ISC2 ISSMP Exam Prep
Information Systems Security Management Professional (Page 14 )

• Amazon Kendra is a managed enterprise search service that can index content stored in S3 and support natural-language queries to find text inside documents (PDFs, Word files, etc.).

• Rekognition analyzes images/videos, not document text search.
• Polly is a text-to-speech service.
• Lex is a chatbot service.

• Create a Kendra index.
• Add a data source of type S3 and point it to your bucket (with an IAM role that allows access).
• Configure/document conversion if needed, then index the data.
• Use the Kendra API or console to run natural-language queries against your indexed documents.

• Answer: No.

• Why:

• If you need such an assessment while controlling costs, you’d generally pursue a paid MCS engagement or another option outside of the basic Premier entitlement.

• Date: 2018-12-31
• Time: 08:59

• B: The original value contains the text at, so it cannot be converted directly to a date.
• A: The last characters contain the time, not the date.
• D: Extracting the first 11 characters can leave an unwanted space and does not properly separate the time component.

• Incidents & alerts — see how the phishing activity was detected, correlated, and investigated.
• Threat Explorer — search for the malicious messages, recipients, URLs, attachments, and campaign activity.
• Email and collaboration reports — assess how many users or messages were affected.
• Remediation details — verify whether messages were quarantined, removed, or otherwise contained.

• Microsoft 365 admin center — general tenant administration.
• Microsoft Entra admin center — identity and access management.
• Exchange admin center — mail-flow and Exchange configuration, rather than full phishing-incident investigation.

• The correct answer: B) Synthetic identity theft.

• Synthetic identity theft involves creating a new, forged identity by combining information from multiple real people (e.g., names, dates of birth, SSNs) to commit fraud.
• In the scenario, Adam “created a new identity by obtaining information from different victims,” which matches the idea of synthesizing data to form a fake person.

• Medical identity theft: using someone’s medical information to obtain care or services.
• Tax identity theft: using someone’s personal info to file fraudulent tax returns.
• Social identity theft: impersonating someone to deceive others socially or publicly.

• Look for phrases like “create a new identity” or “combine information from multiple people” to identify synthetic identity theft.

1. Create a new AMI or copy the existing AMI while specifying EBS encryption and an appropriate AWS KMS key.
2. This creates an encrypted AMI backed by encrypted EBS snapshots.
3. Copy the encrypted AMI to the destination Region, using a KMS key available there.
4. Launch the application stack from the encrypted AMI.

• B: AWS KMS does not encrypt an existing unencrypted AMI in place. You must create an encrypted copy.
• C: AWS Certificate Manager manages TLS certificates, not EBS or AMI encryption.
• D: Enabling encryption by default affects newly created EBS volumes and snapshots; it does not encrypt an existing unencrypted AMI during copying.

• Source: on-premises SQL Server Database1
• Destination: Fabric Warehouse Warehouse1
• Connectivity: on-premises data gateway

• Dataflow Gen1: Primarily for Power Query transformations and isn’t the best Fabric-native choice for this copy operation.
• KQL queryset: Queries data; it does not orchestrate copying from SQL Server.
• Notebook: Could perform custom code-based movement, but it is unnecessary and less direct than a pipeline.

1. Download the updated VPN client configuration package from the Azure VPN gateway.
2. Remove or update the existing VPN client configuration on the Windows 10 workstation.
3. Install the new package and reconnect.

• You provision the virtual machine.
• You manage the guest operating system, applications, and configuration.
• Azure manages the physical servers, datacenter, and underlying virtualization infrastructure.

• Answer: B — Improve employee training and awareness

• Why this is correct:

• Why the other options are less effective here:

• Quick practical note:

• Failed login attempts
• The account being targeted
• The source user or system
• Time and frequency of attempts

• Two-factor authentication: Helps prevent unauthorized access, but does not primarily detect the employee’s attempts.
• Firewall: Controls network traffic; it generally does not monitor individual login attempts.
• Intrusion prevention system (IPS): Can detect certain network attacks, but this scenario is best addressed through authentication and audit logging.

• Secure: uses encryption, such as HTTPS or SFTP.
• Cross-platform: supported by many languages and operating systems.
• Internet-friendly: designed to communicate across networks, usually using standard Internet protocols.

• JSON/REST over HTTPS — widely supported, secure, and Internet-friendly.
• SOAP over HTTPS — also secure and highly cross-platform, though more heavyweight.
• XML over SFTP — secure file-based exchange, but it is not an API-style 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.

