CFA CFA I Exam Prep
CFA Level I Chartered Financial Analyst (Page 77 )

• Basic: Self-help only; no technical support or design assessment.
• Standard: Technical support, but not the full proactive architectural guidance required here.
• Professional Direct: Provides proactive guidance and architecture-related assistance.
• Premier: Also supports this, but is a more expensive, enterprise-level option.

• The VM keeps its configuration, disks, IP settings, and associated resources.
• The operation may cause downtime.
• You cannot guarantee that it will move specifically to Host2; Azure selects the new host.
• Update management is for update configuration, not host relocation.
• Moving to another subscription does not move the VM to a different physical host.
• Usage location is unrelated to VM placement.

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

• Cloud financial management
• Portfolio management
• Data governance
• Risk management
• Compliance

• SharePoint search: Finds documents based on search terms, but it does not reliably identify every 32-character account number for DLP enforcement.
• A hunting query in Microsoft 365 Defender: Used for security investigations, not for defining sensitive content in a DLP policy.
• Azure Information Protection: Uses classification and labeling; it does not automatically identify this specific account-number pattern unless configured with a matching sensitive information type.
• RegEx pattern matching: Best suited for structured identifiers with a known format, such as account numbers, employee IDs, or policy numbers.

• A. Modify CommunitiesSelfRegController

• C. Configure Communities registration to use a custom Visualforce page

• B. Modify the self-registration trigger — There is no standard “self-registration trigger” intended for this configuration. The registration logic is handled by the Visualforce controller.
• D. Configure a custom Apex controller — The standard approach is to modify the provided CommunitiesSelfRegController, rather than simply selecting a separate controller configuration.

• ARP poisoning: Redirects or intercepts local network traffic; monitoring would typically show suspicious ARP changes or man-in-the-middle behavior.
• Jamming: Interferes with wireless or radio signals. It would affect connectivity, not usually show a server-specific overload.
• Kerberoasting: Attempts to obtain and crack Kerberos service-account hashes; it does not normally cause a system outage.

• The requirement explicitly says the organization wants to use SAML to secure Salesforce API access.
• The SAML Bearer Assertion Flow exchanges a SAML assertion for a Salesforce OAuth access token.
• It is intended for server-to-server or other noninteractive integrations where the application has already been authenticated by an identity provider.
• The connected app can be configured so administrators authorize or preauthorize applications that consume the APIs.

• B — JWT Bearer Flow: Uses a signed JWT, not a SAML assertion. It would be appropriate if the requirement specified JWT-based authentication.
• C — SAML Assertion Flow: This is not the standard Salesforce OAuth flow name; the relevant name is OAuth 2.0 SAML Bearer Assertion Flow.
• D — User-Agent Flow: Designed for interactive browser-based authorization, not a SAML-based server-to-server integration.

• Discovers sensitive data in Amazon S3 buckets
• Uses machine learning and pattern matching to identify data such as personally identifiable information (PII)
• Helps assess S3 security and privacy risks
• Generates findings for potentially sensitive or exposed data

• Amazon Detective: Investigates security findings and performs root-cause analysis.
• Amazon GuardDuty: Detects threats and suspicious activity across AWS accounts and workloads.
• AWS IAM Access Analyzer: Identifies resources that are accessible from outside their intended trust zone, such as publicly accessible S3 buckets.

• A. Extranet
• B. VLAN
• C. Intranet
• D. VPN

• R-squared: Typically used for regression, not classification.
• RMSE: Measures prediction error for continuous numerical values, so it is not the best fit here.
• Learning rate: A training hyperparameter that controls how quickly the model updates its weights; it is not an evaluation metric.

1. Determine which host was infected first—the originating host.
2. Decide whether each other host is clean or infected based on communication and event logs.

• Compare timestamps and find the earliest suspicious event.
• Look for the host that initiated the malicious connection, file transfer, exploit, or command—not merely a host that later received traffic.
• Follow the timeline through the firewall:

• A host is likely infected if it both receives suspicious activity and then initiates related malicious traffic.
• A host may be clean if the firewall blocked the connection and there is no evidence of execution or follow-on communication.

Why

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

Why the other options are less suitable

• GPO logon script: Runs only when a user logs on and may not run during initial VM provisioning.
• GPO startup script: Can work, but requires the VM to be joined to the domain and the policy to be applied. It is also normally evaluated at each startup.
• Place scripts in a VHD: Merely placing scripts on a disk does not cause them to execute.

