CFA CFA I Exam Prep
CFA Level I Chartered Financial Analyst (Page 326 )

• 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.

• What information each stakeholder needs
• When and how often it should be communicated
• Which format or channel should be used
• Who is responsible for communicating it

• A: The team should not decide stakeholder communications without first checking the established plan and CEO’s needs.
• B: An executive summary may be appropriate, but choosing a solution before reviewing the plan is premature.
• D: The stakeholder engagement plan addresses how to engage stakeholders, but this is primarily a communication planning issue.

• Installing software
• Applying configuration changes
• Calling PowerShell scripts
• Running setup or customization commands

cmd 
powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File C:\Scripts\ConfigureVM.ps1

• GPO logon script: Runs only when a user logs on and depends on domain/GPO processing.
• GPO startup script: Runs during startup, but requires the VM to be domain joined and receives the applicable GPO.
• Place scripts in a VHD: Merely makes the scripts available; it does not automatically execute them.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Liability accounts (2000–2999) would incorrectly require dimensions, although they should have none.
• Expense accounts (6000–6998) would incorrectly require Customer, which should be optional.
• Account 6999 needs a separate rule because it requires all four dimensions, including Customer.

• 2000–2999: no dimensions
• 4000–4999: Department and Division required; Project and Customer optional
• 6000–6998: Department, Division, and Project required; Customer optional
• 6999: Department, Division, Project, and Customer required

• Access controls — ensuring only authorized users can access it.
• Encryption — protecting the data if it is intercepted or exposed.

• Limiting the number of MAC addresses allowed on a switch port
• Restricting ports to specific known MAC addresses
• Taking an action—such as dropping frames or shutting down the port—when the limit is exceeded

• Load balancer: Distributes application traffic; it does not protect switch MAC tables.
• IPS: May detect some attack traffic, but is not the primary control for switch-port MAC limits.
• NGFW: Filters network traffic at the firewall, but does not directly control MAC addresses learned by a switch.

• Azure DevOps Analytics views are accessed through the Power BI Azure DevOps (Boards only) connector.
• This connector authenticates directly to Azure DevOps Services and lets you select an Analytics view.
• Analytics views allow filtering and shaping data in the cloud before Power BI loads it.
• Azure DevOps Server (Boards only) is for an on-premises Azure DevOps Server instance, not Azure DevOps cloud.
• A generic OData Feed connection can access OData endpoints, but it is not the purpose-built connector for Azure DevOps Analytics views.
• “OData queries” describes the underlying technology or query approach, not the most appropriate Azure DevOps connector choice here.

• Suspended an operator who refused to use unsafe equipment.
• Paid another operator a bonus for using it.
• Prioritised short-term productivity over employee safety.

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

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

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

1. insert con; ? 1
2. Database.setSavepoint(); ? 2
3. update con; ? 3
4. Database.rollback(sp_admin); ? 4

• D — Value analysis: Correct. It examines an existing product to identify ways of reducing its cost while still providing the required functions, quality and reliability.
• E — Kaizen costing: Correct. It involves making continuous, small improvements and cost reductions while the product is already in production.

• Functional analysis: It is not limited to minimizing the cost of the originally defined functions. It examines what functions are required and how they can be provided at the lowest overall cost.
• Value engineering: Usually applies to the design and development of a new product, rather than being a fundamental redesign of existing organisational processes. That description is closer to business process re-engineering.
• Target costing: The target cost is generally established during the product development stage, before production begins. It is not continuously reset while the product is in production.

• 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.

• CHAP: Uses a challenge-response exchange, so the password is not directly transmitted.
• IPsec: Provides authentication, integrity, and encryption for IP communications.
• EAP: An authentication framework that supports stronger methods, such as certificates or token-based authentication.

• SQL injection
• Cross-site scripting (XSS)
• Malicious or malformed web requests
• Some application-layer attacks

• Layer 4 firewall: Filters based mainly on IP addresses, ports, and transport protocols; it cannot deeply inspect web application content.
• NGFW: Provides advanced network filtering and may include application awareness, but a WAF is more specifically designed to protect web applications.
• UTM: Combines several security functions in one appliance, but it is not the most targeted solution for a web portal.

• 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.

