USMLE STEP2 Exam Prep
Step2 (Page 63 )

• 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.

• Encryption to preserve confidentiality
• Integrity protection to detect alteration
• Authentication of the server through certificates

• SHA-256: A hashing algorithm; it does not encrypt data for transmission.
• SSL 3.0: Obsolete and insecure. It should not be used.
• AES-256: A strong encryption algorithm, but by itself it does not provide the complete secure communication protocol needed for data in transit.

• 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 ????

• The product is already in production.
• The organization is examining the product’s functions and cost drivers.
• The objective is to reduce cost without reducing perceived value or required quality.

• Kaizen costing focuses on continuous, usually incremental, cost reductions during the manufacturing stage. It is not specifically the systematic examination of a product’s functions.
• Standard costing compares actual costs with predetermined standards; it is a control technique, not a product redesign method.
• Process innovation concerns developing significantly improved production processes, rather than analysing the product’s functions and value.

• 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.

• Honeypots: Decoy systems or services made to attract attackers. Legitimate users should not interact with them, so activity there is a strong indicator of malicious behavior.
• DNS sinkholes: Redirect requests for known malicious domains to a controlled internal system. This can reveal infected hosts attempting to contact command-and-control infrastructure.

• Tokenization: Replaces sensitive data with non-sensitive tokens.
• CI/CD: Automates software development, testing, and deployment.
• Threat modeling: Identifies and analyzes potential threats before or during system design.
• Data obfuscation: Makes data harder to understand or interpret.

Correct reasoning

• Create storage5 as a General-purpose v2 (StorageV2) account.
• Configure Blob object replication from storage5 to an existing compatible storage account.
• The destination must support object replication—typically another StorageV2 or premium block blob account.
• Blob versioning must be enabled on both accounts.
• Blob change feed must be enabled on the source account.
• The accounts must meet Azure’s object-replication requirements, including being in supported regions and having compatible configuration.

• 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.

• B: Developer Edition has limited user, storage, and data-volume capacity, making realistic community testing difficult.
• C: A Developer Edition org cannot contain sandboxes, so it cannot provide separate environments for development, integration, and UAT.
• E: A standalone Developer Edition org is not part of the production org’s deployment path, so change sets cannot be used to deploy from it directly to that production org. The team would need Metadata API, Salesforce CLI, or another deployment method.

• MFA adds an additional authentication factor, such as a phone notification or verification code.
• It helps prevent unauthorized sign-ins, even if a password is compromised.
• It does not encrypt, store, or protect credentials used by deployment processes.

• Physical: Protects facilities or equipment, such as locks and security cameras.
• Technical: Uses technology, such as firewalls, encryption, or access controls.
• Operational: Covers day-to-day actions and processes, such as training, backups, or incident response.
• Managerial: Includes policies, standards, risk assessments, and procedures.

• Existing measures
• Relationships
• Calculated columns
• Tables and fields
• Existing transformations in the model

• SharePoint folder: Reconnects to the source files. You would likely need to recreate the model and measures.
• Power BI dataflows: Primarily provide reusable data preparation and storage, but they do not automatically provide the existing semantic model and measures.
• Excel workbook: Connects directly to the source file and would also require rebuilding the model and measures.

• Employees can work from any location, including remote sites and offices worldwide.
• Login can be relatively seamless after the device is registered.
• It does not require distributing additional physical authentication equipment.

• Geotagging: Identifies location, but location alone is not a strong authentication method and may prevent legitimate remote access.
• Smart cards: Provide strong authentication but require card readers and physical cards, increasing equipment and management requirements.
• Time-based logins: Typically involve one-time codes that users must enter, making the experience less seamless and potentially requiring a token or authenticator app.

• 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.

• 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.

sql 
CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.usp_CreateOrder 
AS 
BEGIN 
    SET NOCOUNT ON; 
    SET XACT_ABORT ON; 


    BEGIN TRY 
        BEGIN TRANSACTION; 


        INSERT INTO dbo.Orders (/ columns /) 
        VALUES (/ values /); 


        SET @OrderID = SCOPE_IDENTITY(); 


        COMMIT TRANSACTION; 
    END TRY 
    BEGIN CATCH 
        IF @@TRANCOUNT > 0 
            ROLLBACK TRANSACTION; 


        THROW; 
    END CATCH; 
END;

• BEGIN TRY contains the transactional work.
• SCOPE_IDENTITY() retrieves the identity generated by the INSERT; it belongs after the insert, not as the error-handling logic.
• COMMIT runs only if all statements succeed.
• BEGIN CATCH handles failures.
• IF @@TRANCOUNT > 0 prevents attempting a rollback when no transaction is active.
• ROLLBACK undoes partial changes.
• THROW re-raises the original error with consistent details for the application.
• SET XACT_ABORT ON ensures many run-time errors automatically terminate and roll back the transaction.

• 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.

• 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.

• Endpoint Manager: manages hosts and sensor-related settings.
• Falcon Investigator: supports investigation and analysis, but does not necessarily grant RTR access.
• Remediation Manager: handles remediation-related actions rather than interactive host access.

• Create a CodeCommit repository in the secondary Region.
• Use CodeBuild to run a Git mirror operation from the primary repository to the secondary repository.
• Use EventBridge to detect relevant repository events, such as a pull request being merged.
• Invoke a Lambda function, which starts the CodeBuild project.