• A. Tuning system software: This is a corrective action, not an analysis method. Tuning should be based on measured performance data.
• B. User dissatisfaction reports: Useful as an indicator, but subjective and insufficient for diagnosing the cause.
• D. Off-peak utilization and response time: This may hide problems occurring during peak periods. Performance analysis should cover representative or peak workloads.

• A limited lifetime
• Permissions defined by an IAM role or policy
• The ability to access AWS APIs without using long-term IAM user credentials

• Amazon API Gateway — Builds and manages APIs; it does not generally issue AWS credentials for applications.
• IAM users — Usually use long-term credentials, which are less suitable for applications.
• IAM instance profiles — Provide temporary role credentials to applications running on EC2 instances, but are specifically tied to EC2. The broader requirement described is best met by AWS STS.

• S3 Lifecycle rules automate actions such as transitioning objects to different storage classes or deleting old objects.
• S3 bucket policies control access permissions; they do not preserve earlier object versions.
• S3 server-side encryption protects data confidentiality by encrypting objects at rest, but it does not prevent deletion or overwriting.

• Accidental deletion or overwriting ? S3 Versioning
• Unauthorized access ? bucket policies and IAM
• Data encryption ? server-side encryption

• Prevent connections to malware command-and-control servers
• Identify infected systems making those DNS requests
• Collect information for incident response

• A: Attackers do not normally use sinkholes to map a company’s domain structure.
• B: Redirecting employees from legitimate sites to attacker-owned sites describes malicious DNS manipulation, not a defensive sinkhole.
• D: Attracting attackers away from real resources is more closely associated with a honeypot or deception system.

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

• Program and project management
• Risk management
• Cloud financial management
• Data governance
• Portfolio management

• Sustainability
• Performance efficiency
• Reliability

• How quickly the vendor must respond to an incident or request
• Target resolution times
• Availability or uptime requirements
• Performance metrics and penalties for not meeting them

• SOW (Statement of Work): Describes the project’s scope, tasks, deliverables, and timeline.
• MOA (Memorandum of Agreement): Documents a formal agreement to cooperate or perform specific activities.
• MOU (Memorandum of Understanding): Records a mutual understanding or intent, often less binding than a contract.

• Use private connectivity from a cloud provider
• Set up SSO for federated authentication

• Private connectivity—such as a cloud provider’s private endpoint—keeps Snowflake access within the company’s private network path instead of exposing access over the public internet. This fits the VPN/VDI requirement.
• SSO for federated authentication allows Snowflake users to authenticate using the credentials already managed by the company’s identity provider—the same identity system used for VDI—eliminating separate Snowflake passwords.

• Tri-Secret Secure protects encryption keys; it does not provide private network access or credential reuse.
• A proxy Snowflake account outside the VPN conflicts with the requirement that Snowflake have no internet visibility and is not the normal solution for federated login reuse.

• A — IDS attack signatures: An IDS generally detects suspicious network activity but does not necessarily scan uploaded PDF files or prevent them from being accepted.
• C — Load balancer: Distributes traffic among servers; it does not inspect files for malware.
• D — WAF command-injection blocking: A WAF can help block web attacks such as command injection, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting, but this option does not specifically address malicious PDF uploads.

• Help the team identify the causes of delays.
• Encourage continuous improvement through retrospectives.
• Support the team in changing its process, tools, or collaboration methods.
• Help remove impediments that the team cannot resolve independently.

• A: An impediment log may help, but simply maintaining it does not ensure the impediments are resolved.
• B: Directing the team to solutions conflicts with agile self-management.
• C: Adding impediments to the product backlog could delay their resolution and treats them like product features.

• Microsoft Teams: Connects to Teams-related data, but it isn’t the primary connector for the Power Apps data tables.
• Personal Analytics: Provides personal productivity insights, not application data.
• SQL Server database: Only applies if the app explicitly uses SQL Server as its data source.
• Dataflows: Used for preparing and centralizing data, not as the normal direct connection to a Power Apps app.