• Sales Processes define the set of Opportunity stages for a given workflow.
• Record Types let you have different data models (different fields and picklist values) on the same object.
• Page Layouts control which fields are shown/required for each record type.

• Create three Sales Processes so each team can use its own stages.
• Create three Record Types so each team has its own fields and picklist values.
• Create three Page Layouts so each record type shows the appropriate fields.

• Assignment
• Decision
• Get Records
• Loop

• Screen flow: Would include a Screen element.
• Inactive version: Inactive status does not restrict the available elements.
• Activated version: Activation status also does not determine the toolbox contents.

• A private IP address on the virtual network
• An associated public IP address

Flat organisation

• Few levels of management
• A wide span of control—managers supervise many employees
• Shorter communication channels
• More employee autonomy and quicker decisions
• Fewer formal promotion levels

Tall organisation

• Many levels of management
• A narrow span of control—managers supervise relatively few employees
• A clear hierarchy and reporting structure
• More formal supervision and communication channels
• More obvious promotion and career stages

• The Well-Architected Framework has five pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization.
• Operational Excellence: how you run and improve your systems—monitoring, incident response, and evolving processes.
• Reliability: the ability of a workload to recover from failures, maintain uptime, and scale as demand changes.

• Availability (A) is not a pillar name; it’s an outcome that relates to Reliability.
• Scalability (C) isn’t a pillar name; scalability touches on Performance Efficiency.
• Responsive design (D) is not a pillar in the Well-Architected Framework.

• In Microsoft Teams Phone System, a single Auto Attendant can handle multiple time-based greetings by using separate schedules for office hours, after hours, weekends, and holidays.
• You can configure one Auto Attendant with four distinct greetings mapped to:

• Open the Teams admin center > Voice > Auto attendants, edit or create an Auto Attendant.
• Under Time-based routing, define four rules:

• Create a Holiday schedule with the relevant dates (e.g., Easter, Christmas) and assign the Holiday greeting.
• Save the configuration.

• If your environment cannot separate weekend from after-hours within a single Auto Attendant, you might technically need more than one Auto Attendant.

1. Define Power Platform DLP policies
2. Add custom prompt modifications
3. Conduct adversarial testing

1. DLP policies first

1. Prompt modifications second

1. Adversarial testing last

• The answer: Question 51: C — Request trigger.

• To invoke a Logic App from an external service (here, the Azure Application Insights availability test) you need a trigger that starts on an incoming HTTP request. In Logic Apps, this is the trigger that exposes an HTTP endpoint — typically shown as "When a HTTP request is received" and referred to as the Request trigger.
• The other options aren’t appropriate:

• Create a Logic App with the Request trigger to generate a URL.
• Configure Application Insights to post the degraded-availability payload to that URL.
• Add actions (e.g., send email, follow-up) in the Logic App to notify the customer services team.

• A — conformant: Incorrect because one explicit requirement is violated.
• B — consistent: “Consistent” is not sufficient where the implementation contradicts a mandatory specification. The RPC mechanism is covered by the architecture, and the implementation differs from it.
• C — consistent: Incorrect reasoning: the RPC mechanism does have a defined architectural requirement, so conformance must be assessed.
• D — non-conformant: Correct because the implementation fails to follow the specified RPC/threading requirement.

• Mapping:

• Why:

• Quick note: If you were to host a website on a VM, it would be IaaS; if you used a platform service instead of a VM, it would be PaaS. CaaS (containers) isn’t shown here.

• A assigned without var becomes a global variable (in non-strict mode). So after myFunction(), a = 5 is accessible.
• b is declared with var inside the function, so it’s local to that function (function-scoped). It’s not defined in the outer (global) scope.

• console.log(a) prints 5.
• console.log(b) throws a ReferenceError: b is not defined.

• Correct answer: UBA (A)

• Why: UBA (User Behavior Analytics) analyzes user activity, builds baselines of normal access patterns, and flags deviations (e.g., accessing sensitive projects not related to the user’s role). This insider-threat detection is exactly what the scenario requires.

• Why not the others:

• On-prem you generalize and capture the VM as a VHD.
• Upload the VHD to Azure with Add-AzVhd.
• Register the VHD as an image in Azure with Add-AzImage (or New-AzImage) so it appears as a selectable image.
• Create new VMs from that image (e.g., with New-AzVM -Image ...).

• 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.

