Managing-Cloud-Security WGU Managing Cloud Security (JY02) Questions and Answers

TheProcess for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis (PASTA)is a risk-centric threat modeling methodology that explicitly focuses on simulating real-world attacks from an adversary’s perspective. Unlike STRIDE or DREAD, which classify threats and rate severity, PASTA evaluates how an attacker would exploit vulnerabilities step by step.

PASTA has seven stages, including defining objectives, decomposing applications, and simulating attacks. This methodology helps organizations understand both technical and business risks by looking at the application as an attacker would.

STRIDE categorizes threats, DREAD provides scoring, and ATASM emphasizes architecture and mitigation. While valuable, they are not primarily attack-simulation frameworks. PASTA enables proactive testing of defenses against realistic adversary behaviors, making it especially relevant in modern cloud and DevSecOps environments.

Thenetworkis the component that enables customers to transfer data into and out of a cloud environment. It provides the connectivity through which data is uploaded, downloaded, and exchanged between customer systems and cloud infrastructure.

Firewalls protect the network by filtering traffic, load balancers distribute requests across resources, and virtual displays present interfaces, but none directly facilitate the transfer of data.

In cloud models, secure networking is critical. Protocols like TLS encrypt traffic, while VPNs and private links provide additional isolation. Reliable networking ensures availability, while strong controls safeguard confidentiality and integrity. Customers must ensure that the cloud provider offers secure, high-performance network services to support business needs.

Content-based discoveryinvolves searching within the actual text or binary content of documents to find matches for keywords, phrases, or patterns. In e-discovery, when the requirement is to locate documents containing a specific phrase, searching based on content is the most direct and reliable method.

Other approaches, such as metadata-based discovery, only examine properties like creation date or author, which do not reveal the presence of specific text. Label-based discovery relies on pre-applied classification labels, which may not always be accurate. Location-based discovery limits searches to folders or storage locations but does not guarantee relevance.

Content-based discovery provides completeness in legal and regulatory investigations. It ensures that no relevant documents are overlooked simply because of inconsistent labeling or metadata, thus supporting compliance and defensibility in court proceedings.

The scenario arises because ofmultitenancy, a core cloud characteristic where multiple customers share the same physical infrastructure. If a storage device containing multiple tenants’ data is seized as part of a case involving another customer, unrelated organizations may still be affected.

Virtualization enables resource abstraction, but multitenancy specifically introduces shared infrastructure risks. SaaS and PaaS are service models, not architectural characteristics.

Multitenancy offers efficiency and cost benefits but raises challenges for data sovereignty, legal jurisdiction, and evidentiary control. Providers mitigate these risks through encryption, logical isolation, and contractual terms. Customers must understand these implications when handling regulated or sensitive data in cloud environments.

Baselining is the process of establishing a reference point for the standard configuration of systems, networks, or applications. This baseline represents the approved, secure state. By continuously comparing the current environment to the baseline, organizations can detect deviations, unauthorized changes, or misconfigurations.

Patch management involves updating systems, deployment refers to installing new systems, and capacity management focuses on resource planning. While important, these do not establish a standard state for comparison.

Baselining is essential for change management and security auditing. It supports configuration management databases (CMDBs), intrusion detection, and compliance requirements. When deviations are detected, they can be escalated for remediation or formally approved through change control processes.

TheChange Management Board (CMB), also called the Change Advisory Board (CAB), is the formal authority responsible for reviewing, assessing, and approving planned modifications to IT environments. This group ensures that proposed changes align with business objectives, do not introduce unnecessary risks, and comply with security and regulatory requirements.

Event management teams focus on monitoring events, problem management teams handle root-cause analysis, and executive boards provide strategic direction but are not operational approval authorities. Only the CMB has the explicit role of validating technical and security implications before implementation.

By involving the CMB, organizations enforce structured governance, minimize disruptions, and establish accountability. This practice is central in ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 standards, ensuring that operational integrity and security are preserved during change cycles.

Categorizationis the process of systematically identifying and classifying files according to content and relevance. In preparation for a PCI DSS audit, it is critical to identify which files fall within scope—those that contain cardholder data or impact its security.

Normalization adjusts data format, tokenization substitutes sensitive data with tokens, and anonymization removes identifiers. While useful, none directly address the task of isolating “relevant files” for audit. Categorization ensures that files are grouped correctly, allowing auditors to focus on the proper scope and preventing unnecessary exposure of unrelated data.

This step aligns with PCI DSS requirements that limit scope to systems and data directly affecting cardholder data security. Proper categorization streamlines audits and demonstrates effective data governance.

