C++ Institute CPA-21-02 Exam Prep
CPA - C++ Certified Associate Programmer (Page 3 )

• Actions that call external APIs
• Subflows
• Connection and credential aliases
• Supporting integration logic

• Action — A reusable operation within a flow, such as “Create a record” or “Send email.”
• Connection — Defines how ServiceNow authenticates and communicates with an external system.
• Integration step — A general flow step, not the name for the packaged integration.

• A: Knowledge of IT platforms, networks, and methodologies — Useful technical knowledge, but the CISO does not need to be the deepest technical expert.
• C: Regulatory and project management knowledge — Important, but compliance and projects must still support the organization’s broader needs.
• D: Managing people and resources — Essential for execution, but effective management of the wrong security priorities will not produce good results.

• 25 — Traditional SMTP server-to-server mail delivery; often restricted and not the usual client submission port.
• 110 — POP3, used for retrieving email; normally unencrypted.
• 143 — IMAP, used for retrieving and synchronizing email; normally unencrypted.

1. The specific table — for example, incident
2. The parent table — for example, task
3. The wildcard table — *, which applies broadly

1. Create Workspace2 with Lakehouse2 — F
2. Migrate the Employee table to Lakehouse2 — E
3. Assign the data engineer the Contributor role for Workspace1 — D

Why

• Sharing Lakehouse1 would not provide the required isolation.
• Viewer access would not allow writing to Customer.
• Giving Contributor access to Workspace2 would expose the sensitive table.

• contoso.onmicrosoft.com
• contoso1.onmicrosoft.com

• onmicrosoft.com domains: Maximum of five per tenant.
• Custom domains: Domains that your organization owns and verifies in Microsoft 365.

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.

• The underside clips or hinges are broken.
• The cap is stuck, loose, or misaligned.
• The cap no longer presses the switch correctly.
• The cap itself is missing or physically damaged.

• Deterrent control: The signs warning people they may be filmed discourage unauthorized or malicious behavior. They may prevent incidents by influencing behavior, but their primary purpose is to deter.
• Detective control: The CCTV system monitors and records activity so security personnel can identify suspicious or unauthorized actions.

• Preventive: Blocks or prevents an incident, such as a lock or access-control system.
• Corrective: Fixes or restores systems after an incident.
• Directive: Tells people what they must do, typically through policies or procedures.
• Compensating: Provides an alternative control when the preferred control cannot be used.

• VLAN 10 for data
• VLAN 20 for voice

• A: Describes physical trunking or logical switch ports, not an SVI.
• B: An SVI can provide management access, but that is only one use—not the best description here.
• D: SVI use is not related to running out of physical ports.

• O File Gateway fornece uma interface de compartilhamento de arquivos usando protocolos como SMB ou NFS.
• Os usuários continuam acessando os arquivos localmente, aproveitando a baixa latência e o cache local.
• Os dados são armazenados de forma durável no Amazon S3, enquanto os arquivos acessados com frequência permanecem em cache no ambiente local.
• Isso amplia a capacidade de armazenamento sem exigir a substituição completa da infraestrutura existente.

• A: Montar buckets S3 diretamente não oferece uma experiência de compartilhamento de arquivos local tão adequada.
• C: Amazon WorkSpaces fornece desktops virtuais, não é uma solução principal de armazenamento compartilhado.
• D: Um volume EBS pertence a uma instância EC2 e não deve ser compartilhado diretamente entre vários usuários como um sistema de arquivos comum.

• Compute: Not used; no virtual warehouse is required.
• Data Storage: Not scanned again.
• Metadata: May help Snowflake manage and validate cached results, but it is not the Snowflake architectural layer identified as serving the request.
• Cloud Services: Handles query coordination, metadata services, authentication, and result-cache access.

• The backup file is complete and uncorrupted.
• The required data can actually be recovered.
• The recovery process and documentation work as expected.
• Recovery objectives, such as acceptable downtime, can be met.

• Backup logs may show that a job completed, but not that the backup is usable.
• File size does not prove the contents are valid.
• Email notifications may confirm process completion, not recoverability.
• Appointing a DBA does not itself validate backups.

• Extracted text and images
• Page numbers and bounding polygons for citation or grounding
• Structured tables, including tables that continue across multiple pages
• Document structure such as sections and figures

• Document Extraction: Extracts basic text and images, but does not provide the full layout and structural metadata required here.
• Azure Content Understanding in Foundry Tools: A broader content-analysis service, not the single built-in Azure AI Search skill expected by this question.
• GenAI Prompt: Can transform or interpret content but does not inherently produce reliable document geometry and page-level polygons.