• HTTPS: Secure web traffic, not general command-line server administration.
• SNMPv3: Secure network monitoring and management, not interactive server login.
• RDP: Provides graphical remote desktop access. It can be secure, but it is not the direct replacement for Telnet in this scenario.
• SMTP: Used to send email.

• 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.

• Microsoft Foundry is an enterprise platform for developers, data scientists, and IT teams.
• It supports the full AI application lifecycle: selecting models, connecting enterprise data, developing, evaluating, deploying, monitoring, and scaling solutions.
• It can include visual tools and low-code experiences, but it is not primarily designed to enable business users to build complete generative AI solutions independently.

• B: You still need to select and configure an appropriate model.
• C: Business users may participate through visual tools, but they are not the primary target audience.
• D: Foundry includes low-code tools, but it is not fundamentally a low-code-only platform.

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• A password cracker would normally be identified by behavior such as loading password hashes or attempting dictionary/brute-force attacks.
• The question describes a routine audit, not password recovery.
• Simply encountering a protected file during an audit is characteristic of a misconfigured or insufficiently privileged FIM.

• A: Concerns task scheduling and avoiding missed runs, not directly sizing the warehouse.
• B: The amount of data in a stream alone does not reliably determine compute needs; the SQL processing is what matters.
• D: A multi-cluster warehouse addresses concurrency, not the compute size needed for one task execution.

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

• A: Not expanding would increase its dependence.
• B: More business from the same corporation would make dependence worse.
• D: Passing work to other minority businesses does not solve its own dependence.
• E: The passage does not suggest that it can force or influence the corporation to give work to others.

• A is valid:

apex 
  for (Account theAccount : AccountList) { 
      // process theAccount 
  }

• D is conceptually valid, using an index:

apex 
  for (Integer i = 0; i < AccountList.size(); i++) { 
      Account theAccount = AccountList[i]; 
  }

• B is invalid because for(AccountList) is not valid loop syntax.
• C is invalid because each item is an Account, not a List.

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.

1. Write a structured log entry to CloudWatch Logs containing:

1. Create a CloudWatch Logs metric filter that:

text 
ApiRequests 
Operation=GetOrders 
ResponseCode=500 
Version=2.4.0

• B is incorrect: CloudWatch Logs Insights queries analyze logs but do not directly publish metrics in this manner.
• C is incorrect: ALB access logs do not contain arbitrary Lambda response metadata as custom fields.
• D is incorrect: X-Ray traces and insights are not the appropriate mechanism for creating these custom, dimensioned application metrics.

• Domain controllers, because the requirement specifically excludes them. However, note that both member servers and domain controllers run Windows Server, so OS targeting alone cannot distinguish them unless the targeting option allows selecting the relevant server role/version. In the usual exam interpretation, target the applicable server OS category.
• Client computers, because they run a client Windows operating system.

• Domain: Targets membership in a domain, not the computer’s operating-system type.
• Security Group: Would require creating and maintaining a group containing all member servers, increasing administrative effort.
• Environment Variable: Not designed to reliably identify member servers.

• 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.

• 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

• 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

• PC A: 192.168.1.10/24
• PC B: 192.168.2.10/24

• Both PCs have a correct default gateway
• A router or Layer 3 switch connects the subnets
• Routing and firewall rules allow the traffic

• Sustainability
• Performance efficiency
• Reliability

• B. Deploy to a SageMaker endpoint: This is needed for SageMaker-hosted models, not for a model intended to be used directly in Amazon Bedrock.
• C. Register with SageMaker Model Registry: SageMaker Model Registry is unrelated to invoking custom models in Bedrock.
• D. Grant access in Bedrock: Access permissions may be necessary, but they do not replace the required provisioned capacity.

• Documented and formally requested
• Analyzed for security, cost, and operational impact
• Reviewed and approved by the appropriate personnel
• Tested before implementation
• Tracked and reversible if problems occur

• Risk management process: Identifies and evaluates risk, but does not directly authorize design changes.
• Product design process: Applies primarily while creating or developing the product.
• Design review process: May have identified the issues, but the next step for changing an already released design is controlled change management.