In cloud environments, the provider’s role in thechain of custodyprimarily involvescollecting and preserving digital evidencewhen incidents or investigations occur. Because providers manage the infrastructure, they have direct access to logs, storage systems, and virtual machines necessary for evidence collection.

Backup policies and incident response may involve collaboration, but they remain customer responsibilities in many service models. Data classification and analysis are business-driven tasks, which customers must handle.

Providers must ensure that evidence collection is forensically sound and documented properly to maintain legal admissibility. This responsibility is critical in maintaining trust and ensuring compliance with laws and contractual obligations. It reinforces the shared responsibility model by clearly defining which aspects of digital forensics belong to the provider.

Indirect identifiersare pieces of information that may not identify an individual on their own but, when combined with other data, can uniquely identify someone. Examples include birthdate, ZIP code, or gender. Together, these can re-identify a person, even when names or direct identifiers are removed.

Direct identifiers (such as Social Security numbers) uniquely identify an individual alone. Data subjects are the individuals to whom the data refers, while personal details is too broad and not a formal term.

Understanding indirect identifiers is essential in privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, where pseudonymization or anonymization must account for potential re-identification risks. Safeguarding indirect identifiers reduces the chance of privacy violations and unauthorized profiling.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivers fundamental computing resources over the cloud. These include virtual machines, block storage, networking, and load balancers. Customers use these resources to build and manage custom IT solutions, while the provider manages the underlying hardware.

PaaS abstracts infrastructure further, providing a development environment for applications without requiring infrastructure management. SaaS delivers fully functional applications over the internet. NaaS is a narrower category focusing on network delivery.

IaaS is the correct answer because it gives maximum flexibility and control compared to the other models, allowing organizations to build tailored environments. It also requires customers to manage operating systems, middleware, and runtime security, making shared responsibility an essential part of the model.

Acceptance testingevaluates whether the system meets user requirements and performs as expected in real-world conditions. In this case, employees need the graphical interface to work properly for customer data entry. Acceptance testing confirms usability, accuracy, and functionality from the end user’s perspective.

Load testing measures performance under stress, regression testing checks for errors introduced by new changes, and security testing ensures system defenses. These are valuable, but they do not validate end-user satisfaction and workflow alignment.

Acceptance testing is the final validation step before production deployment. It ensures that updates deliver intended business value and user experience. By involving employees in acceptance testing, organizations ensure successful adoption of new systems.

Industry best practice requires that encryption keys arestored separately from the data they protect. This ensures that if the data storage system is compromised, attackers cannot immediately decrypt sensitive information. The use of a secure escrow system is a recognized approach.

An escrow provides controlled storage for encryption keys, ensuring they are only accessible by authorized processes and not co-located with the protected data. Keeping keys “local” to the data creates a single point of failure. A public or private repository without specialized protection mechanisms would also be insufficient due to risks of insider threats or misconfiguration.

By placing keys in an independent escrow system, the organization enforces separation of duties, strengthens defense-in-depth, and aligns with cryptographic standards from NIST and ISO. This practice is vital when dealing with archival data, where long-term confidentiality must be preserved even as systems evolve.

Proceduresare detailed, step-by-step instructions that guide personnel on how to perform specific tasks in alignment with higher-level policies. In an investigation, when uncertainty arises about handling a dataset, procedures provide the exact operational guidance required.

Policies establish high-level rules (e.g., “financial data must be protected”), while procedures explain how to achieve compliance with those policies (e.g., “verify encryption, label dataset, log access, and escalate to compliance officer”). Legal rulings and definitions are external references but do not provide operational steps.

By following documented procedures, investigators ensure consistency, compliance, and defensibility in legal contexts. This also ensures that evidence is handled properly, supporting admissibility in court and protecting the organization against legal or regulatory challenges.

Once a vendor has been selected, the onboarding phase requirescontractual verification and technical arrangements for data transfer. This step ensures that service levels, compliance requirements, encryption standards, and responsibilities are clearly defined before operations begin.

Options such as identifying the business need or responding to the RFP are pre-selection activities. Ensuring secure destruction of data is relevant to offboarding, not onboarding. Therefore, the most critical onboarding task is verifying the contract details and ensuring secure data transfer agreements.

Discussing these issues protects the organization from legal disputes, ensures smooth technical integration, and supports compliance with frameworks such as GDPR and PCI DSS. It also defines the scope of vendor accountability in case of security incidents.

