AICPA CPA-Auditing Exam Prep
CPA Auditing and Attestation (AUD) (Page 81 )

• Laws and regulations
• Litigation holds
• Industry or contractual obligations
• Tax, financial, health, or privacy requirements

• Business strategy and direction: May influence retention, but cannot override legal requirements.
• Storage capacity and longevity: Practical considerations, not the primary driver.
• Business ease and value analysis: May support decisions after compliance obligations are identified.

• Bronze: Raw ingested data
• Silver: Cleaned, validated, and transformed data
• Gold: Business-level data for analytics, dashboards, and reporting

• transform() — modifies every element in an array
• filter() — keeps elements matching a condition
• exists() — checks whether any element matches
• aggregate() — reduces array elements to one result

sql 
SELECT transform(scores, x -> x * 2) 
FROM student_scores;

• A is incorrect because higher-order functions are mainly useful for nested or complex data.
• B is incorrect because they do not convert logic into Python.
• D is incorrect because their purpose is not to fix slow built-in functions, but to process arrays or maps with custom logic.

1. x = -100
2. -100 < x < 100
3. 100 = x < 1000
4. x = 1000

• -500 ? class 1
• 0 ? class 2
• 100 ? class 3
• 1000 ? class 4

1. Wireless AP

1. Router

1. Firewall

1. Device placement

• Password spraying: Tries a few common passwords against many accounts; no indication of repeated login attempts.
• Remote-access Trojan (RAT): Could install malware, but it does not explain how the attacker obtained the administrator’s credentials.
• Dictionary attack: Tries words or common passwords against an account; again, the scenario specifically highlights Telnet’s lack of encryption.

• Espionage: Stealing information for intelligence or competitive purposes.
• Data exfiltration: Unauthorized removal or transfer of data.
• Nation-state attack: An attack sponsored or conducted by a government.
• Shadow IT: Unapproved technology or methods used to access organizational resources.

• BCP (Business Continuity Plan): è più ampio e mira a mantenere le funzioni essenziali dell’organizzazione durante un’interruzione. Il DRP è una componente più specifica del BCP.
• Communication plan: stabilisce come comunicare con dipendenti, cittadini e altre parti interessate, ma non ripristina i sistemi.
• IRP (Incident Response Plan): gestisce la risposta iniziale a un incidente di sicurezza, come un attacco informatico, non principalmente il recupero da un disastro fisico.

• Active-active routers: Provide redundant Internet connections/devices. Both can operate, so traffic can fail over or be load-balanced.
• Active-active firewalls: Avoid a single firewall becoming a failure point while maintaining security inspection.
• Load balancers: Distribute requests across multiple web servers. If one server fails, traffic can go to the other.
• Redundant power supplies: A server with separate power supplies should connect to independent power sources or circuits.
• UPS A and UPS B: Provide backup power and redundancy. Ideally, each power supply is connected to a different UPS.
• SONET ring: A ring topology provides alternate paths if a fiber link or segment fails.

• 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.

• Microsoft Purview portal: Create and manage sensitivity labels and configure support for sensitivity labels used with Office files in SharePoint and OneDrive.
• SharePoint admin center: Primarily manages SharePoint settings. Older guidance and PowerShell procedures used SharePoint tenant configuration, which can make this question confusing.
• IRM: Concerns Information Rights Management and is a separate protection mechanism; it should not be used to identify the portal for configuring Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels.

• Orders contains order-level information, such as the order date.
• Order Line Items contains the products, quantities, and line amounts associated with each order.
• Merging them on the order key, such as OrderID, places the order date alongside each line item. This allows you to calculate total order value and analyze it over time.
• Product attributes can remain in the Products table and be related to the resulting line-item table through ProductID.

• Merging line items with products addresses product attributes but does not first provide the order-level date and value needed for time analysis.
• DAX calculated columns or lists add unnecessary model complexity.
• Calculating order counts is not the first requirement and does not combine the required order and line-item data.

• Reconnaissance: Gathering information about the target.
• Weaponization: Creating or combining a malicious payload with a delivery method.
• Delivery: Sending the payload, such as through phishing.
• Exploitation: Triggering a vulnerability or weakness to gain execution or access.

