ISACA AAIA Exam Prep
ISACA Advanced in AI Audit (Page 20 )

• Deterministic approve/reject results
• Strict adherence to predefined rules
• Consistent, reproducible outcomes
• Auditability and regulatory compliance

• Leaf switches provide access ports for servers, endpoints, and other devices.
• Spine switches form the fabric’s backbone.
• Every leaf connects to every spine, creating a predictable, high-bandwidth, low-latency path.

• A: Adding both a spine and leaf is unnecessary for simply adding access ports.
• B: Adding a spine does not directly provide endpoint access ports.
• D: A single connection to one spine creates a bottleneck and a single point of failure.

• 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.

• 25 — Traditional SMTP server-to-server delivery; often restricted for client submission and not inherently encrypted.
• 110 — POP3 for retrieving email; unencrypted by default.
• 143 — IMAP for retrieving and synchronizing email; unencrypted by default.
• 587 — Authenticated SMTP submission, commonly secured with STARTTLS.

• 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.

1. Identify the fact table

• Records something that happened, such as a sale, test, appointment, or measurement
• Contains foreign keys to other tables
• Contains measures or numeric results
• Has many rows

2. Identify a dimension table

• Describe people, products, dates, locations, or departments
• Contain descriptive columns
• Are referenced by the fact table
• Have fewer rows than the fact table

3. Identify the surrogate key

• System-generated
• Unique within the dimension
• Often named PatientKey, CustomerKey, or similar
• Usually an integer
• Not meaningful outside the model

• Users logging in more frequently than average
• Logins occurring during non-business hours
• Patterns that may indicate compromised credentials or suspicious access

• Login History: Shows individual login attempts and basic details, but does not provide behavioral analysis or averages.
• Login Inspector: Used to troubleshoot or inspect a specific login attempt, rather than analyze organization-wide patterns.
• Login Report: May provide reportable login information, but it is not the specialized tool for forensic behavioral analysis.

• Generates a syslog message
• Shuts down the PoE port
• Places the port into error-disabled (err-disabled) state
• Frees the power allocation

• A device starting to draw power does not necessarily generate a syslog message.
• Monitoring does not pause data traffic while checking power.
• Drawing less than the configured minimum does not automatically mean the device has failed and should be disconnected.

• The application failing to start or becoming unhealthy
• An incorrect probe path, port, or protocol
• The application needing more startup time
• Dependency or configuration failures
• A liveness probe being too aggressive

bash 
kubectl describe pod <pod-name> 
kubectl logs <pod-name> --previous

• Scale to more replicas: may hide the issue but does not diagnose it.
• Decrease initialDelaySeconds: makes probes run earlier and could worsen startup failures.
• Drain and reboot the node: node metrics are normal, so rebooting is not justified as the first step.

• A: Person Accounts cannot be merged directly with standard Contact records.
• C: There is no Account Setup option that automatically merges Person Account duplicates.
• D: Matching rules and duplicate rules can help identify or prevent duplicates, but they do not automatically merge Person Accounts. Also, relationship considerations do not change the basic merge capability.

• Identity provider (IdP): Authenticates users and asserts their identity.
• Service provider (SP): The application being accessed—in this case, Salesforce/the employee portal.
• Identity store: A directory that stores user identities, such as Active Directory.
• Authentication store: A system used to validate credentials.

• Azure creates a corresponding service principal in Microsoft Entra ID.
• The identity’s lifecycle is tied to the Azure resource.
• If the resource is deleted, Azure automatically deletes the identity.
• Only the associated resource can use that identity to request tokens.
• You can grant the identity permissions to access services such as Key Vault or Storage without storing credentials in code.

• 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.

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.

• Crowd-sourced evaluation: Requires recruiting and managing many evaluators.
• Human-worker evaluation: Provides human judgment but requires coordination, labeling instructions, and quality control.
• RLHF: Is a training and alignment process, not simply a low-overhead model comparison method.
• Automatic model evaluation: Quickly evaluates outputs using predefined toxicity or quality metrics with minimal manual effort.

• staff use the new system;
• transactions and reports are checked;
• problems are corrected;
• feedback is collected.

• Phased changeover: different parts or functions are introduced in stages, often according to a planned sequence.
• Pilot changeover: one representative department, branch or group acts as a test site before wider implementation.
• Parallel changeover: old and new systems operate at the same time.
• Direct changeover: the old system is stopped and the new one starts immediately.

• Advanced Persistent Threat (APT): A sustained, targeted attack campaign or attacker group—not a vulnerability.
• Trojan: Malware disguised as legitimate software.
• Stealthware: A general term for malware designed to avoid detection; it does not specifically mean an unknown vulnerability.

• A is correct: Days beyond the included period incur an extra daily charge.
• D is incorrect: Daily use after 10 days is not free.
• B and C: Data-transfer pricing can depend on the direction and service terms. The exam’s intended distinction is that the included device usage period is the clearly stated no-cost benefit.