• Dynamics 365 Remote Assist — used for remote collaboration and mixed-reality scenarios.
• Dynamics 365 Finance — supports financial and operational management.
• Dynamics 365 Business Central — designed primarily for small and medium-sized businesses’ finance and operations.
• Dynamics 365 for Phones — provides mobile access to Dynamics 365 apps, including Sales, through the mobile Unified Interface.

• B — Prompts and suggestions retained for 28 days
• C — User engagement data kept for two years

• The key distinction is between content data—your prompts, code context, and generated suggestions—and engagement data, such as usage activity.
• Do not confuse retention with training: enterprise Copilot data is generally not used to train GitHub’s models without appropriate authorization.
• For a current exam, verify the policy version cited by the exam provider. The key’s C is likely correct, but B should be treated cautiously and may no longer reflect the current policy.

• Primary and core nodes: Use On-Demand Instances because the workload is business-critical. These nodes manage the cluster and store/process HDFS data.
• Task nodes: Use Spot Instances in an instance fleet. Task nodes are suitable for interruption because they do not hold essential cluster data and can be replaced or diversified across instance types.
• Terminate the entire cluster after processing: The job runs only about six hours each morning, and EMRFS stores data in Amazon S3. Keeping the cluster running for the rest of the day would waste money.

• A: Using Spot for primary and core nodes risks interruption of the critical cluster.
• C: All On-Demand is reliable but unnecessarily expensive; terminating the cluster helps, but Spot task nodes provide greater savings.
• D: Leaving primary and core nodes running after the task finishes continues to incur costs. Savings Plans also are less appropriate for this intermittent workload.

• Geo-redundant storage (GRS) replicates data to a secondary Azure region, but the secondary copy is normally unavailable for read access.
• RA-GRS provides geo-replication and read-only access to the secondary region, satisfying all requirements.
• Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) replicates data across availability zones within the same Azure region, not separate geographic regions.
• Locally redundant storage (LRS) keeps copies within a single datacenter or region and does not provide geographic resiliency.

• Virtual machine disks
• Databases
• Storage accounts
• File systems

• Site-to-site VPN: protects data moving between networks
• HTTPS: protects data moving between a client and website
• Encrypted email: generally protects the message while being transmitted

• At rest = stored data
• In transit = moving data
• In use = data currently being processed by a system

• Amazon S3 — Object storage, not a database.
• Amazon DynamoDB — Fully managed NoSQL key-value and document database.
• Amazon Redshift — Managed data warehouse designed for analytics, not primarily transactional MySQL workloads.

• 25 — Traditional SMTP server-to-server mail transfer; not normally used for secure client submission.
• 110 — POP3, used to retrieve email and typically unencrypted.
• 143 — IMAP, used to access email and typically unencrypted.

• The listener has a virtual IP address on the load balancer.
• The active SQL Server replica must respond using the listener’s IP address, not its own VM IP.
• Floating IP allows the listener IP to be preserved and returned by the active replica.
• This is required for the SQL Always On listener configuration.

• A health probe for the SQL listener/cluster role
• The SQL Server listener port, commonly 1433
• Appropriate backend pool membership

• A — VARIANT "null" values are not the same as SQL NULL: Correct.

• B — Frequent, single-row DMLs: Incorrect.

• C — Validate data before loading into the target table: Correct.

• D — Use staging tables to manage MERGE statements: Correct.

• The Subscribe to Reports user permission.
• At least Viewer access to the report’s folder.
• Access to the report itself.

• Subscribe to Reports: Run Reports is not the relevant Salesforce permission.
• Chatter Subscribe to Reports is not a Salesforce permission.
• Set Running User relates to configuring the user whose permissions determine report results—not subscribing to a report.

• Multi-factor authentication
• A secure password change for users whose credentials may be compromised

• Ease of exploitation
• Required privileges
• User interaction
• Impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability

• CVE: Identifies and names a specific publicly known vulnerability; it does not measure severity.
• OSINT: Refers to intelligence gathered from publicly available sources.
• SOAR: Automates and coordinates security operations, such as alert response and playbooks.

• Field name and label
• Data type
• Reference table
• Default value
• Whether the field is mandatory or read-only
• Field attributes and configuration

• A: Labels and translations are handled through documentation and translation-related records.
• C: Table relationships may be represented through reference fields, but this is not the primary description of the Dictionary.
• D: Spell-checking language data is unrelated to the System Dictionary.