• Admin access to the deployment pipeline
• Contributor access to the Development and Test workspaces
• Viewer access to the Production workspace

• Build, measure, learn: Create something, assess real feedback or results, and adapt.
• Minimum viable product (MVP): Produce the smallest useful version to test assumptions and reduce uncertainty.
• Fail fast: Test ideas early so that unsuccessful approaches can be identified before significant time or cost is invested.

• Tracking who accessed or changed customer information
• Detecting unauthorized activity
• Supporting accountability and investigations
• Providing evidence for compliance and incident response

• Single sign-on not enabled: SSO improves convenience and centralized authentication, but it is not essential for access control.
• Complex passwords not required: This weakens authentication, but other controls may reduce the risk.
• Security baseline not consistently applied: A concern, but it is less specific and less immediately damaging than having no activity records at all.

• Azure Machine Learning is the overall Azure service.
• Machine Learning designer is the visual, drag-and-drop interface within Azure Machine Learning.
• Microsoft may refer to the broader product as Azure Machine Learning studio, while “Designer” remains the specific visual workflow tool.

• Azure Logic Apps: Workflow and integration automation.
• Azure Batch: Large-scale parallel or batch compute.
• Azure Cosmos DB: Globally distributed NoSQL database.

• Virus signatures: Primarily associated with antivirus or antimalware tools.
• Security agent deployment: Usually handled by endpoint-management or endpoint-security platforms.
• Vulnerability scanning: Performed by vulnerability-assessment tools, although a SIEM may ingest their results.

• B — The most significant risks are held by SQ.

• C — SQ should recognise the cars as inventory.

• F — SQ recognises revenue when LM sells a car to a third party.

• A: LM does not hold the most significant risks.
• D: LM does not recognise the cars as inventory.
• E: SQ should not recognise revenue when cars are merely delivered to LM.

• A — .gitignore: Controls Git tracking; it does not configure Copilot exclusions.
• B — copilot.ignore: This is not the standard GitHub Copilot Business exclusion mechanism.
• D — Renaming files: Adding _no_copilot has no recognized effect.

• Self-signed certificate — Causes a certificate trust warning, not incorrect name resolution.
• Nameserver record — A DNS record problem would usually affect multiple users, unless only this computer uses a different DNS server.
• IP helper — Relays certain network services, commonly DHCP, between subnets; it does not normally determine website name resolution.

• Code signing: Verifies the software’s authenticity and integrity; it does not hide the source code or prevent reverse engineering.
• Tokenization: Replaces sensitive data with tokens, mainly for protecting data such as payment information—not software logic.
• Blockchain: Provides a tamper-resistant record of transactions or data; it does not protect compiled code from analysis.

• C: Develop the rule in the Rules Editor, define the events, match, and condition sections, then use the test rule feature. This directly validates the YARA-L rule without enabling it in production.
• A: UDM Search can help investigate data and refine filters, but it does not fully test YARA-L logic—especially complex event joins, match windows, and conditions.

• Accept: Acknowledge the risk and take no additional action.
• Transfer: Shift the risk or financial impact to another party, such as through insurance or a contract.
• Mitigate: Reduce the likelihood or impact using controls, such as firewalls, training, or backups.
• Avoid: Eliminate the activity that creates the risk.

• Assign endpoints to a group based on the result of one policy.
• Use that group as the scope of another policy.
• This effectively passes the endpoints from one policy’s processing flow to another.

• 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.

• CSIRT: A Computer Security Incident Response Team that handles and coordinates incident response.
• CVSS: A scoring system used to rate the severity of vulnerabilities.
• SOAR: Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response technology used to automate security workflows.

• Tokenization: Replaces the value with a nonsensitive token, often reversible through a secure token vault.
• Hashing: Converts data into a one-way fixed-length value, generally used for integrity checks or password storage.
• Obfuscation: A broad term for making data difficult to understand; it is less precise than masking in this context.

• Financial performance
• Customer perspective
• Internal business processes
• Learning and growth

• Increasing the number of indicators can make the scorecard cluttered and less useful. Measures should be limited to those that are strategically important.
• The scorecard is mainly a tool for implementing and monitoring strategy, not for formulating strategy.
• It should contain both leading indicators and lagging indicators. Leading indicators predict future performance, while lagging indicators measure results already achieved.