• tag=Priv searches the tag field for values beginning with Priv. The wildcard can match the remaining characters, so it matches Privileged.
• tag=Priv would search for the exact tag Priv, not Privileged.
• tag=priv* uses lowercase priv; tag matching is treated as case-sensitive here, so it may not match the tag Privileged.
• tag=privileged uses the wrong capitalization for the exact tag.

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.

• Packet capture: Collects and analyzes network traffic; it does not describe the scan type.
• Privilege escalation: Attempts to gain higher permissions after obtaining access.
• System enumeration: Identifies systems, services, or resources, but is not specifically defined by the lack of credentials.
• Passive scan: Observes traffic without actively probing systems. A vulnerability scan is generally an active assessment.

• A — Correct: Identify the data required by Salesforce, its dependencies, and how it should be validated. Verification scripts help confirm record counts, relationships, field mappings, and data integrity after migration.
• D — Correct: Use a full sandbox and perform trial migrations using realistic—or appropriately masked—legacy data. This exposes transformation, volume, dependency, and integration issues before production cutover.
• B — Less appropriate: Phased user migration and parallel operation primarily address user adoption and rollout risk, not the technical risks of data migration.
• C — Less appropriate: Although sandbox testing and integration testing are valuable, the option emphasizes test-data generation rather than validating the migration with representative legacy data. “A full sandbox for all systems” may also be impractical.

• CSIRT: A team that responds to and manages security incidents.
• CVSS: A scoring system for rating the severity of vulnerabilities.
• SOAR: A technology platform for automating and coordinating security operations and incident response.

• Separate accounts/domains create a strong administrative boundary between non-production and production.
• Separate projects provide distinct IAM boundaries, billing, quotas, service accounts, and resources.
• Developers can receive permissions in the development project without automatically gaining access to production.
• Production administrators can be restricted from development resources, supporting separation of duties and least privilege.

• A: Creates excessive project fragmentation without being required by the stated requirement.
• C: Keeps development and production under one account and does not clearly separate administrative duties.
• D: Uses one account and only two projects; it provides some project isolation but weaker organizational separation.

• Maintain head office control: Transfer pricing generally supports decentralisation rather than direct head-office control.
• Establish centralised decision making: This conflicts with divisional autonomy.
• Develop a top-down culture: Transfer pricing is intended to support empowered divisions and goal congruence, not impose purely top-down management.

• Sensitive document shared during a Teams chat: Teams chat
• Sensitive document stored/shared in a Teams channel: Teams channel messages

• Files shared in a chat are generally stored in the sender’s OneDrive, but the relevant DLP context is the Teams chat message and its attachment.
• Files shared in a channel are stored in the team’s SharePoint site, but the relevant context is the Teams channel message.
• The DLP rule can then use an action such as restrict access to the content to prevent guest users from opening the sensitive document.

• C — Some risks cannot be eliminated.

• D — Accepting residual risk does not imply recklessness.

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

• 255.255.255.128 = /25: 128 total, 126 usable
• 255.255.255.192 = /26: 64 total, 62 usable
• 255.255.255.224 = /27: 32 total, 30 usable
• 255.255.255.240 = /28: 16 total, 14 usable

• One for the network address
• One for the broadcast address

• 8 total addresses
• 6 usable addresses
• Mask: 255.255.255.248

• Red team: Simulates attackers; exploits weaknesses to test security.
• Blue team: Defends systems; monitors, detects, and responds to attacks.
• Purple team: Combines red- and blue-team efforts to improve detection and defense.
• White team: Oversees or manages the test, defining rules, scope, and authorization.

• Unfamiliar locations or IP addresses
• Anonymous or malicious IP addresses
• Leaked credentials
• Unusual sign-in behavior

• vBond — orchestration plane: Authenticates devices, helps them discover each other, and assists with NAT traversal and initial control-connection setup.
• vSmart — control plane: Distributes routing and policy information to WAN Edge devices using the overlay control plane.
• vManage — management plane: Provides centralized configuration, monitoring, and orchestration through its GUI/API.
• WAN Edge — data plane: Forwards user traffic across the SD-WAN fabric.

• An Adj-SID does not necessarily need manual configuration.
• It can often be dynamically allocated by the router, although manual configuration may also be possible.
• The adjacency information is advertised through the IGP, such as IS-IS or OSPF.

• It is identified by an Adj-SID.
• It represents a particular adjacency of a node.
• Its meaning is generally local to the advertising node; unlike a Node-SID, it is not a globally reusable instruction across the network.

• Accept: Acknowledging the risk without taking additional action.
• Transfer: Shifting the risk’s impact to a third party, such as through insurance or outsourcing.
• Mitigate: Reducing the likelihood or impact of the risk through security controls.
• Avoid: Eliminating the activity or process that creates the risk.

json 
{ 
  "Effect": "Deny", 
  "NotAction": [ 
    "iam:*", 
    "route53:*", 
    "cloudfront:*", 
    "support:*" 
  ], 
  "Resource": "*", 
  "Condition": { 
    "StringNotEquals": { 
      "aws:RequestedRegion": "eu-west-1" 
    } 
  } 
}

• SCPs set maximum permissions; they do not grant permissions. The default SCP allows actions, so the restriction must be an explicit Deny.
• aws:RequestedRegion checks the Region targeted by an API request.
• StringNotEquals: eu-west-1 denies requests directed to every other Region.
• NotAction allows designated global services to remain usable because they do not operate in a single AWS Region.
• Attaching the SCP to the OU makes it apply to existing accounts and accounts later added to that OU.

