IBM A1000-132 Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

During a security investigation, you discover that an attacker has established persistence using a fileless malware technique that leverages WMI event subscriptions. The malware executes PowerShell code directly in memory every time a specific system event occurs. Traditional antivirus solutions have not detected this threat. What is the MOST effective approach to detect and investigate this type of attack in your SIEM?

Your organization experienced a sophisticated supply chain attack where malicious code was injected into a trusted third-party software update. The malware communicated with C2 servers using DNS tunneling over legitimate domains. Post-incident analysis reveals that your security tools generated thousands of low-priority alerts that masked the actual compromise. What combination of improvements would BEST prevent alert fatigue while detecting similar future attacks?

During an active incident response, you identify that an attacker has gained Domain Admin privileges and is conducting lateral movement using legitimate administrative tools (PsExec, remote WMI, PowerShell remoting). Your incident response plan requires containment without alerting the attacker. However, disabling accounts or blocking network access might trigger attacker awareness. What is the MOST appropriate containment strategy?

Your SIEM is processing 50,000 events per second from diverse sources including cloud workloads, on-premises infrastructure, and IoT devices. You're experiencing parsing failures for 15% of events, storage costs are exceeding budget, and query performance has degraded significantly. Threat detection coverage cannot be reduced. What architectural approach would MOST effectively address these challenges?

You're analyzing a security event where multiple failed authentication attempts were followed by a successful login from the same source IP, but the successful login used Kerberos preauthentication while the failed attempts used NTLM. The successful login occurred during business hours from a geographic location consistent with the user's profile. Standard brute force detection rules did not trigger. What does this pattern MOST likely indicate?

Your threat intelligence platform has identified that your organization is being targeted by an APT group known for using living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBins) and blending malicious activity with legitimate administrative tasks. Traditional IOC-based detection is ineffective. How should you adapt your detection strategy to identify this threat actor?

During incident response to a ransomware attack, forensic analysis reveals the initial compromise occurred 45 days ago through a phishing email, but the ransomware was only deployed yesterday. The attacker maintained persistence through multiple mechanisms and exfiltrated 2TB of sensitive data over the past week. Your backup systems were also compromised. What should be your PRIMARY focus in the immediate response phase?

Your security operations center needs to integrate threat intelligence feeds from multiple sources (commercial, open-source, ISACs, and internal intelligence) into your detection platform. However, you're experiencing high false positive rates, intelligence fatigue, and difficulty prioritizing actionable intelligence. What framework approach would BEST improve threat intelligence operationalization?

You're investigating an alert where a user's authentication tokens appear to be replayed from multiple geographic locations simultaneously, with successful access to cloud applications occurring from IP addresses in different countries within seconds. The user reports normal activity and hasn't shared credentials. MFA is enabled but wasn't prompted for these sessions. What is the MOST likely attack technique being employed?

Your organization is implementing a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform to improve incident response efficiency. You have defined playbooks for common incident types, but analysts report that automated responses sometimes cause business disruption, miss critical context, or escalate incorrectly. What approach would BEST balance automation benefits with risk management?