• Customers may boycott V’s products.
• Supermarket customers may stop buying from V.
• Investors may view V as having higher legal, ethical and reputational risk.
• V could face fines, lawsuits, contract losses and higher costs.
• Expected future profits may fall.

• If the hashes match, the software has likely not changed.
• If they differ, the software was modified or corrupted.

• Encryption: Protects confidentiality by making data unreadable; it does not primarily verify that software was unchanged.
• Baselines: Establish expected configurations or states, but hashing is the specific method for checking file integrity.
• Tokenization: Replaces sensitive data with non-sensitive tokens and is unrelated to software integrity.

1. Open the Microsoft Entra Connect wizard.
2. Select Configure.
3. Choose Customize synchronization options.
4. Authenticate when prompted.
5. On the Domain and OU filtering page, select:

1. Complete the wizard.

• Start-ADSyncSyncCycle only starts synchronization; it does not change which OUs are included.
• Manage federation configures federation settings, which are unrelated to OU filtering.
• Add-ADSyncConnectorAttributeInclusion concerns connector attributes, not selecting additional OUs for synchronization.

• A: It allows for branching and merging...

• C: It allows multiple engineers to work against the same code and configuration files and manage differences and conflicts.

• B: Build automation and infrastructure provisioning are handled by CI/CD and automation tools, not by version control alone.
• D: User Stories and backlogs are managed by project-management tools.
• E: Version control stores and tracks code, but it does not itself ensure that developers write effective unit tests.

1. Wireless AP

1. Router

1. Firewall

1. Device placement

• The type of change: standard, normal, or emergency
• The risk, impact, and complexity
• The change model being used

• A standard change may be pre-authorized through its change model.
• A normal change may require assessment and approval by an appropriate change authority.
• An emergency change may be authorized by an emergency change authority, often using an expedited process.

• Change authorities are not only needed for emergency changes.
• They are not assigned only when a change is deployed.
• They are not only required for normal changes.

• T?o m?t Systems Manager Automation runbook d? ch?y l?nh kh?i d?ng l?i ?ng d?ng trên các EC2 instance.
• T?o m?t Amazon EventBridge rule ph?n ?ng khi CloudWatch alarm chuy?n sang tr?ng thái ALARM.
• Ð?t Automation runbook làm target c?a EventBridge rule.

1. Log c?a ?ng d?ng du?c ghi vào CloudWatch Logs.
2. CloudWatch alarm phát hi?n nhi?u l?i liên quan d?n vi?c restart.
3. Alarm chuy?n sang tr?ng thái ALARM.
4. EventBridge nh?n s? ki?n thay d?i tr?ng thái này.
5. EventBridge g?i Systems Manager Automation runbook.
6. Runbook restart ?ng d?ng trên các EC2 instance, không restart c? instance.

• A: SNS không tr?c ti?p g?i Systems Manager Automation runbook nhu m?t target native.
• B: Lambda có th? th?c hi?n vi?c restart, nhung ph?i t? x? lý vi?c xác d?nh instance và ch?y l?nh t? xa.
• C: Lambda ch? làm trung gian d? g?i runbook, không c?n thi?t vì EventBridge có th? g?i runbook tr?c ti?p.

• MFA adds an additional authentication factor, such as a phone notification or verification code.
• It helps prevent unauthorized sign-ins, even if a password is compromised.
• It does not encrypt, store, or protect credentials used by deployment processes.

• Restrict a port to a defined number of MAC addresses
• Use statically configured or “sticky” MAC addresses
• Shut down or restrict the port when violations occur

• Load balancer: Distributes application traffic; it does not protect switch MAC tables.
• IPS: May detect suspicious traffic but is not the primary control for switch-port MAC limits.
• NGFW: Filters routed network traffic, not the switch’s CAM/MAC address table directly.

• Box 1: No — The rule requires user.department to equal Engineering. Engineer does not match, so User1 is not in AU1. Admin1 cannot reset User1’s password.
• Box 2: No — Admin1’s role is scoped to AU1 and cannot manage users outside that AU.
• Box 3: Yes — Admin2 is a Global Administrator and can reset User3’s password.

• Ramen is a Linux worm associated with Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7.0 systems.
• It spreads by scanning randomly generated IP addresses using tools such as synscan.
• It exploits vulnerable network services, including web-related services, and may leave malicious files or altered web content.
• The tar.gz file is also a clue because it is a common Linux archive/package format.