• Continuous deployment: Automates software releases; it does not specifically test input handling.
• Static code analysis: Examines source or compiled code without executing it. It can find coding flaws but does not directly stress the application with malformed inputs.
• Manual peer review: Developers inspect code or design manually. Useful, but not the best practice specifically for testing how a live product handles invalid input.

• DB1 (500 TB): Azure Data Box Heavy

• Virtual machines: Azure Migrate

• A — Increasing the minimum password length to 14 characters: Longer passwords have more possible combinations, making them harder to guess or crack through brute force.
• F — Requiring at least one special character: This increases password complexity and expands the possible character combinations.

• MD5 to SHA-512: Improves password-hash resistance, but does not stop users from choosing easy-to-guess passwords. Also, modern systems should use a password-specific hashing algorithm such as bcrypt, scrypt, or Argon2.
• Increasing maximum age to 120 days: Leaves weak passwords in use longer.
• Reducing minimum length to 10: Makes guessing easier.
• Reducing minimum age to zero: Allows immediate password changes but does not make the password itself harder to guess.

• D — Create sibling resource pools for the Production VMs and Test VMs.

• B — Configure a memory reservation on the Production resource pool.

• Shares only determine relative priority when resources are scarce; they do not guarantee memory.
• A parent resource pool alone does not provide a guarantee.
• A child pool for Test VMs does not reserve memory for Production.

• C series: CPU-optimized instances; not designed primarily for LLM training.
• G series: GPU instances generally optimized for graphics and some machine learning workloads, but not specifically large-scale model training efficiency.
• P series: Powerful GPU instances for ML training, but typically consume more energy than Trainium-based instances for suitable training workloads.

• A Layer 2 switch checks the destination MAC address in its MAC address table (CAM table).
• If the destination MAC is unknown, the switch cannot select a specific outgoing port.
• It therefore performs unknown-unicast flooding, sending the frame out every other port in that VLAN.
• The frame is not sent back through the port where it arrived.

1. Which host originated the infection

1. Which remaining hosts are infected

• Aggregation happens once, during the scheduled job.
• Dashboard users query a relatively small, precomputed table.
• Repeated users do not trigger expensive aggregations against the detailed sales table.
• Overwriting is appropriate because the summary is rebuilt for the reporting period.

• B: Structured Streaming is unnecessary for data that only needs daily refreshes and adds operational/compute overhead.
• C: A view recomputes the aggregation at query time, increasing latency and query cost.
• D: Delta caching may improve reads but does not replace the need to materialize the expensive aggregation, and cache availability is not the main design guarantee.

• Each team’s Bedrock workflow uses a separate IAM service role.
• The role’s Amazon S3 permissions can be limited to only that team’s customer folder or objects.
• This enforces least privilege and prevents one team’s Bedrock application from accessing another team’s data.
• Access is enforced by AWS permissions, not by asking users to provide a customer name in each request.

• A single role with broad S3 access does not provide team-level isolation.
• Asking teams to specify a customer name is not an access-control mechanism.
• Redacting data does not prevent unauthorized access.
• A bucket policy alone is insufficient unless it explicitly enforces the required team-role restrictions.

• Employees can use approved devices from remote locations or worldwide offices.
• Users do not need to carry or insert extra hardware.
• It helps prevent account takeovers from unknown devices.

• Geotagging: Restricts access based on location, which could interfere with remote work and travel.
• Smart cards: Require additional physical equipment and card readers.
• Time-based logins: Limit access according to time but do not strongly bind access to an authorized user device.

• Prevention costs: Avoiding defects, such as staff training and improved product design. The company has invested in these.
• Appraisal costs: Detecting defects before products reach customers, such as inspection and testing. The planned batch sampling has not been implemented.
• Internal failure costs: Correcting defects found before delivery.
• External failure costs: Dealing with defects after delivery, such as refunds, replacements, complaints and lost sales.

• An Azure pay-as-you-go subscription follows an operational expenditure (OpEx) model.
• With OpEx, the organization pays for services as they are used, typically based on consumption.
• There is no need to purchase and maintain physical servers upfront.
• This contrasts with capital expenditure (CapEx), where the company makes a significant upfront investment in infrastructure, such as on-premises Hyper-V hosts.

• NIDS: Monitors network traffic for suspicious activity and network-based attacks targeting the application or its supporting services.
• HIPS: Protects an individual host by monitoring processes, files, and system activity. It can help secure the web server, but it is not focused specifically on the application’s network attack surface.
• SIEM: Aggregates and correlates logs; it does not directly prevent attacks.
• Honeypot: A decoy system, not the primary protection for a production web application.
• Certificate revocation list: Deals with certificate trust, not application exploitation.

• 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.

• 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.