chain exposure and third-party risk.

• File policy in Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps: Can detect activity involving files, but it is not designed specifically to investigate risk from departing or deleted users.
• Access review policy in Microsoft Entra: Reviews whether users should retain access to resources; it does not detect historical document downloads.
• Alert policy in Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Primarily handles alerts for email and collaboration threats, not insider-risk investigations involving departed users.

• Company documents
• Databases
• Knowledge bases
• Current web or business data

• A: Describes diversity and inclusive design, not grounding.
• B: Describes explainability or model interpretability.
• D: Describes documenting a model’s capabilities and limitations.

• Data source: Folder
• Transformation: Remove the Content column (or keep only the file-metadata columns)

Why

• File name
• Extension
• Date modified
• Folder path
• Content — the binary contents of the file

• Prevention costs – costs incurred to stop defects occurring, such as staff training, quality planning and supplier evaluation.
• Appraisal costs – costs of checking whether products meet standards, such as inspection, testing and quality audits.
• Internal failure costs – costs of defects found before delivery to customers, such as scrap, rework and retesting.
• External failure costs – costs of defects found after delivery, such as warranty claims, returns, complaints and product recalls.

• TLS passthrough: A TCP listener does not decrypt traffic. The client establishes TLS directly with the backend, so the backend can perform mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication.
• gRPC over TCP: gRPC commonly uses HTTP/2 over TLS, and an NLB can forward the underlying TCP connections without modifying them.
• Scalability: Registering the Pods as IP targets allows Kubernetes to add or remove Pods as the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler changes the workload. The AWS Load Balancer Controller updates the target registrations.
• Port 443: The NLB can forward TCP traffic on port 443 without terminating TLS.

• An ALB HTTPS listener terminates TLS at the load balancer, violating the requirement that traffic must not be decrypted before reaching the backend.
• Targeting the EKS node group's Auto Scaling group does not directly track dynamically scaling Pods.
• An NLB TLS listener also terminates TLS at the NLB, preventing end-to-end mTLS between the client and backend.

• CPU: Number of virtual CPUs and, where applicable, CPU reservations.
• Memory: Amount of memory and memory reservations.

• Network interface: Usually configured through the VM or workload networking configuration.
• PCI devices: Specialized hardware and not a standard VM Class resource in this context.
• Storage: Typically selected through storage policies or the VM’s storage configuration.

• B. Conditional access policies

• D. Additional authentication factors

• Disciplinary actions: Punish users but do not prevent credential-based attacks.
• More regular account audits: Useful for finding inactive or excessive accounts, but less direct for stopping unauthorized logins.
• Content filtering: Primarily controls web or email content, not authentication.
• Review of permissions: Reduces privilege but may not stop unauthorized account access.

• Low: Applies system, tenant, and user-based suppressions. Activity from locations commonly used by that user is more likely to be suppressed.
• Medium: Applies system and user suppressions.
• High: Applies only system suppressions, so more unusual-location activity generates alerts.

• STP elects the switch with the lowest Bridge ID as the root bridge.
• The Bridge ID consists mainly of bridge priority + MAC address.
• If multiple switches have the same priority, the switch with the lower MAC address is preferred.
• STP bridge priority values are configured in increments of 4096, such as 0, 4096, 8192, and so on. 32768 is the standard default value.

• NTLM: Uses Windows challenge-response authentication and does not provide the normal web-based MFA redirect flow.
• Single Sign-On: Automatically reuses existing credentials; it is intended to avoid prompting, not to support an MFA workflow.
• Transparent: Intercepts the session without redirecting the user to a separate authentication page.

• httprint fingerprints Web servers by analyzing their HTTP responses. It can help identify the Web server type and sometimes its version, even when the banner has been modified or hidden.
• Wget is mainly used to download files or Web content.
• WinSSLMiM is associated with SSL man-in-the-middle testing.
• Whisker is an older Web-server vulnerability assessment tool, especially associated with IIS, rather than the expected banner-grabbing tool here.

• RTO is how quickly service must be restored.
• RPO is how much data loss is acceptable.

• Snapshots: Restore points may be older and require restoration time.
• On-site backups: Usually require rebuilding or restoring systems, producing higher RTO/RPO.
• Journaling: Records database changes and can reduce data loss, but it still generally requires recovery or replay operations; it does not by itself provide the fastest service restoration.
• Hot site: Designed for rapid failover and minimal data loss.

• Measurement bias: Errors in how features or labels are measured, such as unreliable camera data or inconsistent labeling.
• Observer bias: A human evaluator’s subjective judgment influencing observations or labels.
• Confirmation bias: Favoring information that supports an existing belief.