• ADF: Automatic Document Feeder; a printer/scanner hardware component.
• USB: A short-range wired connection, not a protocol for accessing a remote shared folder.
• PCL: Printer Control Language; it describes how print jobs are formatted, not how files or printers are shared over a network.

• View/inspect configuration: Possible.
• Modify the installed application or its S-Controls: Typically restricted in a test-drive org.

• The user authenticates with the external Identity Provider.
• Salesforce receives the SAML assertion.
• Salesforce uses attributes in that assertion—such as username, email, first name, last name, and profile/community information—to create the user during the first login.
• On later logins, Salesforce updates or uses the existing user record.

• On-the-fly provisioning is a general phrase; the Salesforce capability being tested is specifically JIT provisioning.
• Salesforce APIs would require a separate integration and provisioning process.
• Identity Connect is designed primarily to synchronize users from an identity directory, not to create users at the moment of their first SAML login.

• Import: Copies data into the Power BI model. It requires scheduled or manual refresh, so it may not meet the two-minute requirement.
• Live connection: Connects to an existing Power BI semantic model or Analysis Services model; it is not the appropriate choice for connecting directly to the Azure SQL database in this scenario.

• Exploitability
• Attack complexity
• Required privileges
• User interaction
• Impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability

• CVE: Identifies and tracks a specific vulnerability; it does not primarily measure severity.
• OSINT: Open-source intelligence gathered from publicly available sources.
• SOAR: Security orchestration, automation, and response technology used to automate security workflows.

1. Get Data > Folder

1. Expand the Attributes column

1. Remove the Content column

• Folder connector: lists files and their metadata, but also includes a Content binary column.
• Combine Files: processes and combines the actual CSV contents, which is explicitly disallowed here.

• Server provisioning
• Operating systems and runtime infrastructure
• Scaling
• Much of the maintenance and patching

• Thin clients reduce endpoint hardware requirements but do not specifically streamline code deployment.
• Private cloud provides dedicated cloud infrastructure but usually requires more management and expense.
• Virtual machines improve resource utilization, but administrators still manage the VMs, operating systems, and deployments.

1. Start with the 48-bit MAC address.
2. Split it into two 24-bit halves.
3. Insert FF:FE between the halves, creating a 64-bit value.
4. Invert the U/L bit—the seventh bit from the left in the first MAC byte.

text 
MAC:       00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E 
EUI-64:    02:1A:2B:FF:FE:3C:4D:5E

• FE80 is the prefix commonly used for an IPv6 link-local address, not part of the EUI-64 interface ID.
• The interface ID is not random.
• The MAC address is modified by inserting FF:FE and changing the U/L bit.

• Which Security policy matches
• Which NAT rule/translation is selected
• Which PBF rule applies
• Which route is used

text 
test security-policy-match ... 
test nat-policy-match ... 
test pbf-policy-match ... 
test routing fib-lookup ...

• Data loss prevention (DLP): Helps detect or prevent unauthorized data transfers, but does not directly protect data on a stolen, powered-off laptop.
• Operating system hardening: Reduces vulnerabilities and attack surface, but does not adequately protect stored data if the device is stolen.
• Boot security: Helps prevent unauthorized operating systems or boot media from loading. It supports device security but is not the primary solution for protecting the data itself.

• Planning – identifying the need, objectives, scope and resources.
• Analysis – understanding business requirements and current problems.
• Design/development – determining how the system will work.
• Implementation – installing the system and putting it into operation.

• Port 515: LPD/LPR line-printer service
• Port 631: IPP — Internet Printing Protocol
• Port 9100: JetDirect/RAW printing, commonly used by network printers

• Linux machine: Linux could run these services, but the three printer-specific ports strongly indicate a printer.
• Router: Routers may use Telnet and HTTP, but normally would not expose ports 515, 631, and 9100 together.
• Windows machine: Windows can share printers, but this particular service combination is more characteristic of a network printer’s embedded operating system.

• Elicited and documented customer requirements
• Converted them into clear, measurable specifications
• Validated the requirements with the customer
• Used them as the basis for design, quality checks, and acceptance

• A: Requirements should reflect the customer’s needs—not the supplier’s standards.
• B: Iteration review planning does not replace proper requirements collection.
• D: A retrospective occurs after work is completed and is mainly for process improvement, not initial requirements definition.