Chapter 17: Security

1. A. The first layer of access control is perimeter security. Perimeter security is intended to delay or deter entrance into a facility.

2. A. Biometrics is a technology that uses personal characteristics, such as a retinal pattern or fingerprint, to establish identity.

3. A. Social engineering uses the inherent trust in the human species, as opposed to technology, to gain access to your environment.

4. C. A fingerprint scanner, or any device that identifies a person by a physical trait, is considered a biometric security control.

5. A. Although the end result of any of these attacks may be denying authorized users access to network resources, a DoS attack is specifically intended to prevent access to network resources by overwhelming or flooding a service or network.

6. B. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack uses multiple computer systems to attack a server or host in the network.

7. C. In a back door attack, a program or service is placed on a server to bypass normal security procedures.

8. C. A replay attack attempts to replay the results of a previously successful session to gain access.

9. D. TCP/IP hijacking is an attempt to steal a valid IP address and use it to gain authorization or information from a network.

10. A. A worm is different from a virus in that it can reproduce itself, it’s self-contained, and it doesn’t need a host application to be transported.

11. D. A smurf attack attempts to use a broadcast ping (ICMP) on a network. The return address of the ping may be that of a valid system in your network. This system will be flooded with responses in a large network.

12. A. A password-guessing attack occurs when a user account is repeatedly attacked using a variety of passwords.

13. B. Biometrics relies on a physical characteristic of the user to verify identity. Biometric devices typically use either a hand pattern or a retinal scan to accomplish this.

14. A. Tokens are created when a user or system successfully authenticates. The token is destroyed when the session is over.

15. C. Someone trying to con your organization into revealing account and password information is launching a social engineering attack.

16. A. Some viruses won’t damage a system in an attempt to spread into all the other systems in a network. These viruses use that system as the carrier of the virus.

17. B. A symptom of many viruses is unusual activity on the system disk. This is caused by the virus spreading to other files on your system.

18. A. A software exploitation attack attempts to exploit weaknesses in software. A common attack attempts to communicate with an established port to gain unauthorized access.

19. A. Packet filters prevent unauthorized packets from entering or leaving a network. Packet filters are a type of firewall that block specified traffic based on IP address, protocol, and many other attributes.

20. D. All of these devices can store and pass viruses to uninfected systems. Make sure that all files are scanned for viruses before they’re copied to these media.