Splunk SPLK-2001 Exam Prep
Splunk Certified Developer (Page 2 )

• Reviewing security policies and standards checks whether controls are documented, not whether they work.
• Reviewing security logs may show that monitoring is occurring, but does not directly establish that preventive controls are effective.
• Analyzing technical security practices is broad and may assess implementation, but it is less objective than an actual controlled attack.

• Design/compliance effectiveness: policies, standards, and procedures
• Operational effectiveness: logs, records, and evidence that controls operate
• Technical security effectiveness: penetration testing or vulnerability testing

• Fileless malware: Nothing in the command indicates malware executing only in memory.
• Living-off-the-land binaries: Mimikatz is a credential-access tool, not a normal system utility used for LOLBin abuse.
• Social engineering: The command shows technical credential abuse, not manipulation of an accountant.

• Espionage: Stealing confidential information, often for a competitor or government.
• Data exfiltration: Unauthorized transfer of data outside the organization. This could occur, but the question focuses on using unapproved access methods.
• Nation-state attack: An attack sponsored or conducted by a government.
• Shadow IT: Employees using technology or access methods outside the organization’s approved security controls.

• SAML: Enables federated authentication and single sign-on between the IdP and SaaS providers.
• OAuth tokens: Allow delegated application access; OAuth is not primarily the first step for employee SSO.
• Password vaulting: Stores or autofills multiple passwords but does not eliminate the separate credentials or provide true federation.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

• Vulnerability scanner: Identifies technical weaknesses in systems, applications, or devices.
• Penetration test: Simulates attacks to determine whether vulnerabilities can be exploited.
• SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol): Uses standardized formats and protocols for automated vulnerability, configuration, and compliance checks.
• Illumination tool: Maps and analyzes broader supply-chain exposure and third-party risk.

• Microservices: An application-design approach that divides an application into smaller services. It does not inherently reduce the number of operating systems.
• Virtualization: Creates virtual machines, but each VM generally requires its own complete operating system. This improves isolation but does not minimize OS instances as effectively.
• Infrastructure as code: Uses code to automate infrastructure deployment and configuration. It improves consistency but does not determine how many operating systems are used.

• Each Azure VM must have at least one network interface (NIC).
• A single NIC can have:

• Therefore, each of the five VMs needs only one NIC:

• SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language): Commonly used for enterprise SSO between an identity provider and cloud applications. It sends signed authentication assertions to the service provider.
• RADIUS: Primarily used for centralized authentication to network devices, VPNs, and wireless networks.
• EAP: An authentication framework commonly used with network access technologies; it is not typically the SSO protocol for SaaS applications.
• OpenID: Related to identity authentication, but traditional enterprise SSO questions involving cloud applications generally expect SAML. OpenID Connect is a newer authentication layer built on OAuth 2.0.

• Owner, Contributor, and Network Contributor provide sufficient management permissions.
• Reader can view Traffic Analytics data but cannot enable or configure it.

1. Define – establish the project’s objectives, scope, feasibility and requirements.
2. Design – plan how the project will be carried out, including resources, schedules and controls.
3. Deliver – execute the project and produce the required outputs.
4. Develop – close the project formally and capture learning for future projects.

• Filing documentation and records
• Closing project and accounting systems
• Settling costs
• Handing over the completed work and obtaining sign-off
• Reviewing performance and giving feedback

• The requirement is an assessment of the Azure environment’s design, which requires a support plan offering proactive architectural guidance.
• Premier support would provide this capability, but it is a high-cost option.
• Since the requirement says to minimize expenses, Premier is not the best recommendation.
• A lower-cost plan with the required advisory/design-review capability—historically Professional Direct in Azure’s support-plan model—would be more appropriate.

• 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.

• The identified risk
• Its likelihood and potential impact
• The person or team responsible for handling it
• The response or treatment plan
• Risk thresholds, such as when escalation or action is required
• Current status and review dates

• Risk tolerance: The amount of risk an organization is willing to accept; it is a concept or limit, not usually the primary documentation.
• Risk transfer: Moving the responsibility or financial impact of a risk to another party, such as through insurance.
• Risk analysis: The process of evaluating risk likelihood and impact.

• 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.

• Reduce the training data: Usually makes overfitting worse.
• Add hyperparameters: Hyperparameters already control training; simply adding them does not solve the problem. Proper tuning could help, but that is not what the option states.
• Increase training time: More training can worsen overfitting if the model is already memorizing the training data.

• Works across SaaS and internal applications: TOTP is widely supported by authentication systems and can be integrated into many applications.
• Device manufacturer agnostic: A hardware token or authenticator application can generate the code without depending on a specific computer or phone manufacturer.
• Offline capability: The code is generated locally using a shared secret and the current time; an internet connection or cellular service is not required.

