SY0-701 CompTIA Security+ Exam 2025 Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

An endpoint detection and response (EDR) system is a security tool that monitors and analyzes the activities and behaviors of endpoints, such as computers, laptops, mobile devices, and servers. An EDR system can detect, prevent, and respond to various types of threats, such as malware, ransomware, phishing, and advanced persistent threats (APTs). One of the features of an EDR system is to block the automatic execution of downloaded programs, which can prevent malicious code from running on the endpoint when a user clicks on a link in a phishing message. This can reduce the impact of a phishing attack and protect the endpoint from compromise. Updating the EDR policies to block automatic execution of downloaded programs is a technical control that can mitigate the risk of phishing, regardless of the user’s awareness or behavior. Therefore, this is the best answer among the given options.

The other options are not as effective as updating the EDR policies, because they rely on administrative or physical controls that may not be sufficient to prevent or stop a phishing attack. Placing posters around the office to raise awareness of common phishing activities is a physical control that can increase the user’s knowledge of phishing, but it may not change their behavior or prevent them from clicking on a link in a phishing message. Implementing email security filters to prevent phishing emails from being delivered is an administrative control that can reduce the exposure to phishing, but it may not be able to block all phishing emails, especially if they are crafted to bypass the filters. Creating additional training for users to recognize the signs of phishing attempts is an administrative control that can improve the user’s skills of phishing detection, but it may not guarantee that they will always be vigilant or cautious when receiving an email. Therefore, these options are not the best answer for this question. References = Endpoint Detection and Response – CompTIA Security+ SY0-701 – 2.2, video at 5:30; CompTIA Security+ SY0-701 Certification Study Guide, page 163.

A high-availability network is a network that is designed to minimize downtime and ensure continuous operation of critical services and applications. To achieve this goal, a high-availability network must consider two important factors: ease of recovery and attack surface.

Ease of recovery refers to the ability of a network to quickly restore normal functionality after a failure, disruption, or disaster. A high-availability network should have mechanisms such as redundancy, failover, backup, and restore to ensure that any single point of failure does not cause a complete network outage. A high-availability network should also have procedures and policies for incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity to minimize the impact of any network issue on the organization’s operations and reputation.

Attack surface refers to the exposure of a network to potential threats and vulnerabilities. A high-availability network should have measures such as encryption, authentication, authorization,firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, and patch management to protect the network from unauthorized access, data breaches, malware, denial-of-service attacks, and other cyberattacks. A high-availability network should also have processes and tools for risk assessment, threat intelligence, vulnerability scanning, and penetration testing to identify and mitigate any weaknesses or gaps in the network security.

Centralized authentication (such as Active Directory or LDAP) combined with proper password policies helps prevent the reuse of the same local credentials across multiple systems, reducing the risk of lateral movement during attacks like credential reuse or pass-the-hash.

A false positive is an alert that incorrectly identifies benign activity as malicious. Over time, if an alerting system generates too many false positives, security teams are likely to ignore these alerts, resulting in "alert fatigue." This increases the risk of missing genuine threats.

True positives and true negatives are accurate and should be acted upon.

False negatives are more dangerous because they fail to identify real threats, but they are not "ignored" since they do not trigger alerts​​.

A firewall ACL (access control list) is a set of rules that determines which traffic is allowed or denied by the firewall. The rules are processed in order, from top to bottom, until a match is found. The syntax of a firewall ACL rule is:

Access list

To limit outbound DNS traffic originating from the internal network, the firewall ACL should allow only the device with the IP address 10.50.10.25 to send DNS requests to any destination on port 53, and deny all other outbound traffic on port 53. The correct firewall ACL is:

Access list outbound permit 10.50.10.25/32 0.0.0.0/0 port 53 Access list outbound deny 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 port 53

The first rule permits outbound traffic from the source address 10.50.10.25/32 (a single host) to any destination address (0.0.0.0/0) on port 53 (DNS). The second rule denies all other outbound traffic on port 532.

To limit the potential impact on the log-in database in case of a breach, the security team would most likely recommend hashing. Hashing converts passwords into fixed-length strings of characters, which cannot be easily reversed to reveal the original passwords. Even if the database is breached, attackers cannot easily retrieve the actual passwords if they are properly hashed (especially with techniques like salting).

Tokenization is used to replace sensitive data with a token, but it is more common for protecting credit card data than passwords.

Obfuscation is the process of making data harder to interpret but is weaker than hashing for password protection.

Segmentation helps isolate data but doesn't directly protect the contents of the login database​​.