Effective Study Techniques for the ISC CCSP Exam

With a typical BCDR solution, an organization would need some number of staff to quickly travel to the location of the BCDR site to configure systems and applications for recovery. With a cloud environment, everything is done over broad network access, with no need (or even possibility) to travel to a remote site at any time.

The software service capability gives the cloud customer a fully established application, where only minimal user configuration options are allowed.

The record protocol of TLS performs the authentication and encryption of data packets, and in some cases compression as well. It does not perform any acceleration functions.

To implement DNSSEC, no additional changes are needed to applications or their code because the integrity checks are all performed at the system level.

Any time a major functional change of an application occurs, a new BCDR test should be done to ensure the overall strategy and process are still applicable and appropriate.

Security requirements should be incorporated into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) from the earliest requirement gathering stage and should be incorporated prior to the requirement analysis phase.

Disaster recovery and business continuity are vital concerns with availability. If data is destroyed or compromised, having regular backup systems in place as well as being able to perform disaster recovery in the event of a major or widespread problem allows operations to continue with an acceptable loss of time and data to management. This also ensures that sensitive data is protected and persisted in the event of the loss or corruption of data systems or physical storage systems.

With PaaS providing a fully configured and managed framework, auto-scaling can be implemented to programmatically adjust resources based on the current demands of the environment.

Cloud environments are constantly changing and often span multiple physical locations. A cloud customer is also very unlikely to have knowledge and insight into the underlying systems architecture in a cloud environment. Both of these realities make it very difficult, if not impossible, for an organization to provide a comprehensive systems design document.

Any application can be a possible target of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. From the application side, the developers should minimize how many operations are performed for non-authenticated users. This will keep the application running as quickly as possible and using the least amount of system resources to help minimize the impact of any such attacks.

Cloud environments will regularly change virtual machines as patching and versions are changed. Unlike a physical environment, there is little continuity from one period of time to another. It is very unlikely that the same virtual machines would be in use during a repeat audit.

A bastion host is a server that is fully exposed to the public Internet, but is extremely hardened to prevent attacks and is usually dedicated for a specific application or usage; it is not something that will serve multiple purposes. This singular focus allows for much more stringent security hardening and monitoring.

The Safe Harbor regulations were developed by the Department of Commerce and are meant to serve as a way to bridge the gap between privacy regulations of the European Union and the United States. Due to the lack of adequate privacy laws and protection on the federal level in the US, European privacy regulations generally prohibit the exporting of PII from Europe to the United States. Participation in the Safe Harbor program is voluntary on the part of US organizations. These organizations must conform to specific requirements and policies that mirror those from the EU, thus possibly fulfilling the EU requirements for data sharing and export. This way, American businesses can be allowed to serve customers in the EU. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) pertains to the protection of patient medical records and privacy. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) focuses on the use of PII within financial institutions. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) regulates the financial and accounting practices used by organizations in order to protect shareholders from improper practices and errors.

Modifying the metadata does not change the actual data. Although this initial phase is called "create," it can also refer to modification. In essence, any time data is considered "new," it is in the create phase. This can come from data that is newly created, data that is imported into a system and is new to that system, or data that is already present and is modified into a new form or value.

A cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack forces a client that a user has used to authenticate to an application to send forged requests under the user's own credentials to execute commands and requests that the application thinks are coming from a trusted client and user. Although this type of attack cannot be used to steal data directly because the attacker has no way of seeing the results of the commands, it does open other ways to compromise an application. Missing function-level access control exists where an application only checks for authorization during the initial login process and does not further validate with each function call. Cross-site scripting occurs when an attacker is able to send untrusted data to a user's browser without going through validation processes. An injection attack is where a malicious actor sends commands or other arbitrary data through input and data fields with the intent of having the application or system execute the code as part of its normal processing and queries.