50 IBM A1000-132 Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A SOC analyst sees hundreds of login failures across many user accounts from a single external IP within a short timeframe. Which event analysis approach is MOST appropriate to quickly confirm whether this is a credential-stuffing attempt?

During triage, an analyst needs to decide whether an alert should be escalated. Which information is MOST useful to determine the alert's business impact?

A team wants to reduce false positives from a rule that triggers on administrative logins. Which tuning change is BEST practice while maintaining detection value?

Which statement BEST describes the purpose of threat intelligence in a SOC detection program?

An analyst notices the SIEM is receiving firewall logs but not DNS logs, even though DNS servers are configured to forward logs. What is the MOST likely next step to troubleshoot?

A phishing incident is confirmed and a user clicked the link but no malware is detected. Which action is the BEST immediate containment step to reduce risk of account takeover?

A SOC wants to detect lateral movement using Windows remote administration tools. Which detection logic is MOST effective when based on endpoint and authentication telemetry?

A security team is designing a case management workflow. Which approach BEST supports consistent incident handling and measurable outcomes?

A SIEM correlation rule is intended to detect data exfiltration by alerting when outbound traffic exceeds a threshold. After deployment, it generates excessive false positives during nightly backups. What is the BEST design improvement that preserves detection for true exfiltration?

An organization integrates multiple threat feeds and notices many indicators are duplicated and some are outdated, causing unnecessary blocking and alert fatigue. Which governance practice is MOST effective to improve indicator quality and operational usefulness?

A SOC analyst sees repeated failed logins to several user accounts from the same external IP, followed by a successful login to one account. What is the MOST appropriate initial action?

A security team wants to reduce SIEM alert fatigue from repeated, identical detections (same host, same rule, within minutes). Which tuning approach is BEST?

During an investigation, an analyst needs to prove whether a suspicious executable was present and run on multiple endpoints. Which data source is MOST directly useful?

An incident handler suspects an attacker established persistence via a scheduled task on a Windows server. What is the BEST next step to confirm and scope this persistence mechanism?

A SIEM rule intended to detect data exfiltration alerts whenever a backup job runs, because it transfers large volumes to a cloud bucket. What is the BEST way to reduce false positives while maintaining detection capability?

A team receives a threat intel report listing multiple malicious IPs and domains tied to a new phishing campaign. What is the BEST operational use of this intel in a detection program?

An organization wants incident response to be repeatable and measurable across shifts. Which practice BEST supports this goal?

A SOC is investigating possible lateral movement. Which event pattern MOST strongly indicates use of remote administration for lateral movement within a Windows environment?

During containment of a suspected breach, the incident commander must choose between blocking a user account and isolating an endpoint. Logs show the compromised account is being used from multiple IPs, and the endpoint status is unknown. What is the MOST effective immediate containment action with the least assumptions?

A SOC is building detections for a cloud environment where IP addresses change frequently and many services use shared infrastructure. Which detection strategy is MOST resilient and context-aware?

A SOC analyst notices a sudden spike in failed logins across many user accounts from a small set of source IPs. What is the BEST immediate action to reduce risk while preserving evidence for investigation?

During triage, an analyst is asked to differentiate an IDS alert from a SIEM correlation rule outcome. Which statement is MOST accurate?

A security engineer wants to improve detection quality by reducing recurring false positives from a specific vulnerability scan that triggers on known approved scanning hosts. What is the BEST practice approach?

A SIEM correlation rule is meant to alert when a user logs in from two geographically distant locations within 30 minutes. Analysts report missed detections for roaming users. Which change is MOST likely to improve accuracy without increasing noise significantly?

An incident handler suspects a phishing email led to credential theft. Which evidence set is MOST useful to confirm the initial access path and scope in a timely manner?

A SOC is onboarding a new log source into a SIEM. After ingestion, fields like username and source IP appear inconsistently, making correlation unreliable. What is the BEST next step?

A threat intelligence team wants to prioritize which external indicators (IPs/domains) to block. Which criterion is MOST appropriate to reduce business disruption while improving protection?

An attacker likely used a compromised service account to access cloud resources. The SOC needs to determine whether data was exfiltrated. Which approach is MOST effective?

A company is building an incident response plan and wants to ensure actions taken during containment do not undermine later legal proceedings. Which practice BEST supports this requirement?

A SIEM generates an alert when a PowerShell command is executed with encoded content. Analysts find the alert fires frequently for a legitimate software deployment tool. They still want to detect malicious use. What is the BEST refinement strategy?

A SOC analyst is tuning a correlation rule that currently triggers on any single failed login event. The team wants to reduce noise while still detecting password-spraying attempts. Which change is the BEST approach?

During an incident, the incident commander assigns tasks for containment, evidence collection, and communications. Which document is MOST helpful to ensure roles and responsibilities are clear and repeatable?

A security team receives threat intelligence about a malicious domain being used for command-and-control. Which action provides the MOST immediate protection with minimal investigation time?

A SOC manager wants to ensure analysts can investigate alerts without being able to change log sources or SIEM configurations. Which security principle BEST addresses this requirement?

A SIEM shows thousands of events from a Windows host, but the timestamps appear several hours in the future compared to other sources, making correlation unreliable. What is the MOST likely root cause?

A suspected compromised endpoint is still powered on and connected to the network. The goal is to preserve evidence while preventing further attacker activity. What is the BEST containment action?

An organization wants to prioritize threat intel so only actionable, high-confidence items create alerts. Which approach BEST supports this goal?

A SOC is implementing a case management process to improve investigations across shifts. Which practice MOST directly improves continuity and auditability of investigations?

A detection rule is intended to identify data exfiltration. It triggers when outbound traffic volume exceeds a static threshold. Analysts report many false positives during nightly backups. Which improvement is MOST effective?

A SOC suspects an attacker is using a valid administrative account to move laterally. Traditional IOC-based detections are not firing. Which detection strategy is MOST appropriate to identify this activity?

A Tier 1 analyst sees a sudden spike in successful VPN logins from multiple countries for the same user account within 10 minutes. What is the BEST immediate action to reduce risk while preserving evidence?

A SOC is tuning detection rules to reduce alert fatigue. Which approach is MOST effective for lowering false positives without creating blind spots?

An analyst wants to confirm whether an endpoint executed a suspicious file and then established an outbound connection shortly afterward. Which data correlation is the MOST appropriate?

A SOC receives threat intelligence indicating a newly observed malicious domain used for command-and-control. What is the BEST way to operationalize this intelligence to improve detection?

During an investigation, an analyst notices identical alerts triggered across dozens of hosts, all referencing the same hash. What is the MOST effective next step to determine scope and prioritize response?

A SIEM rule is intended to detect brute-force attempts but is generating false positives because a legitimate service account frequently fails authentication due to scheduled tasks. What is the BEST tuning method?

A SOC is designing a workflow for handling phishing reports from end users. Which process is MOST aligned with best practices for repeatable incident handling?

After containment of a malware incident, management asks the SOC to ensure the same technique is detected earlier next time. Which action provides the MOST durable improvement?

A company ingests logs from cloud services and on-prem systems into a central platform. They frequently miss correlations because timestamps differ between sources. What is the BEST architectural control to address this?

An attacker uses a valid admin account to run commands on multiple servers (living-off-the-land). There is no known malware hash or domain. Which detection strategy is MOST effective in this situation?