• up ? down ? up
• Often happens rapidly or intermittently

• Faulty or loose cable or connector
• Failing transceiver, NIC, or switch port
• Speed/duplex or auto-negotiation problems
• Power or hardware instability
• Layer 1 interference

• Nothing plugged in: the port is simply down
• Latency: does not directly trigger err-disable
• shutdown: administratively disables the port, but that is not the same as an automatically detected err-disabled condition

• Report on the discount approval time for quotes

• Dashboard of opportunity stage duration

• Lead conversion trends measure lead-generation effectiveness, not opportunity closing time.
• Campaign ROI evaluates marketing performance, not delays in the sales process.

• 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.

• 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

• B — Incorporate contextual output encoding/escaping: Encode untrusted data based on its context—HTML, attribute, JavaScript, or URL—so the browser treats it as data rather than executable code.
• D — Run untrusted HTML input through an HTML sanitization engine: Sanitization removes or neutralizes dangerous elements and attributes, such as script-related content, while preserving safe HTML where needed.

• A: Enabling client-side scripts does not prevent XSS. Script restrictions may reduce risk in some environments, but “enable” is not a general XSS control.
• C: Cookie inspection is unrelated to preventing injected scripts.
• E: The SameSite cookie attribute primarily helps mitigate CSRF, not XSS. It should not generally be described as an XSS prevention measure.

• Business
• People
• Governance
• Platform
• Security
• Operations

• Sustainability
• Performance efficiency
• Reliability

• A is correct: It establishes the revised dates and identifies the effect on the critical path.
• B is premature: Stakeholders should be informed after the impact has been assessed and the updated schedule is understood.
• C is not automatically appropriate: Fast-tracking may introduce additional risk and should be considered only after analyzing schedule options.
• D is premature: Adding resources may not resolve a dependency and could increase costs without addressing the actual constraint.

• 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

• Which host first communicated with the suspected malicious source
• Whether that host initiated suspicious traffic or merely received it
• Which other hosts show evidence of infection, such as connections from the originating host
• Which hosts have no related suspicious activity and are therefore clean

• An outbound connection to a suspicious external address
• A downloaded or executed malicious file
• Later lateral connections from that host to other internal systems
• Firewall logs showing the direction and timing of the traffic

• Transport and handling
• Storage and warehousing
• Refrigeration
• Shelf-stacking or replenishment
• Other costs directly attributable to product P

• C — Some risks cannot be eliminated.

• D — Accepting residual risk does not imply recklessness.

• E — Most companies in this industry will say something similar.

• 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.

• nmap - 10.11.1.130 — a network scanning command; mitigated with controls such as firewalls, monitoring, or access restrictions.
• “Click this link to get your free gift card.” — a phishing or social-engineering message; addressed through user awareness, email filtering, and authentication controls.
• “Your connection is not private.” — indicates a certificate or TLS validation problem; addressed by correcting the certificate or secure-connection configuration.

• Where to find the TiMOS runtime image
• Which configuration file to load
• The IP address and related settings for the CPM management Ethernet port

• A: User authorization is configured in the router’s security configuration, not primarily in the BOF.
• C: Hardware initialization is performed by the boot process and system software.
• D: The system date and time are configured separately, often through NTP or CLI settings.

• O dispositivo estar registado no Windows Autopilot;
• A atribuição de Profile1 ao grupo;
• O estado de associação ao Microsoft Entra ID e de inscrição no Intune/MDM.

• terraform init is normally required first, especially for a new or changed working directory. It installs providers/modules and configures the backend.
• terraform plan previews the proposed changes.
• terraform apply applies those changes. It also creates a plan internally if you have not supplied a saved plan.

text 
terraform init 
terraform validate       # optional but recommended 
terraform plan 
terraform apply

• A. Remove rows where Sales[Status] is Canceled

• E. Remove Sales[Canceled Date]

• B: Removing Sales_Date would remove information users need—the date portion.
• C: Changing Delivery_Time to Integer could alter its meaning or precision and is not necessarily safe.
• D: Splitting the date/time column creates additional columns rather than simply removing unnecessary data.

• 10 minutes have elapsed, or
• 20 MB of accounting data has accumulated

• FTP — Transfers files using a client/server model and supports authentication. It uses separate control and data connections.
• TFTP — A very simple file-transfer protocol with no authentication and minimal features. Commonly used to transfer router or switch configuration files and IOS images.
• SCP — Securely copies files over SSH. It provides encryption and authentication.
• SFTP — Also transfers files securely through SSH, but provides more file-management capabilities than traditional SCP.
• HTTP/HTTPS — Primarily web protocols, but can also download files; HTTPS encrypts the session.

• TFTP = simple, unauthenticated file transfer
• FTP = file transfer with authentication, but not inherently encrypted
• SCP/SFTP = secure file transfer using SSH

• 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.

• File hashes
• Strings and metadata
• Binary or code structure
• Known malicious patterns
• Embedded indicators or signatures

• Sandbox: Executes the file in an isolated environment; useful for observing behavior, but usually slower.
• Network traffic analysis: Examines communications generated by a system or application, not the file itself.
• Package monitoring: Tracks software packages or installations and is not the primary method for examining malware signatures.

