Cisco Certified Network Professional Security Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A security team is designing controls for east-west traffic in a hybrid environment. Workloads in a private data center and in a public cloud frequently move between subnets, and security policies must remain consistent even when IPs change. The team also wants to reduce reliance on brittle network-based ACLs and move toward identity- and context-based access decisions. Which architectural approach best meets these goals?

A SOC is tuning detection to reduce false positives from bursty but legitimate traffic (software updates, backups). They want a method that adapts to changing baselines per entity and flags meaningful deviations without hard-coded thresholds. Which analytic approach is most appropriate?

A company uses Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) at the edge. Users report intermittent access to a specific SaaS application. Packet captures show the TCP three-way handshake completes and TLS negotiation begins, but the session resets shortly after the client sends the ClientHello. The firewall policy includes TLS decryption for 'All HTTPS' with a custom CA deployed to endpoints. Which is the most likely cause?

An organization operates multiple sites with Cisco SD-WAN and uses an edge NGFW cluster at headquarters for internet breakout. They plan to add local internet breakout at branches but must maintain consistent security controls and logging. Bandwidth is constrained on the WAN, and hairpinning all internet traffic to HQ is no longer acceptable. Which design best meets the requirements with the least WAN overhead?

A data center runs a multi-tenant environment where different business units share the same physical FTD cluster. Each tenant requires administrative isolation, separate policy change control, and separate logging visibility, but the security team also needs to share underlying hardware efficiently. Which FTD capability best addresses this?

A company stores sensitive objects in cloud storage and wants to prevent accidental public exposure while still allowing cross-account access for specific workloads. They also need to detect and block uploads containing regulated data (e.g., PII) leaving the organization. Which solution combination best addresses both requirements with strong governance?

Security must allow developers to use containers in the cloud while ensuring that compromised container images cannot introduce malware into production. The organization wants prevention before runtime, verifiable provenance, and the ability to block deployments that violate policy. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A fleet of endpoints has Cisco endpoint protection deployed. After an incident, analysts discover that a script-based attacker used legitimate administrative tools (LOLBins) to download payloads and execute them in-memory, leaving minimal artifacts on disk. Which detection strategy is most effective to identify this behavior reliably?

An enterprise uses Cisco ISE for 802.1X and wants to implement zero-trust segmentation. Requirements: (1) unknown devices must be quarantined automatically, (2) authorization should be based on user identity and device posture, (3) enforcement must scale across wired, wireless, and VPN, and (4) policy changes must not require widespread VLAN redesign. Which approach best satisfies these requirements?

A SOC integrates firewall logs, endpoint telemetry, and network visibility into a centralized platform. They need to quickly identify whether an internal host is beaconing to command-and-control while minimizing time spent chasing one-off connections. Which query/analytics approach best distinguishes beaconing from random traffic patterns?