• B: Amazon S3 is object storage, not a Git repository that developers can use as a CodeCommit remote.
• C: CodeArtifact is intended for packages and artifacts, not source-code repository mirroring.
• D: An AWS Cloud9 environment is not an appropriate automated replication mechanism and would require manual or persistent infrastructure management.

• A — Too infrequent: Formal strategies are often reviewed only every three to five years. This can make the organisation slow to respond to rapid changes in technology, competitors, regulation or customer needs.

• C — Relies on predicting the future: The approach assumes senior managers can make reasonably reliable forecasts and assumptions. In uncertain environments, these assumptions may quickly become invalid.

• E — Can restrict radical innovation: Formal planning tends to favour existing information, established objectives and incremental improvements. This may discourage experimental or highly innovative strategies that emerge from lower levels of the organisation.

• B concerns the difficulty of achieving competitive advantage through core competences when competing with focused specialists. It is not specifically a drawback of the formal top-down planning process.
• D is an activity organisations should undertake—continuous monitoring—not a drawback of the approach itself.

• The vulnerability scan identifies a vulnerability.
• The administrator verifies that the vulnerability is not present.
• Therefore, the scan produced a false positive.

• True positive: A vulnerability is reported and genuinely exists.
• False negative: A vulnerability exists, but the scan fails to detect it.
• True negative: No vulnerability exists, and the scan correctly reports no issue.

• Storage usage of files stored in Microsoft Teams: SharePoint site usage report

• Number of active users per team: Microsoft Teams usage report

1. SharePoint site usage report
2. Microsoft Teams usage report

• 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.

• Determining ISP-assigned address space: Usually involves public reconnaissance, such as WHOIS or regional Internet registry information.
• Bypassing DNS sinkholing: Would require evidence that malicious domains are resolving outside the organization’s sinkhole controls.
• Achieving initial access: DNS log entries alone do not demonstrate compromise or entry.
• Exfiltrating data: DNS tunneling generally involves repeated queries containing encoded or unusually long data, not merely internal host discovery.

• 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.

1. Discovery tries the SSH probe first.
2. SSH fails.
3. Discovery tries SNMP, which succeeds.
4. Discovery records SNMP as the preferred service for that IP.
5. Future discoveries try SNMP first.

• Classification identifies the type of device, such as a server, router, or printer.
• Credential affinity remembers which credentials work for a device.
• MID Server affinity associates a device or network with a particular MID Server.
• IP service affinity specifically controls the preferred discovery protocol or service.

• Crash cart: Provides local physical access, not remote access.
• Jump box: A secured intermediary used to reach devices over the normal network; it may be inaccessible if the appliance has not booted.
• Secure Shell (SSH): Requires the device’s operating system and network services to be running properly.

• Reviewing and validating generated code
• Checking security, licensing, and quality concerns
• Testing the implementation
• Making the final design and coding decisions

• A: Copilot is not a complete replacement for developers.
• C: Human input, review, and oversight are still required.
• D: Copilot Chat supports many tasks beyond debugging, including explanation, generation, refactoring, and testing assistance.

• 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.

• 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.

apex 
Set<Id> accountIds = new Set<Id>{ accountId1, accountId2 }; 


List<Account> accounts = [ 
    SELECT Id, Name 
    FROM Account 
    WHERE Id IN :accountIds 
];

• A: LIMIT accepts a number, not a collection of IDs.
• B: Set.containsAll() checks set contents in Apex; it does not filter SOQL results.
• C: Database.query() accepts a dynamic SOQL string, not a Set<Id> directly.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Azure Machine Learning is the overall Azure service.
• Machine Learning designer is the visual, drag-and-drop interface within Azure Machine Learning.
• Microsoft may refer to the broader product as Azure Machine Learning studio, while “Designer” remains the specific visual workflow tool.

• Azure Logic Apps: Workflow and integration automation.
• Azure Batch: Large-scale parallel or batch compute.
• Azure Cosmos DB: Globally distributed NoSQL database.

• 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.

• Accept: Acknowledging the risk and choosing not to take additional action.
• Transfer: Shifting the risk or financial consequences to another party, such as an insurer.
• Mitigate: Reducing the likelihood or impact through controls, such as patching or access restrictions.
• Avoid: Eliminating the activity that creates the risk.

• 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.

• 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.

• You can configure different pre-shared keys for different device groups.
• All cameras could use one key.
• All scanners could use another key.
• Each key can be associated with an appropriate role or access policy.

• LastName: Required.
• FirstName: Optional.
• AccountId: Optional; a Contact may be associated with an Account later or remain private, depending on organization settings.
• Name: A compound display field made from first and last name; it isn’t entered as a separate field.

1. The specific table — for example, incident
2. The parent table — for example, task
3. The wildcard table — *, which applies broadly

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.

• Additional running costs: $800
• Less depreciation: $300

• The $100 reduction in fixed production overhead absorbed is only an accounting reallocation. It does not represent an actual saving in total fixed overhead.

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

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

• Periodic vulnerability assessments: Identify technical weaknesses but do not establish governance or ensure risks are managed.
• Established information security metrics: Help measure performance and report status, but measurement alone does not make governance effective.
• Advanced security technologies: Support security operations, but governance is primarily about direction, accountability, decision-making, and alignment with business objectives.

• 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.