• Correct answer: S3 Versioning

• Why the other options aren’t suitable for this protection:

• Quick tip: For enhanced protection, enable Versioning (and consider related features like Object Lock for write-once scenarios in specific compliance cases).

• Active vs passive: Active assessment involves actively scanning targets by sending probes/packets to identify hosts, services, and vulnerabilities. Passive assessment observes traffic without probing.
• External vs internal: External assessment is about testing from outside the network perimeter; the scenario doesn’t specify external vantage, only that tools are identifying hosts/services across the enterprise network.

• The 99.99% availability SLA for VMs is achieved when you run VMs across two or more Availability Zones.
• Two VMs in a single Availability Zone do not meet the 99.99% target (their SLA is lower, e.g., around 99.95% or less depending on configuration).

• Deploy at least two VMs across two different Availability Zones (one VM in each zone, or both in two zones with a load balancer).
• This provides the required zone redundancy and the 99.99% SLA.

• What the dataflow options mean:

• Why C fits best:

• Why: After listing all resources, you need to assign who is responsible for each task. A RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) documents these roles for every activity.

• What RACI means:

• Why the others aren’t suitable here:

• Quick example: Task "Create user authentication module" — Responsible: Developer, Accountable: Tech Lead, Consulted: Security Architect, Informed: PM.

1. Ingestion Lambda receives requests from API Gateway and places messages in an SQS queue.
2. Processing Lambda is triggered by the queue and loads records into Aurora PostgreSQL.

• Decoupling: API request handling is separated from database loading.
• Buffering: SQS absorbs bursts when incoming traffic exceeds the database’s processing capacity.
• Controlled concurrency: Configure the SQS-triggered Lambda’s concurrency and batch size to avoid overwhelming Aurora or exhausting database connections.
• Automatic retries: Messages that fail processing can return to the queue and be retried. A dead-letter queue can capture persistent failures.
• Lower operational effort: The solution remains serverless and avoids managing EC2 servers or Kubernetes clusters.

• A: EC2 and Tomcat add server-management overhead.
• B: DynamoDB/DAX would require changing the database model and does not solve the Aurora ingestion design.
• C: SNS is useful for notifications and fanout, but SQS is better for durable buffering and backpressure in this producer-consumer workflow.

• IaaS: You deploy and manage virtual machines, operating systems, disks, and networking. Azure manages the physical datacenter and host infrastructure.
• PaaS: Azure manages the operating system and runtime so you can focus on deploying applications, such as with Azure App Service or Azure Functions.
• SaaS: You consume a complete, provider-managed application.

• User1 can sign in because the account is cloud-only. It does not depend on the on-premises domain.
• User3 can sign in because the account uses Password Hash Synchronization (PHS). Azure AD has a synchronized password hash and can validate the sign-in even when connectivity to on-premises Active Directory is unavailable.
• User2 cannot sign in because the account relies on Pass-through Authentication (PTA). PTA sends the authentication request to an on-premises PTA agent, which must contact a domain controller. With the internet connection from on-premises lost, that validation cannot occur.

• Assign a Teams license to a user — Licenses are assigned through the Microsoft 365 admin center, Microsoft Entra ID, or PowerShell.
• Deploy the Teams client — The Teams admin center manages Teams policies and apps, but it is not the primary tool for deploying the desktop client.
• Prevent users from creating teams — Team creation depends on controlling the creation of Microsoft 365 groups, generally configured through Microsoft Entra ID and PowerShell rather than directly in the Teams admin center.

• Correct answer: A. Email templates

• Snippets are reusable content blocks that you insert into email content, and they require an email template (or at least an email draft) to render.
• You can store region-specific footers as snippets and include them in a template, but there would be nothing to render the snippet into without a template.
• The other options aren’t prerequisites for using snippets:

• Authenticating websites with TLS/HTTPS
• Enabling certificate-based VPN authentication
• Signing or encrypting email
• Supporting device or user authentication

• VLAN tagging: Uses network-frame tags, such as 802.1Q; it does not rely on X.509 certificates.
• LDAP: May integrate with PKI in some environments, but X.509 certificates are not most commonly associated with LDAP itself.
• MFA: Certificates can be one authentication factor, but X.509 is fundamentally a PKI technology.

• The correct answer: C. Tokenization

• Why:

• Why the others are weaker:

• Why: A multi-modal embedding model maps both text and images into a shared vector space, enabling cross-modal similarity and retrieval (e.g., find images matching a text query or text matching an image).

• What it does: Enables efficient similarity search using a vector database or nearest-neighbor indexing.

