CCSK Cloud Security Alliance Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge v5 (CCSKv5.0) Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

Cloud security frameworks organize control objectives to guide security practices and achieve specific security goals. Reference: [CCSK Study Guide, Domain 3 - Cloud Governance]

A governance hierarchy provides a structured approach to managing cloud services, ensuring policies and controls are effectively enforced. Reference: [Security Guidance v5, Domain 2 - Cloud Governance]

Behavioral detection for IAM and management plane activities is essential for identifying unusual or suspicious actions by compromised identities, especially in environments where attackers use automated tactics. Reference: [CCSK v5 Curriculum, Domain 5 - IAM]

Each cloud provider may use different IAM protocols and configurations, increasing complexity and requiring customized integration for each cloud environment. Reference: [CCSK Study Guide, Domain 5 - Identity and Access Management]

Governance frameworks help organizations ensure that cloud computing aligns with strategic objectives and that cloud risks are identified, managed, and monitored.

From CSA Security Guidance v4.0 – Domain 2: Governance and Enterprise Risk Management:

“Cloud governance enables organizations to align cloud adoption with business strategy and risk management. Embedding cloud decisions into governance ensures accountability, informed decision-making, and the alignment of cloud services with enterprise-wide goals.”

(CSA Security Guidance v4.0, Domain 2)

Answer D directly reflects this principle. The other choices do not capture the core strategic role of governance in cloud computing.

Threat modeling is the technique used to assess potential threats by analyzing attacker capabilities, motivations, and potential targets. It involves identifying, understanding, and prioritizing potential security threats in the context of a system or application. By considering the attackers' possible objectives and methods, organizations can design security controls to mitigate these risks proactively.

Vulnerability assessment focuses on identifying and evaluating vulnerabilities in a system, but it does not explicitly analyze attacker behavior or motivations. Incident response involves responding to security incidents after they occur, not proactively assessing potential threats. Risk assessment involves evaluating potential risks to an organization, but threat modeling specifically focuses on understanding and mitigating potential threats, making it a more targeted technique for this purpose.

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is primarily responsible for filtering and monitoring HTTP/S traffic to and from a web application. It is designed to protect web applications by filtering and monitoring traffic for malicious requests, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other common application-layer attacks. A WAF helps secure web applications by analyzing the HTTP/S traffic and blocking any harmful requests before they reach the application.

Anti-virus Software is used to detect and remove malicious software on endpoints and devices but is not designed to filter HTTP/S traffic specifically for web applications. Load Balancer is used to distribute network traffic across multiple servers to ensure performance and reliability, but it does not focus on security filtering. Intrusion Detection System (IDS) monitors network traffic for suspicious activity but operates at a different level of the network stack and is not focused solely on web application traffic.

Updating forensics tools for virtual machines (VMs) and containers is critical because cloud environments can differ significantly from traditional on-premises environments. As cloud technologies evolve, it is important to ensure that forensic tools are compatible with the latest cloud infrastructure, such as VMs, containers, and serverless architectures. Thisensures that the tools can effectively collect, analyze, and preserve evidence in the event of a security incident, allowing for accurate and efficient incident analysis.

Complying with cloud service level agreements (SLAs)) is not the primary reason for updating forensics tools, although some SLAs may require certain levels of incident response capabilities. Streamlining communication with cloud service providers and customers) is important, but the primary concern is the ability to analyze incidents, not just communication. Increasing the speed of incident response team deployments) is a consideration, but ensuring the tools are up to date and compatible is the main priority for effective incident analysis.

The management plane refers to the interfaces used to manage configurations and resources in a cloud environment. It is responsible forhandling administrative tasks, such as provisioning, configuration management, and monitoring of resources. Protecting the management plane is crucial because it is where sensitive configurations and access control policies are set, which can potentially be exploited if not properly secured.

Securing the management plane involves ensuring that only authorized users and systems can make changes to the cloud infrastructure and resources, protecting these interfaces from unauthorized access or malicious activity.

AI can enhance anomaly detection in cybersecurity by analyzing large volumes of data and identifying patterns that deviate from normal behavior. By using machine learning algorithms, AI can improve the accuracy of anomaly detection, reducing false positive alerts. This helps security teams focus on genuine threats while minimizing distractions from irrelevant alerts.

Assisting analysts is a valid benefit of AI, but reducing false positives directly improves anomaly detection capabilities. Threat intelligence refers to gathering and analyzing information about potential threats but isn't directly focused on reducing false positives in the same way as anomaly detection. Automated responses can be part of AI's role in cybersecurity, but reducing false positives is more directly related to improving anomaly detection.

To reduce vulnerabilities in virtual machines (VMs) in a cloud environment, it is critical to use secure base images that are free from known vulnerabilities,ensure regular patching to fix any discovered security issues, and implement configuration management to ensure that VMs are properly configured according to security best practices. This combination of practices ensures that VMs are both secure from the start and remain secure over time as new vulnerabilities are discovered.

Disabling unnecessary VM services and using containers is a good security practice but does not directly address vulnerabilities in VMs specifically. Encryption and SBOM is important for securing data and understanding dependencies but does not specifically focus on reducing vulnerabilities in VMs. Network isolation and monitoring are key network security practices but do not directly address the security of the VMs themselves.

Correct Option: A. Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs)

VLANs are widely used in cloud and traditional environments to provide logical separation of network traffic. In a multi-tenant cloud environment, VLANs help ensure that one customer's network traffic is isolated from another’s, providing a key layer of segmentation and security.

From CSA Security Guidance v4.0 – Domain 7: Infrastructure Security:

“To isolate tenants in multi-tenant environments, cloud providers often rely on mechanisms such as VLANs, VXLANs, or other software-defined networking technologies. VLANs ensure that different customer environments remain logically separated even though they share the same physical infrastructure.”

— Domain 7: Infrastructure Security, CSA Security Guidance v4.0

Why the Other Options Are Incorrect:

B. Resource pooling➤ Refers to shared infrastructure in the cloud. It enables multi-tenancy but does not enforce separation between tenants.

C. Software-defined networking (SDN)➤ SDN provides flexibility and programmability in networking. While it can support separation, VLANs are the actual mechanism used for enforcing it.

D. Elasticity➤ Elasticity refers to scaling resources up/down based on demand. It has nothing to do with tenant isolation or network separation.

Kubernetes provides automated deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, which enhances operational efficiency and scalability. Reference: [CCSK v5 Curriculum, Domain 8 - Cloud Workload Security]