Pass the ISC Cloud Security CCSP Questions and answers with CertsForce

Vendor documentation from the manufacturer of the physical hardware is the best source of best practices for securing the BIOS.

A reservation is a minimum resource that is guaranteed to a customer within a cloud environment. Within a cloud, a reservation can pertain to the two main aspects of computing: memory and processor. With a reservation in place, the cloud provider guarantees that a cloud customer will always have at minimum the necessary resources available to power on and operate any of their services.

No matter what kind of application, system, or hosting model used, encryption is 100 percent dependent on encryption keys. Properly securing the keys and the exchange of them is the biggest and most important challenge of encryption systems.

Type 1 hypervisors run directly on top of the bare metal and only contain the code and functions required to perform their purpose. They do not rely on any other systems or contain extra features to secure.

The cloud service operations manager is responsible for preparing systems for the cloud, administering and monitoring services, providing audit data as requested or required, and managing inventory and assets.

The SOAP protocol does not support caching, whereas the REST API does.

With cloud providers hosting a number of different customers, it would be impractical for them to pursue additional certifications based on the needs of a specific customer. Cloud environments are built to a common denominator to serve the greatest number of customers, and especially within a public cloud model, it is not possible or practical for a cloud provider to alter their services for specific customer demands.

Sensitive data exposure occurs when information is not properly secured through encryption and secure transport mechanisms; it can quickly become an easy and broad method for attackers to compromise information. Web applications must enforce strong encryption and security controls on the application side, but secure methods of communications with browsers or other clients used to access the information are also required. Security misconfiguration occurs when applications and systems are not properly configured for security, often a result of misapplied or inadequate baselines. Insecure direct object references occur when code references aspects of the infrastructure, especially internal or private systems, and an attacker can use that knowledge to glean more information about the infrastructure. Unvalidated redirects and forwards occur when an application has functions to forward users to other sites, and these functions are not properly secured to validate the data and redirect requests, thus allowing spoofing for malware or phishing attacks.

In order for any archiving system to be deemed useful and compliant, regular tests must be performed to ensure the data can still be recovered and accessible, should it ever be needed, for the duration of the retention requirements.

Deletion merely removes the pointers to data on a system; it does nothing to actually remove and sanitize the data. As such, the data remains in a recoverable state, and more secure methods are needed to ensure it has been destroyed and is not recoverable by another party.

With many SaaS implementations, data is not isolated to a particular customer but rather is part of the overall application. When it comes to data destruction, a particular challenge is ensuring that all of a customer's data is completely destroyed while not impacting the data of other customers.

Local, physical access in a data center is done via KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switches.

Masking involves replacing specific data within a data set with new values. For example, with credit card fields, as most who have ever purchased anything online can attest, nearly the entire credit card number is masked with a character such as an asterisk, with the last four digits left visible for identification and confirmation.

The best practice is to totally remove any unneeded services and utilities on a system to prevent any chance of compromise or use. If they are just disabled, it is possible for them to be inadvertently started again at any point, or another exploit could be used to start them again. Removing also negates the need to patch and maintain them going forward.