CCSP ISC Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

Regulatory changes by themselves would not trigger a need for new testing of a BCDR plan. Any changes necessary for regulatory compliance would be accomplished through configuration changes or software updates, which in turn would then trigger the necessary new testing. Annual testing is crucial to any BCDR plan. Also, any time major configuration changes or software updates are done, the plan should be evaluated and tested to ensure it is still valid and complete.

The physical security of crypto keys is of some concern, but guards or vaults are not always necessary. Two-person integrity might be a good practice for protecting keys. The best answer to this question is option A, because it is always true, whereas the remaining options depend on circumstances.

ExplanationThe other options are the names of the phases, but out of proper order.

The lowest level is Level 1, which is self-assessment, Level 2 is an external third-party attestation, and Level 3 is a continuous-monitoring program. Hybridization does not exist as part of the CSA STAR program.

Data masking does not support authentication in any way. All the others are excellent use cases for data masking.

Regulated PII data carries legal and jurisdictional requirements, along with official penalties for its misuse or disclosure, which can be either civil or criminal in nature. Legal and protected are similar terms, but neither is the correct answer in this case. Contractual requirements can carry financial or contractual impacts for the improper use or disclosure of PII data, but not legal or criminal penalties that are officially enforced.

Options A and C are also correct, but included in B, making B the best choice. D is incorrect, because we don’t want unauthorized users gaining access.

Resource pooling serves as the biggest challenge to using DLP solutions to protect data at rest because data is spread across large systems, which are also shared by many different clients. With the data always moving and being distributed, additional challenges for protection are created versus a physical and isolated storage system. Portability is the ability to easily move between different cloud providers, and interoperability is focused on the ability to reuse components or services. Reversibility pertains to the ability of a cloud customer to easily and completely remove their data and services from a cloud provider.

DLP tools need to be aware of which information to monitor and which requires categorization (usually done upon data creation, by the data owners). DLPs can be implemented with or without physical access or presence. USB connectivity has nothing to do with DLP solutions.

The exposure of data by hackers is considered a data breach. Data loss focuses on the data availability rather than security. Data loss occurs when data becomes lost, unavailable, or destroyed, when it should not have been.

Option B is incorrect, because it refers to a specific applications security elements, meaning it is about an ANF, not the ONF. C is true, but not as complete as D, making D the better choice. C suggests that the framework contains only “some” of the components, which is why B (which describes “all” components) is better

All the others might be included in data labels, but multifactor authentication is a procedure used for access control, not a label.

Policy drives all programs and functions in the organization; the organization should not conduct any operations that don’t have a policy governing them. Penalties may or may not be an element of policy, and severity depends on the topic. Multifactor authentication and homomorphic encryption are red herrings here.

With Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the cloud customer is responsible for deploying and maintaining its own systems and virtual machines. Therefore, the customer is solely responsible for patching and any other security updates it finds necessary. With Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Desktop as a Service (DaaS), the cloud provider maintains the infrastructure components and is responsible for maintaining and patching them.

Cryptographic erasure involves having the data encrypted, typically as a matter of standard operations, and then rendering the data useless and unreadable by destroying the encryption keys for it. It represents a very cheap and immediate way to destroy data, and it works in all environments. With a cloud environment and multitenancy, media destruction or the physical destruction of storage devices, including shredding, would not be possible. Depending on the environment, overwriting may or may not be possible, but cryptographic erasure is the best answer because it is always an available option and is very quick to implement.

Explanation

Incident management is focused on limiting the impact of disruptions to an organization's services or operations, as well as returning their state to full operational status as soon as possible. Problem management is focused on identifying and mitigating known problems and deficiencies before they occur. Deployment management is a subcomponent of change management and is where the actual code or configuration change is put into place. Change management involves the processes and procedures that allow an organization to make changes to its IT systems and services in a controlled manner.

All the others are data analytics methods, but “refractory iterations” is a nonsense term thrown in as a red herring.

The contract between the provider and customer enhances the customer’s trust by holding the provider financially liable for negligence or inadequate service (although the customer remains legally liable for all inadvertent disclosures). Statutes, however, largely leave customers liable. The security control matrix is a tool for ensuring compliance with regulations. HIPAA is a statute.

Although all the other options are ways to harden a mobile device, two-person integrity is a concept that has nothing to do with the topic, and, if implemented, would require everyone in your organization to walk around in pairs while using their mobile devices.

The use of subcontractors can add risk to the supply chain and should be considered; trusting the provider’s management of their vendors and suppliers (including subcontractors) is important to trusting the provider. Conversely, the customer is not likely to be allowed to review the physical design of the datacenter (or, indeed, even know the exact location of the datacenter) or the personnel security specifics for the provider’s staff. “Redundant uplink grafts” is a nonsense term used as a distractor.

SIEM does not intend to provide any enhancement of performance; in fact, a SIEM solution may decrease performance because of additional overhead. All the rest are goals of SIEM implementations.

While the provider might share any of the other options listed, the provider will not share administration of security controls with the customer. Security controls are the sole province of the provider.

All of these answers are actually correct, but A is the best answer, because it is the most general, includes the others, and is therefore the optimum choice. This is a good example of the type of question that can appear on the actual exam.

DLP solutions may protect against inadvertent disclosure. Randomization is a technique for obscuring data, not a risk to data. DLP tools will not protect against risks from natural disasters, or against impacts due to device failure.

We don’t have physical ownership, control, or even access to the devices holding the data, so physical destruction, including melting, is not an option. Overwriting is a possibility, but it is complicated by the difficulty of locating all the sectors and storage areas that might have contained our data, and by the likelihood that constant backups in the cloud increase the chance we’ll miss something as it’s being overwritten. Cryptoshredding is the only reasonable alternative. Cold fusion is a red herring.

Dynamic masking involves the live replacing of sensitive data fields during transactional use between the data and application layers of a service. Static masking involves creating a full data set with the sensitive data fields masked, but is not done during live transactions like dynamic masking. Active and transactional are offered as similar types of answers but are not types of masking.

The locality--or physical location and jurisdiction where the system or data resides--is the dominant driver of regulations. This may be based on the type of data contained within the application or the way in which the data is used. The contract and SLA both articulate requirements for regulatory compliance and the responsibilities for the cloud provider and cloud customer, but neither artifact defines the actual requirements. Instead, the contract and SLA merely form the official documentation between the cloud provider and cloud customer. The source of the data may place contractual requirements or best practice guidelines on its usage, but ultimately jurisdiction has legal force and greater authority.

With multitenancy, where different cloud customers all share the same physical systems and networks, data classification becomes even more important to ensure that the appropriate security controls are applied immediately to prevent any potential leakage or exposure to other customers. Portability refers to the ability to move easily from one cloud provider to another. Interoperability refers to the ability to reuse components and services for different uses. Reversibility refers to the ability of the cloud customer to quickly and completely remove all data and services from a cloud provider and to verify the removal.