• Treatment one – easier to prepare: Convenience for the accounting team is not the main objective of financial reporting.
• Treatment two – fair representation: This is the correct choice because financial statements must faithfully represent the underlying transaction and its economic substance.
• Treatment three – maximises profit: Accounting policies must not be selected simply to manipulate or inflate reported profit.
• Treatment four – easier to understand: Understandability is important, but it cannot justify presenting information that is less faithfully represented.

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

• Custom domain: miami.weyland.com requires a paid App Service tier; Free and Shared are unsuitable.
• Two instances: Standard supports scaling to multiple instances.
• SSL: Standard includes SSL support.
• 12 GB storage: Basic provides only about 10 GB, so it does not meet the requirement. Standard provides substantially more storage.
• Cost minimization: Standard is the lowest tier among the choices that satisfies all requirements.

• A — Tables
• B — Named file formats
• C — Schemas
• E — Databases

Why these are correct

• Tables: Can be cloned using CREATE TABLE ... CLONE. The clone initially uses zero-copy cloning, so storage is shared until changes are made.
• Named file formats: Can be cloned as database objects, preserving the file-format definition.
• Schemas: A schema and its eligible objects can be cloned.
• Databases: A database and its eligible schemas and objects can be cloned.

Why the others are incorrect

• Shares: A share is an account-level data-sharing object, not a normal cloneable database object.
• Users: Users are security principals and cannot be cloned with CLONE.

• A. IDS attack signatures: An IDS primarily detects suspicious network activity; it is not the best tool for scanning uploaded files.
• C. Load balancer: Improves availability and distributes traffic but does not inspect files for malware.
• D. WAF: Protects web applications against attacks such as SQL injection and command injection. It may inspect HTTP requests, but malware scanning of uploaded PDFs is the key requirement here.

• The S3 bucket as an origin for static content
• The Application Load Balancer (ALB) as an origin for dynamic content
• An Amazon Route 53 alias record pointing the application domain to CloudFront

Why this works

• Static data: CloudFront caches objects from S3 at edge locations, reducing latency for users worldwide.
• Dynamic data: CloudFront forwards requests that require application processing to the ALB. It can also maintain persistent connections and use the AWS global edge network to improve delivery performance.
• One domain: CloudFront behaviors can route different path patterns to different origins—for example, /static/* to S3 and other paths to the ALB.

Why the other options are incorrect

• Global Accelerator is designed primarily for accelerating traffic to applications with endpoints such as ALBs, not for caching S3 content.
• Using separate domains or splitting static and dynamic traffic adds unnecessary complexity.
• CloudFront already provides the required global edge distribution and caching, so combining it with Global Accelerator is unnecessary here.

• CCTV system — Detective control: Cameras monitor and record activity, helping identify or investigate security incidents after—or while—they occur.
• Signs about being filmed — Deterrent control: The signs discourage people from attempting unauthorized or criminal activity because they know surveillance is present.

• Preventive: Stops an incident from occurring, such as a lock or access-control system.
• Corrective: Restores systems after an incident.
• Directive: Instructs people to behave in a certain way, such as a security policy.
• Compensating: Provides an alternative control when the preferred control cannot be implemented.

• Share of overall contribution: part of the organization’s total contribution is allocated to the supplying division.
• Dual pricing: the supplying division may record a higher transfer price while the receiving division records a lower price, with central accounts absorbing the difference.
• A centrally imposed price range: this may allow the transfer price to be set above variable cost, helping the supplying division recover fixed costs.

• The listener uses a virtual IP address shared by the availability-group replicas.
• Floating IP, also called Direct Server Return (DSR), allows the SQL Server nodes to respond using the listener’s IP address rather than their individual VM IP addresses.
• This is required for the availability-group listener to function correctly with an Azure internal load balancer.

• 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.

• The ERSPAN source is the device or interface whose traffic is being copied.
• The ERSPAN destination is the device receiving the encapsulated copy and forwarding it to the traffic analyzer.
• The local monitor session number is locally significant. Therefore, the source and destination do not need matching session IDs such as 47 or 48.
• The erspan-id identifies the ERSPAN stream and must correspond between the source and destination configuration.

• Understating expenses and liabilities
• Overstating profit
• Misleading users of the financial information
• Potentially breaching integrity, objectivity, and professional competence and due care