IBM A1000-132 Practice Exam 2025: Latest Questions

A SOC analyst notices that a single endpoint is generating thousands of identical authentication failure events per minute, causing other important alerts to be delayed. What is the BEST immediate action to restore monitoring effectiveness while preserving evidence?

During triage, an analyst finds an alert triggered by a correlation rule that requires three conditions: suspicious PowerShell, an outbound connection to a rare domain, and a new scheduled task. Only the PowerShell event is present. What is the MOST likely explanation and best next step?

A security team wants to reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) by ensuring logs from critical systems arrive quickly and reliably at the central analysis platform. Which design choice BEST supports this goal?

An alert indicates possible credential theft. As the incident commander, which action should occur FIRST to minimize business impact while protecting the environment?

Threat intelligence reports a new phishing campaign using a specific sender domain and URL path. The SOC wants to use this information effectively without increasing false positives. What is the BEST approach?

A SIEM shows repeated 'User added to privileged group' events. The analyst suspects some are legitimate administrative changes. What is the BEST way to tune detection while maintaining security coverage?

An organization is building an incident response process and wants to ensure actions taken during incidents are consistent and auditable. Which element BEST enables this outcome?

A detection engineer wants to validate that new correlation rules will fire correctly without generating production noise. Which approach is MOST appropriate?

A SOC receives multiple low-confidence alerts: unusual DNS queries, a rare outbound IP, and a suspicious process hash. Individually they are weak signals. Which method BEST increases confidence for escalation?

During containment of a suspected ransomware incident, leadership asks the SOC to "block everything" at the firewall. What is the BEST response that aligns with incident response best practices?

A SOC analyst is tuning SIEM correlation rules and wants to reduce false positives from repeated failed logins caused by a known misconfigured application. Which approach is the BEST first step while maintaining visibility?

During triage, an analyst needs to quickly determine whether a suspected phishing email led to credential use from an unusual location. Which data source is MOST directly useful?

A new analyst is asked to follow standard incident response practices when handling a suspected malware infection on a workstation. What is the MOST appropriate immediate action?

A SIEM use case is triggering alerts for 'impossible travel' based on geolocation changes, but many alerts are from employees using a corporate VPN. What is the BEST adjustment?

Your organization ingests threat intelligence feeds and observes many indicators of compromise (IOCs) that are low quality or duplicated. What is the BEST practice to improve detection value while minimizing noise?

An incident handler needs to ensure evidence is admissible and traceable during an investigation. Which process is MOST critical to maintain throughout evidence handling?

A security operations team wants to reduce mean time to respond (MTTR) for common incidents such as repeated malicious IP blocks and account disablement. Which capability BEST supports this goal?

A SIEM correlation rule is intended to detect brute-force attacks by counting failed logins followed by a successful login. It is missing incidents. Investigation shows failed logins are logged on the domain controller, but the successful login is logged on the application server with a different username format (UPN vs sAMAccountName). What is the MOST likely fix?

During containment of a confirmed compromised admin account, the team must ensure business continuity while preventing further abuse. Which action sequence is MOST appropriate?

A SOC is designing log collection for cloud workloads and wants to ensure analysts can reconstruct attack timelines even if an attacker deletes local logs on a compromised instance. Which architecture choice BEST supports this requirement?

During a SOC shift, an analyst notices repeated authentication failures for many different usernames from a single external IP over a short period. What is the most appropriate initial classification of this activity?

A SOC wants to reduce alert fatigue from high-volume, low-fidelity detections while ensuring true positives still get investigated. Which approach is the best practice?

An incident handler is tasked with preserving evidence from a suspected compromised server for potential legal review. Which action best supports forensic integrity?

A threat intelligence team receives a feed of indicators of compromise (IOCs). After ingesting it, the SOC sees a spike in false positives because many IP indicators belong to shared cloud infrastructure. What is the most effective improvement?

A SOC is investigating a suspected compromise. They have EDR telemetry showing a PowerShell process spawning from an Office application, followed by a network connection to an unfamiliar domain. What is the BEST next step to confirm malicious behavior while minimizing business impact?