• Initial Intrusion: The compromised VPN account and stolen phishing credentials describe how the attacker first gained access, but that happened months earlier.
• Persistence: The scheduled tasks and recurring C2 connections show how the attacker maintained and automated continued access.
• Search and Exfiltration: This would involve locating and transferring data. The scenario does not primarily describe data discovery or theft.
• Cleanup: Cleanup involves removing evidence or covering tracks. Obfuscated scripts may make detection harder, but the main behavior here is maintaining access.

• Preparing and managing datasets
• Building and training machine-learning models
• Testing and evaluating models
• Deploying models as endpoints for predictions

• 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.

• STIX: A standardized format for exchanging cyber-threat intelligence.
• OVAL: A language and framework for describing and assessing system vulnerabilities and configuration issues.
• Threat intelligence feed: Provides current indicators or threat information, but is not specifically a reference for common application exploitation techniques.
• CVE: A catalog of publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, identified by unique CVE numbers.

• Confirming the data has the required columns and data types
• Handling missing or duplicate records
• Converting data into a suitable format
• Selecting or engineering useful features
• Splitting it into training, validation, and test sets

1. Prepare the training data
2. Select an algorithm or configure AutoML
3. Train the model
4. Evaluate its performance
5. Tune hyperparameters if needed
6. Deploy the model

• Amazon S3 as the origin for static content
• Application Load Balancer (ALB) as the origin for dynamic content
• Amazon Route 53 configured to point the company’s domain name to CloudFront

• /static/* ? S3 origin; cache content at edge locations
• Dynamic paths such as /api/* ? ALB origin; forward requests to the EC2 application

• The users currently have Office 365 Enterprise E3 licenses assigned directly.
• Assigning Microsoft 365 Enterprise E5 through a group does not automatically remove their directly assigned E3 licenses.
• From the Licenses blade, you can select the E3 product and remove it from all assigned users in one operation. This requires less effort than editing 2,500 users individually.

• Identity Governance manages access reviews, entitlement management, and related governance—not bulk license removal.
• Set-AzureAdUser does not remove product licenses.
• Set-WindowsProductKey applies Windows product keys and is unrelated to Microsoft 365 licensing.

• IRR assumes that interim cash flows can be reinvested at the project’s own IRR. This may be unrealistic, especially when the IRR is very high.
• MIRR assumes reinvestment at a specified rate, usually the company’s cost of capital or another realistic reinvestment rate.

• B: MIRR does not specifically favour projects with long payback periods.
• C: MIRR and IRR can rank competing projects differently.
• D: MIRR is not always higher than IRR; it may be higher or lower depending on the cash flows and reinvestment rate.

• 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 expected ROI: 15%
• New project ROI: 14%
• Cost of capital: 12%

• Project return = 14%
• Cost of capital = 12%
• It earns 2% more than the cost of capital, so it should increase shareholder value.

1. Discovery tries the SSH probe first.
2. SSH fails.
3. Discovery tries SNMP, which succeeds.
4. Discovery records SNMP as the preferred service for that IP.
5. Future discoveries try SNMP first.

• Classification identifies the type of device, such as a server, router, or printer.
• Credential affinity remembers which credentials work for a device.
• MID Server affinity associates a device or network with a particular MID Server.
• IP service affinity specifically controls the preferred discovery protocol or service.

• User2 is in Group1, so CA2 applies.
• CA2 targets Office 365.
• CA2 requires MFA OR an app protection policy.
• User2 has no app protection policy, but if User2 successfully completes MFA, the OR condition is satisfied.
• The device being noncompliant does not matter because CA2 does not require device compliance.
• CA1 applies only to Global Administrators. Unless User2 is also a Global Administrator, CA1 does not apply.

• Dark web: A place where leaked credentials may be sold or shared, not usually the original source.
• Threat feeds: Collections of intelligence about threats, not a typical leakage source.
• State actors: A type of attacker, not an accidental corporate disclosure source.
• Vulnerability databases: Track known vulnerabilities, rather than leaked credentials.

• Azure Machine Learning Studio is designed to build, test, train, and deploy machine-learning models, including predictive analytics.
• Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed NoSQL database. It can store data used by an AI solution, but it is not the primary service for developing and deploying predictive models.
• Therefore, the appropriate recommendation is Azure Machine Learning Studio, as shown in Question 15.

• The Intune device limit restriction does not apply in the normal way; DEM enrollment supports up to 1,000 devices.
• However, the Microsoft Entra maximum number of devices per user setting can still impose a limit when the enrollment creates an Entra device object.
• Therefore, a DEM account is not automatically unlimited. The effective limit depends on the Entra device setting and the enrollment/join type.