• Code Red: Primarily targeted Microsoft IIS servers running Windows.
• LoveLetter: Spread mainly through email attachments.
• Nimda: A Windows-based worm that spread through email, web servers, and network shares.

• Architects design overall Splunk infrastructure and data strategy.
• Administrators manage configuration, access, and system operations.
• Knowledge Managers create and maintain knowledge objects such as data models, field extractions, and event types. They may support pivots, but they are not the primary users of them.

1. Clear principles and boundaries — Employees have freedom, but decisions must remain within clear organizational values, policies and limits.
2. High degree of freedom — Managers are trusted to make decisions rather than seeking continual approval from senior management.
3. Frontline customer responsibility — Customer-facing managers should be empowered to manage customer relationships and respond quickly to needs.
4. Transparent and ethical information — Information should be openly available and used honestly, supporting trust and informed decision-making.

• The JSON files contain one billion items, so this is a big-data workload.
• PySpark uses Apache Spark’s distributed, parallel processing, allowing the data to be processed across multiple compute nodes.
• It can read and transform data directly from OneLake, helping minimize unnecessary data movement or duplication.
• A Fabric notebook can also support exploration and visualization, as well as Spark-based analytics and anomaly-detection workflows.

• Pandas is primarily in-memory and generally suited to smaller datasets. One billion records would be impractical on a typical single machine.
• A Power BI report with core visuals is appropriate for visualization and sharing, but it is not the best tool for large-scale transformation, parallel processing, or anomaly detection. It would normally consume prepared data rather than perform the entire workload.

Why this is correct

• Each user authenticates with their own Google account.
• Google manages the user’s SSH key association.
• IAM controls who can access instances.
• Access can be audited by user identity, so security can determine who accessed a VM.
• Granting the role to a Google group avoids managing permissions individually.

Why the others don’t apply

• A: A shared private key is difficult to distribute securely and cannot reliably identify which employee used it.
• B: Manually collecting and deploying keys on every instance is operationally inefficient and complicates auditing.
• D: A project-wide shared key has the same identity and key-management problems as option A. It also does not provide per-user accountability.

• Keep earlier prompt versions.
• Identify the last version that produced acceptable output.
• Restore it as a baseline.
• Make small, controlled changes—ideally one significant change at a time.
• Test the output after each change.

• A: Discards useful information about what worked.
• B: Large simultaneous changes make it difficult to identify the cause of problems.
• D: Accepts output that does not meet the requirements.

• 50% memory utilization baseline: The environment can be provisioned with excess capacity, leaving room for growth and workload spikes.
• Storage scalability: Cloud storage can generally be expanded as needed without redesigning the physical platform.
• Single circuit failure resilience: A properly designed IaaS provider uses redundant power circuits and infrastructure, so failure of one circuit should not take the platform offline.

• A — Dual PDUs: Helps with power redundancy but does not provide storage scalability.
• C — Network load balancing: Provides network-path resilience, not memory or storage scalability, and does not address a power-circuit failure.
• D — Multiple NAS devices: May improve storage capacity, but does not inherently provide power resilience or the required compute-capacity baseline.

• A — Improved management of storage space: Correct.

• B — Improved supplier relationships: Correct.

• C — Improved pricing decisions: Correct.

• D — Non-product-specific costs must be apportioned: Incorrect.

• E — Profitability of each customer group: Incorrect.

• The CSV contains the external users’ email addresses.
• The bulk invitation feature supports inviting many guest users in one operation.
• Each invited user becomes a guest account in contoso.com.

• Wireshark captures packets and allows you to examine their contents, potentially revealing usernames and passwords sent without encryption.
• Netcat creates network connections and can send or receive data, but it is not primarily a packet-analysis tool.
• Nessus scans for known vulnerabilities and configuration issues; it generally would not prove that credentials are visible in transit.
• Nmap performs network discovery and port/service scanning, not detailed packet-content inspection.

• Group1 — security-enabled: Eligible.
• Group2 — mail-enabled and security-enabled: Eligible because it is still a security group.
• Group3 — Microsoft 365 group: Not eligible for group-based licensing.
• Group4 — Microsoft 365 group, not security-enabled: Not eligible.