• Username and password: May work offline but provides weaker authentication and does not meet the intended improvement in security.
• Biometrics: Can depend on device hardware, operating-system support, and enrollment mechanisms.
• SMS verification: Requires cellular connectivity and is vulnerable to threats such as SIM swapping.

• 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.

• A: Configure security groups — Customers define inbound and outbound rules for resources such as Amazon EC2 instances.
• B: Classify company assets — Customers decide how their data and assets should be classified and protected.

• C: Amazon S3 is a regional service; customers select a Region, not individual Availability Zones for buckets.
• D: AWS manages the infrastructure and patching for Amazon DynamoDB.
• E: AWS manages the infrastructure used by AWS Lambda; customers do not select EC2 instances for Lambda functions.

• Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates define the virtual machines and related Azure resources declaratively. You can deploy the same template repeatedly, ensuring consistent VM sizes, networking, storage, extensions, and other infrastructure settings.

• PowerShell DSC extension applies and maintains the required Windows configuration inside each VM. DSC is state-based: if a setting changes or becomes incorrect, DSC can bring it back to the desired configuration.

• Azure Pipelines deployment groups organize deployment targets, but they do not primarily enforce ongoing VM configuration.
• Custom Script Extension runs setup scripts, but it is generally less maintainable and does not continuously enforce configuration like DSC.
• Pipeline stage templates reuse pipeline workflow definitions; they do not configure the VMs themselves.

• 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.

• Third-party enterprise application with embedded AI: The provider manages most security controls. The customer mainly manages users, data, and configuration.
• Application using an existing third-party FM: The customer controls the application and its inputs/outputs, but the provider controls the underlying model and infrastructure.
• Fine-tuning a third-party FM: The customer has additional responsibility for training data, data protection, and model behavior, but still depends on the provider’s base model and platform.
• Building and training a model from scratch: The customer controls the model, training data, application, deployment, and many security safeguards. This creates the greatest security ownership.

• SQL injection (SQLi): Attacks databases by inserting malicious SQL commands.
• Cross-site scripting (XSS): Injects scripts into web pages viewed by other users.
• Sideloading: Installing an application from outside the official app store. It may install unauthorized apps, but it does not generally unlock the operating system or enable restricted system features.

1. Convert text and images into numerical embeddings.
2. Store or compare those embeddings.
3. Retrieve the most semantically similar items.

• Embedding model: Best for similarity search and retrieval.
• Generation model: Best for producing new text or other content from multimodal input.

• 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.

• Open or insecure ports
• Enabled legacy or insecure protocols
• Known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations
• Weak services and outdated software

• curl tests web requests and HTTP-based services.
• Wireshark captures and analyzes network traffic; it does not normally scan servers for weaknesses.
• netcat can test connectivity to individual ports and sometimes grab service banners, but it is not a comprehensive vulnerability scanner.

• Input feature distributions differ from training data ? Analyze dataset drift metrics

• Model accuracy drops without code changes ? Analyze dataset drift metrics

• Endpoint latency increases under load ? Investigate scaling and infrastructure metrics

• CSIRT: A Computer Security Incident Response Team that handles and coordinates incident response.
• CVSS: A scoring system used to rate the severity of vulnerabilities.
• SOAR: Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response technology used to automate security workflows.

• Record changes — a flow can start when a record is updated or otherwise changes.
• Schedules — a flow can run at a specified date/time or on a schedule.
• Record inserts — a flow can start when a new record is created.

• Subflows are reusable flow components called by another flow; they are not normally trigger types.
• Record views do not generally initiate a Flow Designer flow.

• 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.

• Response and resolution time frames
• Availability or uptime requirements
• Performance targets
• Support obligations
• Penalties for failing to meet requirements

• SOW (Statement of Work): Defines the project’s scope, tasks, and deliverables.
• MOA (Memorandum of Agreement): Describes cooperation and responsibilities between parties.
• MOU (Memorandum of Understanding): Records a general mutual understanding, usually without detailed enforceable service targets.

• 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.

• Vulnerability scanner: Finds technical weaknesses in systems, applications, or devices. It does not usually analyze the entire supply chain.
• Penetration test: Simulates attacks against a defined target to identify exploitable weaknesses. Its scope is narrower.
• SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol): Provides standardized formats and methods for automating security configuration and vulnerability checks, rather than mapping the full supply chain.

• Restarting the device: May fix software glitches, but would not usually make cable orientation matter.
• Swollen battery: A safety concern, but it would not typically cause recognition only in one cable orientation.
• Failing cable: Possible, but less likely because the problem occurs with this particular device and not other devices of the same type.