The correct answer iselectronic discovery (e-discovery). This process involves identifying, collecting, and producing electronically stored information (ESI) that may serve as evidence in legal proceedings. E-discovery ensures that relevant data such as emails, logs, or documents is preserved and made available in a legally defensible manner.

Chain of custody refers to documenting the handling of evidence once collected, while forensic imaging creates exact copies of digital media. Gap analysis identifies weaknesses in processes but is unrelated to evidence collection.

E-discovery is essential in both corporate and cloud contexts, as data is often distributed across multiple environments. Cloud providers may assist customers with e-discovery by providing tools for searching, tagging, and exporting relevant data. A sound e-discovery process ensures compliance with legal obligations and prevents spoliation of evidence.

Backups are only valuable if they can be successfully restored when needed. Testing backups on a periodic basis is the only reliable way to validate their viability. Simply storing backups without testing may create a false sense of security, because corruption, misconfiguration, or incomplete backup sets can go unnoticed until a disaster occurs.

Industry best practices, such as those recommended by NIST and ISO 27031, emphasize regular backup testing as part of disaster recovery and business continuity planning. Testing involves restoring data to a test environment, verifying its integrity, and ensuring that applications can use the restored data as expected.

Deleting, comparing, or replacing backups might help in managing storage efficiency, but these actions do not confirm whether the backups are usable. Periodic testing ensures alignment with company policy, regulatory requirements, and internal risk management controls. It also provides confidence to management that recovery objectives, such as RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective), can be met.

WithSaaS, applications are delivered entirely by the provider, and customers have little to no control over the underlying platform or data portability. This creates a higher risk ofvendor lock-in, as migrating away from one SaaS provider to another may require reworking applications or losing features.

In contrast,PaaSgives customers more flexibility by allowing them to build, deploy, and manage their own applications while relying on standardized frameworks and platforms. Because applications are customer-managed, switching providers or migrating workloads can be easier compared to SaaS.

Vendor lock-out, personnel threats, and natural disasters are risks in any service model. The key differentiator here is portability and flexibility. Choosing PaaS reduces dependence on a single provider’s application features, thereby lowering vendor lock-in risk while still offloading infrastructure management.

Multivendor pathway connectivityrefers to a cloud provider’s ability to maintain connections with multiple internet service providers (ISPs). This ensures redundancy and reduces the risk of outages due to a single ISP failure.

Electric providers, fuel vendors, and HVAC contracts support facility resilience, but they are not directly tied to connectivity. The purpose of multivendor pathways is specifically to guarantee uninterrupted network access and resilience for customer workloads.

By maintaining ISP redundancy, cloud providers improve availability and meet SLA commitments. This capability is especially critical for enterprises requiring high uptime or operating in regions where connectivity disruptions are common. It also provides flexibility in bandwidth management and routing optimization.

This is an example ofsocial engineering, where attackers manipulate individuals into divulging confidential information or performing actions that compromise security. In this case, the fraudulent caller convinced the help desk to disclose sensitive employee data.

Man-in-the-middle attacks involve intercepting communication between parties, escalation of privilege involves gaining higher access rights, and internal threats come from legitimate insiders. None of these fit the situation as accurately as social engineering.

Social engineering exploits human trust rather than technical vulnerabilities. Common tactics include phishing, pretexting, and phone-based fraud (vishing). Preventing such threats requires strong identity verification processes, employee awareness training, and layered authentication mechanisms. By recognizing the human element as a weak point, organizations can better prepare staff to resist manipulative tactics.

By analyzing natural events that could impact data centers and assessing the risks associated with each, the leadership team isdefining the disaster criteria. This step determines what conditions or events qualify as disasters requiring activation of the recovery plan.

An asset inventory identifies systems, but here the focus is on external events. A disaster declaration process occurs during an actual event, and identifying actions comes later when response strategies are created.

Defining disaster criteria is essential to avoid ambiguity during crises. It establishes thresholds such as “category 4 hurricanes,” “regional power outages exceeding 12 hours,” or “seismic events over a set magnitude.” Clear criteria ensure consistent decision-making and timely activation of recovery procedures.

Outside the United States,ISAE 3402 (International Standard on Assurance Engagements 3402)is the standard used for audits equivalent to SOC reports. It ensures that service organizations demonstrate adequate internal controls over financial reporting and operational processes.

SSAE 18 is the U.S. standard governing SOC audits. ISRE 2400 and SSARS 25 focus on accounting and review services, not assurance over service organizations.

ISAE 3402 provides assurance to international customers that cloud providers or service organizations meet rigorous standards for security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. This builds global trust and interoperability in compliance frameworks.