Free ECCouncil 212-89 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 6

An Inappropriate Usage incident refers to instances where computing resources are misused or abused, often violating organizational policies or laws. While access-control attacks, reconnaissance attacks, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks represent different types of external threats or methods of attack, an Insider Threat is an example of inappropriate usage. Insider threats come from individuals within the organization, such as employees or contractors, who misuse their access to harm the organization's interests. This can include stealing confidential information, intentionally disrupting systems, or other malicious activities that leverage their legitimate access to the organization's resources.

The EC-Council Incident Handler (ECIH) curriculum highlights the Shared Responsibility Model in cloud environments. Cloud providers are responsible for security of the cloud (infrastructure), while customers are responsible for security in the cloud (applications, data, access control).

Confusion over responsibility leads to delayed incident response, misconfigurations, and security gaps. ECIH emphasizes clearly defining roles between cloud providers and internal teams before incidents occur, including logging, monitoring, access management, and incident handling responsibilities.

Option A improves security posture but does not resolve responsibility confusion. Option B improperly shifts all responsibility to the provider, which contradicts the shared model. Option D relates to operational configuration, not governance clarity.

Therefore, understanding shared responsibilities for incident response in cloud environments is critical to effectively managing cloud security incidents.

IDOR is fundamentally an authorization flaw: the application exposes object identifiers (IDs) and fails to enforce that the requesting user is allowed to access that object. The primary remediation is to implement robust authorization checks—commonly RBAC (C) plus object-level access control—so every request verifies user identity and privileges against the requested resource.

(A) WAFs can help with certain injection patterns, but default WAF rules rarely fix logical authorization flaws like IDOR. A WAF also risks false positives and doesn’t replace secure design. (B) pen testing is important for assurance, but it’s not the primary patch; it helps validate the fix later. (D) encryption protects confidentiality in transit/at rest, but it does not prevent an authenticated user from accessing another user’s records if authorization checks are missing.

Therefore (C) is the correct first-line fix: enforce authorization server-side, avoid predictable identifiers, and ensure access control is consistently applied across all endpoints (including APIs).

Insider threats are among the most difficult risks to detect because insiders often operate within legitimate access boundaries. The ECIH Insider Threat module emphasizes that behavioral analytics is the most effective approach for identifying sophisticated, low-and-slow insider activity.

Option B is correct because behavioral analytics correlates user actions over time to detect anomalies such as unusual transaction patterns, abnormal access times, or deviations from job role norms. This allows detection of malicious behavior that traditional rule-based monitoring may miss.

Options A, C, and D are invasive, unethical, and often illegal, and they contradict ECIH guidance on lawful, proportional monitoring.

ECIH stresses that insider threat programs must balance security, privacy, and legality while providing meaningful detection. Behavioral analytics meets these requirements and provides actionable insights, making Option B the correct answer.

This scenario exemplifies a classic malicious insider threat, where a trusted employee with legitimate access abuses their privileges. According to the EC-Council ECIH curriculum, traditional perimeter controls and static access restrictions are often ineffective against insiders because the actions appear legitimate at a surface level. Therefore, the primary emphasis must be on behavior-based detection.

Option D is correct because behavioral analytics enables organizations to establish baselines of normal employee behavior and identify deviations such as unusual access times, excessive data downloads, atypical system usage, or abnormal data transfer patterns. ECIH highlights behavioral monitoring as a critical control for detecting insider threats early, especially when access credentials are valid and authorized.

Option A may limit productivity and does not detect malicious intent. Option B is an administrative practice with limited security value. Option C improves awareness but does not detect deliberate malicious behavior.

By implementing behavioral analytics, ClobalTech can identify subtle indicators of insider misuse, respond earlier, and reduce the impact of long-term data exfiltration, aligning with ECIH best practices for insider threat mitigation.

Static analysis involves examining the malware's memory dumps or binary codes without executing the code. This technique is used to find traces of malware by analyzing the code to understand its purpose, functionality, and potential impact. Static analysis allows for the identification of malicious signatures, strings, or other indicators of compromise within the malware's code. This method is contrasted with dynamic analysis, which studies the malware's behavior during execution, live system analysis, which examines running systems, and intrusion analysis, which focuses on detecting and analyzing breaches.

This question focuses on post-incident recovery and resilience, a key ECIH concept. After restoring services, organizations must strengthen defenses to prevent recurrence.

Option B is correct because Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) distribute traffic and absorb volumetric attacks, while blackhole routing discards malicious traffic upstream. ECIH identifies these as industry-standard controls for DDoS resilience.

Options A, C, and D weaken security or increase attack surface and contradict ECIH guidance.

ECIH stresses that recovery is not complete until preventive measures are implemented. CDN deployment and upstream traffic control significantly improve availability during future attacks.

Explanation (cloud IR reality):

In multi-vector cloud incidents, the defining challenge is coordination across layered services—identity (IAM), networking (WAF/CDN/LB), compute (VMs/containers/functions), email/collaboration, endpoints, and third-party SaaS integrations. Each vector often lands in a different plane: phishing compromises identities; malware persists on endpoints or workloads; DDoS stresses edge/network layers. Responding effectively requires aligning containment actions across these domains so one mitigation doesn’t leave another door open (e.g., stopping DDoS but leaving compromised identities active, or cleaning a workload while malicious OAuth tokens remain valid).

(B) is important but is a subset of coordination—CSP communication is one dependency in the broader multi-service response. (C) is a tactical DDoS problem and matters, but the incident includes phishing + malware, so focusing only on traffic classification is insufficient. (A) matters for regulated firms, but during active response, compliance is usually addressed through predefined procedures; it’s not the main operational obstacle in stopping a multi-vector campaign.

So (D) best captures the cloud-specific complexity: distributed ownership, shared responsibility boundaries, and the need for synchronized actions (revoking tokens, isolating workloads, adjusting security groups, WAF rules, email protections, and endpoint containment) to truly break the kill chain.