• A user connects with their Google account.
• Google associates the user’s SSH key with that identity.
• IAM roles determine whether they can log in.
• Access can be tied to a specific employee for auditing.
• Removing the IAM role removes their login access.

• compute.osLogin: regular OS login access
• compute.osAdminLogin: OS login with administrative privileges, typically including sudo

text 
enable-oslogin=TRUE

• Storage usage of files stored in Microsoft Teams: SharePoint site usage report

• Number of active users per team: Microsoft Teams usage report

1. SharePoint site usage report
2. Microsoft Teams usage report

• Scanning is not essential during a power outage.
• A scanner can consume UPS battery power without helping the user save cloud documents or shut down safely.
• The UPS should be reserved for the computer, monitor, and necessary network equipment.
• The surge protector helps protect the scanner from voltage spikes, but it will not keep it running during an outage.

• Existing Eventhouse data: remains available only in the KQL database.
• Data ingested after enabling the feature: is copied to OneLake and can be accessed through OneLake file explorer.
• New databases: are irrelevant; the setting applies to the selected KQL database.

1. Horizontal scaling — Yes

1. Vertical scaling — Yes

1. Scaling can manage costs — Yes

• Horizontal = more or fewer instances
• Vertical = larger or smaller instances

• The table is large.
• Queries frequently filter or join on particular columns.
• The table’s natural data order does not support good micro-partition pruning.
• Clustering improves performance enough to justify its maintenance cost.

Manager role

DAX 
Country[Manager] = USERPRINCIPALNAME()

• Sales
• Human Resources

CFO role

• See sales for all countries
• See no Human Resources data

• Do not restrict the Country table or Sales table.
• Apply a filter to Human Resources that always returns false, such as:

DAX 
FALSE()

• Security groups
• Dynamic security groups
• Cloud-only or synchronized security groups

• Microsoft 365 groups
• Distribution groups
• Mail-enabled distribution groups

• Allow only approved MAC addresses
• Limit the number of learned addresses
• Shut down or restrict a port when a violation occurs

• Load balancer: Distributes application traffic; it does not protect switch MAC tables.
• IPS: May detect some attack traffic, but it is not the direct control for limiting MAC addresses on switch ports.
• NGFW: Filters routed network traffic, while this attack targets Layer 2 switch behavior.

• On-premises resources, such as an existing database
• Cloud resources, such as Azure services or virtual machines
• Connectivity that allows the application to use both environments

• Public cloud: resources are entirely provided through a public cloud provider.
• Private cloud: resources are dedicated to one organization, typically on-premises or privately hosted.

• Red team: Simulates attackers and tests exploitability.
• Blue team: Defends, monitors, detects, and responds to attacks.
• Purple team: Combines red- and blue-team activities to improve cooperation and defenses.
• White team: Manages and oversees the rules, scope, and authorization of the exercise.

• The Azure DevOps (Boards only) connector is designed specifically for Azure DevOps Analytics views.
• It authenticates directly to Azure DevOps and lets you select an existing Analytics view.
• Filters defined in the Analytics view are applied by Azure DevOps before Power BI retrieves the data, reducing the amount of data transferred.

• Azure DevOps Server (Boards only) is for on-premises Azure DevOps Server.
• OData Feed can consume OData endpoints, but it is not the dedicated Azure DevOps Analytics-view connector.
• OData queries are not the intended dedicated connector for this requirement.

• Disable high concurrency: Changes workspace-wide behavior and is not the targeted way to isolate these workloads.
• Modify the number of executors: Adjusts capacity and performance, but does not provide workload isolation.
• Set the default environment: Controls libraries and runtime configuration, not compute isolation.

• Streams — track change data for tables or views.
• External tables — reference data stored in an external cloud storage location.

• Role — account-level security object.
• Warehouse — account-level compute resource.
• User — account-level security object.
• Share — account-level object used to share data.

• Firewalls and routers
• Servers and applications
• Endpoint devices
• Authentication systems
• Cloud services

• Centralized log collection
• Event correlation
• Dashboards and reporting
• Alerting
• Compliance support

• The application stores data on Amazon EBS volumes, so the encryption should be applied directly to those volumes.
• EBS encryption uses AWS-managed cryptographic operations and is designed to provide encryption at rest with minimal performance impact.
• The volumes are created during initial deployment, so they can be configured as encrypted when provisioned.

• B: Moving data to an encrypted S3 bucket changes the storage design and does not encrypt the EBS data the application uses.
• C: A custom encryption algorithm adds application overhead and is unnecessary.
• D: Ephemeral disks are temporary storage and can lose data when instances stop or terminate. Encrypting only the AMI’s root volume does not protect data stored elsewhere.