Understanding that changes are critical in any production environment, a DoD contractor has instituted measures to manage them. All software changes can only be implemented by defined individuals. These changes must have gone through a rigorous change approval process and must be implemented from a secure server located in the company's headquarters. The personnel affecting the changes access the server room using access cards and an iris scan. To log into the server, they must enter their passwords to receive a one-time password (OTP), which must be keyed in within 2 minutes. After any changes are made, the chairperson of the contractor's Change Review Board and the CISO get a notification to approve the changes before they take effect. To determine if the contractor has implemented enough measures to meet CM.L2-3.4.5 – Access Restrictions for Change, you need to examine all the following EXCEPT?
When assessing a contractor’s implementation of CMMC practices, you examine its SystemSecurity Plan (SSP) to identify its documented measures for audit reduction and reporting. They have a dedicated section in their SSP addressing the Audit and Accountability requirements. You proceed to interview their information security personnel, who informed you that the contractor has a dedicated Security Operations Center (SOC) and uses Splunk to reduce and report audit logs. What key features regarding the deployment of Splunk for AU.L2-3.3.6 – Reduction & Reporting would you be interested in assessing?
You have been hired to assess an OSC's implementation of secure password storage and transmission mechanisms. The OSC uses a popular identity and access management (IAM) solution from a reputable vendor to manage user authentication across their systems. During the assessment, you examine the IAM solution's configuration and documentation, which indicate that passwords are hashed using industry-standard algorithms like SHA-256 or bcrypt before being stored in the system's database. Additionally, the IAM solution leverages TLS encryption for all communications, ensuring that passwords are transmitted securely over the network. Based on the information provided, how would you assess the OSC's compliance with CMMC practice IA.L2-3.5.10 – Cryptographically-Protected Passwords, which requires organizations to store and transmit only cryptographically protected passwords?
After you ask to examine some audit records, the contractor's system administrator informs you that there is a process to follow before accessing them. The logs are hashed using SHA-512 algorithms, and the system administrator has to run an algorithm to recalculate the hashes for the audit records to verify their integrity before running a decryption algorithm to decrypt the data. Since this might take some time, you tour the facility while interviewing personnel with audit and accountability roles. You see an employee holding the door for another without using their physical access card. While interviewing the contractor's employees, you find that they can access all audit logging tools and tweak the settings according to their needs or requirements. Upon examining the contractor's access control policy, you realize they have not defined the measures to protect audit logging tools. Which of the following statements accurately describes the contractor's compliance with protecting audit logging tools from unauthorized access, modification, and deletion, as required by AU.L2-3.3.8 – Audit Protection?
You are assessing a contractor’s implementation for CMMC practice MA.L2-3.7.4 – Media Inspection by examining their maintenance records. You realize the maintenance logs identify a repeating problem. A recently installed central server has been experiencing issues affecting the performance of the contractor’s information systems. This is confirmed by your interview with the contractor’s IT team. You requested to investigate the server, and the IT team agreed. On the server, there is a file named conf.zip that gets your attention. You decide to open the file in an isolated computer for further review. To your surprise, the file is a .exe used when testing the server for data exfiltration. How should this incident be handled?
CMMC MA.L2-3.7.6 – Maintenance Personnel requires that maintenance personnel without required access authorization be supervised during maintenance activities. One of the ways organizations can achieve this is to develop a documented procedure for supervised maintenance activities. Which of the following elements should be excluded from the documented procedure?
Examining an OSC password policy, you learn that a password should have a minimum of 15 characters. It also should have 3 uppercase, 2 special characters, and other alphanumeric characters. Passwords have to be changed every 45 days and cannot be easily tied to the account owner. Passwords cannot be reused until 30 cycles are complete. The OSC's systems send a temporary password to the user's email or authentication app, which is one of the events described in their password usage policy. However, a recent penetration test report shows that the generated temporary passwords did not have sufficient entropy, and an attacker may guess a temporary password through brute force attacks. Which CMMC practice has the contractor successfully implemented? Select all that apply.
You are conducting a CMMC assessment for a contractor that develops software applications for the DoD. During the assessment of the AU domain, you request to examine the contractor's audit and accountability policies, access control procedures, and system configuration documentation related to the management of audit logging functionality. Upon reviewing the documentation, the contractor has implemented a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model, where privileged users are assigned different roles based on their responsibilities. One of these roles is the "Audit Administrator" role, which is granted the necessary privileges to manage audit logging functionality across the contractor's systems. However, during interviews with the system administrators, you learn that besides the Audit Administrator role, several other privileged roles, such as the "System Administrator" and "Network Administrator" roles, can also manage audit logging functionality. When you inquire about the rationale behind granting multiple privileged roles access to audit management functions, the contractor's security team explains that this approach allows for better operational flexibility and ensures that different teams can perform audit logging tasks based on their areas of responsibility. Based on the information provided in the scenario, how would you assess the contractor's compliance with CMMC practice AU.L2-3.3.9 – Audit Management?
While examining a contractor's audit and accountability policy, you realize they have documented types of events to be logged and defined content of audit records needed to support monitoring, analysis, investigation, and reporting of unlawful or unauthorized system activities. After the logs are analyzed, the results are fed into a system that automatically generates audit records stored for 30 days. However, mechanisms implementing system audit logging are lacking after several tests because they produce audit logs that are too limited. You find that generated logs cannot be independently used to identify the event they resulted from because the defined content specified therein is too limited. Additionally, you realize the logs are retained for 24 hours before they are automatically deleted. All of the following are required to satisfy AU.L2-3.3.1 – System Auditing assessment objectives [b] and [d], EXCEPT?
After you ask to examine some audit records, the contractor's system administrator informs you that there is a process to follow before accessing them. The logs are hashed using SHA-512 algorithms, and the system administrator has to run an algorithm to recalculate the hashes for the audit records to verify their integrity before running a decryption algorithm to decrypt the data. Since this might take some time, you tour the facility while interviewing personnel with audit and accountability roles. You see an employee holding the door for another without using their physical access card. While interviewing the contractor's employees, you find that they can access all audit logging tools and tweak the settings according to their needs or requirements. Upon examining the contractor's access control policy, you realize they have not defined the measures to protect audit logging tools. Considering CMMC AU.L2-3.3.8 – Audit Protection and best practices, which of the following is the MOST concerning finding regarding the employees' access to audit logging tools?