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

CIMA P3 topics

• IT governance and systems strategy
• Systems development and implementation
• Change and project governance
• Strategic and business risk

• A — Plan for new systems: The committee should help identify and prioritise systems requirements and ensure planned systems support organisational needs.
• D — Consider competitive issues: New information systems may affect Y’s competitive position, service quality and efficiency. These strategic implications should be considered.
• E — Ensure the system meets company goals: This is a key governance responsibility. The committee should ensure the project remains aligned with Y’s objectives and delivers business value.

• B — Develop new systems: Detailed system development should be performed by IT specialists and project teams, not the steering committee.
• C — Manage the project: The project manager should handle day-to-day project management. The steering committee should provide oversight, challenge and key decisions, rather than manage daily activities.

• An active relationship is used automatically when filters are evaluated. An inactive relationship does not propagate filters unless explicitly activated in DAX, so it would not reliably enforce the required security behavior.
• Apply security filter in both directions allows RLS filters to propagate across the relationship in both directions. This ensures that bidirectional filtering respects the RLS rules applied to both tables.
• Assume referential integrity is unrelated to RLS. It is mainly a DirectQuery optimization that allows Power BI to use an inner join when matching keys are guaranteed to exist.
• The relationship must therefore be active, with security filtering enabled in both directions.

• Amazon EC2 instances — ???????? ?? ?? ??????? CPU, memory ??? instance size ???????? ???????
• AWS Lambda functions — memory configuration ?????????? ???????
• Amazon EBS volumes — volume type ?? size optimize ???? ???????
• ??????? ECS workloads — resource configuration ? cost optimization-?? ???????

• Memory ? compute usage ?????????? ???? custom code ????? ???? development ? maintenance ??????
• Cost allocation tags ???? ????? ??? ?????? ???? ??????? ???; inefficient resource ??????? ?? recommendation ???? ???
• CloudTrail resource ???? ?? API activity ??????, resource utilization ????

• A script of cloud CLI commands: IaC because the commands can be saved, reviewed, versioned, and rerun consistently.
• Manually run curl commands: Not necessarily IaC; they are manual actions unless organized into an automated script.
• A sequence of REST requests passed to an API: Could represent automation, but the wording does not explicitly say they are stored and executed as reusable code.
• Commands entered into a cloud console: Manual operation, not IaC.

• Due diligence: Investigating and evaluating a third party before entering into or continuing a business relationship.
• Attestation: An independent party provides assurance about an organization’s claims or controls. A SOC 2 examination is an example of an attestation engagement, but the analyst requesting and reviewing the report is performing due diligence.
• Internal audit: Reviews the organization’s own internal controls.
• Penetration testing: Actively tests systems for exploitable vulnerabilities.

• Tokenization: Replaces the value with a nonsensitive token, often reversible through a secure token vault.
• Hashing: Converts data into a one-way fixed-length value, generally used for integrity checks or password storage.
• Obfuscation: A broad term for making data difficult to understand; it is less precise than masking in this context.

• Accept: Acknowledging the risk without taking additional action.
• Transfer: Shifting responsibility or financial impact to another party, such as through insurance or outsourcing.
• Mitigate: Reducing the likelihood or impact of the risk through controls.
• Avoid: Eliminating the activity or condition that creates the risk.

• desktopwidth:i:1280
• desktopheight:i:1024

• Connection information: Controls connection-related settings, not the desktop resolution.
• Scaling plan: Controls when session hosts start, stop, or scale based on demand.
• Session behaviour: Controls behavior such as disconnect or logoff handling.
• Display settings: Specifically controls RDP display properties, making it the appropriate choice.

• Internal hostnames and subdomains
• Network structure and naming conventions
• Servers and services
• Relationships between systems

• Determining ISP-assigned address space: Usually involves external registration and DNS information, not internal host discovery.
• Bypassing DNS sinkholing: Would require evidence that malicious DNS requests avoided redirection.
• Initial access: DNS queries alone do not show that the attacker gained access.
• Exfiltrating data: DNS tunneling can do this, but the snippet would typically show encoded or unusually long DNS queries.

• Espionage: Stealing information for intelligence or competitive purposes.
• Data exfiltration: Unauthorized removal or transfer of data.
• Nation-state attack: A sophisticated attack sponsored by a government.
• Shadow IT: Unapproved technology or access methods used by employees.

• Accept: Acknowledges the risk without taking additional action.
• Transfer: Shifts the risk or financial impact to another party, such as an insurer.
• Mitigate: Reduces the likelihood or impact through controls like patching, MFA, or segmentation.
• Avoid: Eliminates the activity that creates the risk.