Free Microsoft SC-900 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 2

In the Microsoft 365 security center/Microsoft 365 Defender portal, the Reports area is designed to provide organization-wide visibility into security posture and activity over time. Microsoft describes the Reports experience as enabling you to “view security trends and track the protection status across identities, endpoints, email & collaboration, and cloud apps.” Within Reports, the Identity section aggregates signals from Microsoft Entra ID protection and related identity defenses so security teams can monitor trends such as risky sign-ins, user risk, MFA adoption/registration, and other identity protection metrics. These curated, read-only dashboards are aimed at measuring protection status and changes over time, helping you validate the impact of controls and prioritize remediation.

By contrast, Attack simulator is used to run user training simulations (e.g., phishing) and is not intended for posture trend reporting. Hunting (Advanced hunting) lets analysts query raw telemetry for investigations, not to provide summarized trend dashboards. Incidents correlates alerts into incident records for triage and response, rather than showing long-term trends and protection status views. Therefore, to view security trends and track the protection status of identities, the correct place is Reports in the Microsoft 365 security center/Microsoft 365 Defender portal.

Microsoft explains that Conditional Access (CA) evaluates signals and then enforces access decisions using grant and session controls: “Conditional Access policies are enforced after first-factor authentication is completed” and are used to “make access control decisions.” CA policies target users and groups—including administrators—unless explicitly excluded. Microsoft guidance recommends excluding only break-glass accounts: “Customers with Azure AD roles such as Global administrator should have at least one emergency access account excluded from policies.” This means admins are not exempt by default; they are in scope unless you configure exclusions.

CA does not manage directory role assignments; that is handled by role assignment and Privileged Identity Management (PIM). CA’s grant controls focus on access conditions: “Grant access… Require multi-factor authentication” and Microsoft lists a common baseline: “Require multi-factor authentication for all users.” Therefore, CA can require MFA to access cloud apps, but it cannot add users to Azure AD roles.

These statements from Microsoft’s SCI materials confirm the outcomes: Admins are not inherently exempt (No), CA cannot assign roles (No), and CA can force MFA for app access (Yes).

In Microsoft’s SCI learning content, the core objective of protecting information is framed by the CIA triad. Microsoft explains that “confidentiality, integrity, and availability are foundational security principles.” Within this model, integrity is described as the assurance that information remains trustworthy and unchanged from its intended state. The SCI materials state that integrity means “preventing unauthorized modification and ensuring the accuracy and completeness of data.” When a requirement says, “ensuring that the data you retrieve is the same as the data you stored,” it directly maps to this integrity principle—verifying that data hasn’t been altered, corrupted, or tampered with during storage or transmission.

Microsoft’s guidance further highlights that integrity is supported by controls that “detect or prevent unauthorized changes,” including cryptographic hashes, checksums, and digital signatures that can “provide proof that content hasn’t been modified.” By contrast, confidentiality focuses on restricting access (for example, through least privilege and encryption), and availability focuses on “reliable and timely access to information and systems.” Because the scenario emphasizes that the retrieved data is identical to the stored data, it is not about access or uptime but about preserving correctness and detecting alteration—which is precisely the integrity objective in Microsoft’s Security, Compliance, and Identity guidance.

Box 1: Yes

The MailItemsAccessed event is a mailbox auditing action and is triggered when mail data is accessed by mail protocols and mail clients.

Box 2: No

Basic Audit retains audit records for 90 days.

Advanced Audit retains all Exchange, SharePoint, and Azure Active Directory audit records for one year. This is accomplished by a default audit log retention policy that retains any audit record that contains the value of Exchange, SharePoint, or AzureActiveDirectory for the Workload property (which indicates the service in which the activity occurred) for one year.

Box 3: yes

Advanced Audit in Microsoft 365 provides high-bandwidth access to the Office 365 Management Activity API.