• Why the other options aren’t suitable:

• Quick implementation note: you’d typically pair the embeddings with a vector store (e.g., ANN index) and possibly fine-tune on domain data for better alignment across modalities.

• Answer: C – netstat -an

• netstat -an lists all active connections and listening ports with numeric addresses, without resolving names. This lets you spot DoS patterns such as a flood of connections to a specific port or many connections from a single or few IPs.
• The other options don’t help as directly:

• Windows: netstat -an and look for numerous ESTABLISHED connections to a service or many SYNs to a port.
• Filter by port, e.g., netstat -an | findstr :80, or on Linux: ss -tunap | grep ':80'.

• Netstat provides a snapshot. DoS detection often benefits from continuous monitoring, flow data, and IDS/IPS logs.

• Correct answer: B — From the code repository, modify Startup.cs (in ASP.NET Core you configure the Application Insights SDK in code, not with ApplicationInsights.config).

• Why the other options aren’t correct:

• How to implement fixed-rate sampling (ASP.NET Core):

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args); 


    builder.Services.Configure<TelemetryConfiguration>(telemetryConfiguration => 
    { 
        var builder = telemetryConfiguration.DefaultTelemetrySink.TelemetryProcessorChainBuilder; 
        double fixedSamplingPercentage = 10; // 10% sampling 
        builder.UseSampling(fixedSamplingPercentage); 
    }); 


    builder.Services.AddApplicationInsightsTelemetry(new ApplicationInsightsServiceOptions 
    { 
        EnableAdaptiveSampling = false 
    }); 


    var app = builder.Build();

• IPv6 address types you’ll typically see:

• Unique Local Addresses (ULAs)

• If an address begins with fdXX:… or fc00:…, place it under “Unique Local Address” (ULA).
• If it begins with 2000::/3, place it under “Global Unicast.”
• If it begins with fe80::, place it under “Link-local.”
• If it begins with ff00::, place it under “Multicast.”

• Review the risk register.
• Use the previously defined risk response plan, such as assigning a backup resource, reprioritizing work, or using another qualified engineer.
• Implement the response promptly because the task is on the critical path.

• B: Revising the schedule without first applying the planned response may be premature.
• C: Excluding a required task could compromise the project’s objectives and requirements.
• D: Updating the risk and lessons learned records is appropriate, but it should happen after managing the immediate issue, not as the next primary action.

• Correct answer: A: The ITIL service value system (SVS).

• The SVS explains how all components (governance, the service value chain, practices, guiding principles, information and technology, partners and resources, and continual improvement) work together to enable value creation from demand to outcomes.

• B: The ITIL guiding principles describe aspirational guidance for decision-making, not how all components/activities interact.
• C: The four dimensions of service management explain areas to consider (organizations/people, information/technology, partners/suppliers, value streams/processes) but don’t describe the integrated system itself.
• D: A service relationship defines the relationship between provider and consumer, not the overall system of components and activities creating value.

• A. Implement retries with exponential backoff

• C. Reduce the frequency and/or size of requests

• B. Use PutRecord instead of PutRecords — PutRecord sends one record per call and does not remove the underlying throughput limitation. It may increase request overhead.
• D. Use Amazon SNS instead — SNS is not a direct fix for Kinesis shard throttling and changes the required streaming architecture.
• E. Reduce KCL consumers — KCL consumers read from Kinesis; they do not solve producer-side PutRecords throttling.

• Define the contractor’s deliverables, responsibilities, acceptance criteria, and deadlines.
• Agree on a reporting cadence to monitor progress.
• Allow the local company to use its expertise and manage its own work.

• A: “Under the supervision of the project manager” suggests excessive direct control and is less empowering.
• B: Micromanaging prevents the contractor from functioning independently and is inefficient.
• D: Deploying the contractor’s staff under the PM’s supervision creates a staffing/control arrangement rather than empowering the contracted company.

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

• What wipe does: A factory reset that erases all data, apps, and settings and returns the device to the OOBE. It removes the device from management and resets identity.
• Why not for this scenario: The goal is to repurpose the same device to a new user with Autopilot. Autopilot Reset keeps the device’s Azure AD/Intune identity and re-provisions the device for the next user without a full wipe.
• What Autopilot Reset does: Removes user data and apps but preserves device identity and management connection, then reapplies the Autopilot provisioning for the next user.
• When you’d use wipe instead: If you’re selling or permanently discarding the device, or you truly want to scrub all traces and start fresh without re-enrolling.