Biometrics templates are stored locally on a device. Reference:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/identity-protection/hello-for-business/hello-overview

In Microsoft’s Security, Compliance, and Identity guidance, Microsoft Defender for Identity (formerly Azure ATP) is explicitly described as “a cloud-based security solution that leverages your on-premises Active Directory signals to identify, detect, and investigate advanced threats.” The service deploys lightweight sensors on domain controllers to collect and analyze Active Directory (AD) authentication and activity data. Using behavioral analytics and built-in detections, it helps security teams surface indicators of compromised identities, lateral movement, pass-the-ticket/NTLM relay, and other identity-driven attack techniques. Documentation further explains that Defender for Identity “profiles and learns entity behavior,” correlates events, and raises security alerts with investigation timelines and evidence to accelerate incident response in hybrid environments.

This precisely matches the sentence in the prompt: the only Microsoft security product whose core purpose is to use on-premises AD signals to identify, detect, and investigate advanced threats is Defender for Identity. By contrast, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint focuses on endpoint prevention and EDR; Microsoft Defender for Office 365 protects email and collaboration workloads from phishing and malware; and Microsoft Cloud App Security (now Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps) operates as a CASB for app discovery, control, and session monitoring. Therefore, aligning with SCI study guides and product descriptions, the correct completion is Microsoft Defender for Identity.

In Microsoft Defender for Cloud, the Free plan provides continuous security assessment and visibility into your posture via Secure Score and security recommendations. Microsoft explains that the free tier offers “foundational CSPM capabilities,” including recommendations and a security score (Secure score) to help you prioritize hardening tasks. Advanced features—such as vulnerability scanning for VMs (Qualys-based), Just-In-Time (JIT) VM access, and threat protection alerts—require the enhanced/paid Defender plans (for example, Defender for Servers). Consequently, among the listed options, only Secure score is available in the free mode. This score aggregates the effect of recommendations across subscriptions and resources so you can track and improve security posture without enabling any of the paid Defender plans.

Microsoft Purview Information Protection (in the Microsoft 365 compliance center) enables you to discover, classify, label, and protect sensitive information across emails, documents, and other data stores. Labels and policies can enforce encryption, access restrictions, and visual markings, helping prevent unauthorized disclosure of sensitive data—inside or outside your organization.

In Microsoft’s SCI guidance, encryption at rest is defined as protecting data when it is stored on a disk or other persistent media. Microsoft describes it as controls that “help safeguard your data to meet your organizational security and compliance commitments by encrypting data when it is persisted,” distinguishing it from protections for data in transit. Within Azure and Microsoft 365, examples include Azure Disk Encryption for IaaS VMs (using BitLocker for Windows and DM-Crypt for Linux), server-side encryption for storage accounts, and Transparent Data Encryption for databases. A virtual machine’s OS and data disks encrypted with BitLocker or DM-Crypt are canonical cases of at-rest encryption because the encryption keys protect the physical media; the data becomes unreadable if the disks are accessed outside the authorized context. By contrast, site-to-site VPN, HTTPS web sessions, and encrypted email protect data in transit—they secure network communications but do not encrypt the data where it is stored. Therefore, among the options provided, encrypting a virtual machine disk is the correct example of encryption at rest in Microsoft’s security model.

In Microsoft’s Security, Compliance, and Identity guidance, encryption is described as the control that “converts data into a form that cannot be understood by anyone who does not possess the appropriate decryption key.” In the Microsoft Purview Information Protection (sensitivity labels with encryption) documentation, Microsoft explains that when encryption is applied to a file, “only authorized users and services that present the correct keys and usage rights can open and use the content,” and that access is enforced even if the file is moved outside the organization. Azure Rights Management (part of Microsoft Purview) further states that encryption “protects data at rest and in transit by using keys so that only permitted identities can decrypt and use the information.”

This aligns precisely with the sentence: encrypting a file makes the data readable and usable to viewers that have the appropriate key (and unreadable to those who do not). By contrast, archiving organizes or preserves data for long-term storage; compressing reduces file size without controlling access; and deduplicating removes redundant copies to save space. None of these provide the key-based, identity-bound access control described in Microsoft SCI materials. Therefore, the correct completion is Encrypting.