Security Operations Engineer Practice Exam 2025: Latest Questions

You need to ensure that only Google Cloud-managed identities can authenticate to your company’s SaaS applications, and you want to minimize password-based logins. Which approach is most aligned with Google Cloud security best practices?

A security analyst wants to investigate who changed a firewall rule in a GCP project. Where should they look to find the authoritative record of the change?

Your SOC needs a place to track investigations with evidence, tasks, and status updates tied to security alerts generated in Google Security Operations. What feature should you use?

You want to automate response actions when a high-confidence alert is generated, such as disabling a user and opening a case. What is the most appropriate way to implement this in Google Security Operations?

A spike in outbound connections from a GCE instance is detected. You want to quickly determine whether the instance is communicating with suspicious IPs and which processes may be responsible. What is the best next step?

Your organization has multiple GCP projects and wants consistent, centralized security visibility. You need to query security telemetry across projects and retain it for investigations. Which architecture best meets this requirement?

A detection rule in Google Security Operations is generating too many false positives for a known administrative tool used by IT. You want to reduce noise without suppressing true malicious behavior. What is the best action?

During an incident, you need to contain a suspected compromised service account used by a workload on GCE. The workload must continue running if possible, and you need to preserve evidence. What is the recommended first containment step?

You need an automated response pipeline: when a phishing alert is generated, enrich it with user context, quarantine the email in the mail platform, disable the user if high risk, and open a case with all artifacts attached. You also need retries and human approval for disabling executives. What should you implement?

An attacker gained access to a project and created new service account keys to maintain persistence. You need to detect this quickly across the organization and investigate which identities performed the actions. What is the best solution design?

Your SOC team wants to ensure that suspicious actions in Google Workspace (for example, a large number of failed logins) are visible alongside Google Cloud activity in a single detection platform. Which approach best supports centralized detection and investigation in Google SecOps?

An analyst is investigating a suspected compromised Compute Engine VM. They need to quickly determine whether the VM made outbound connections to known malicious IPs in the last 24 hours. Which data source is most directly suited for this task?

You want to prevent incident responders from accidentally modifying evidence while still allowing them to investigate. What is the best practice for granting access to security logs in Google Cloud?

Your organization uses Google SecOps to manage incidents. Analysts complain that alerts about the same underlying event are generating multiple cases, increasing triage time. What configuration change best addresses this problem?

A Cloud Run service is publicly reachable and is suspected of being abused. You need to quickly verify whether any identities invoked the service with elevated privileges and whether configuration was changed to allow unauthenticated access. Which combination of logs is most appropriate to investigate?

You are integrating a third-party endpoint detection and response (EDR) platform into Google SecOps. The EDR sends high-volume JSON events with inconsistent field names across versions. What is the best approach to ensure reliable detections over time?

A detection rule flags potential data exfiltration from Cloud Storage. During investigation, the analyst wants to confirm if objects were accessed via signed URLs versus authenticated identities. Which evidence is most useful?

A security automation playbook should quarantine a potentially compromised VM by removing its external exposure while preserving internal access for forensic collection. What is the best containment action in Google Cloud?

Your organization must support cross-project incident response. During an incident, responders need to query logs from many projects and preserve chain-of-custody. You also want to avoid granting broad roles in every project. What architecture best meets these goals?

You are building an automated response that triggers when Google SecOps identifies a high-confidence credential theft pattern. The response must: (1) create a case, (2) disable the suspected user, (3) open a ticket in an external ITSM system, and (4) record all actions for auditability. What is the best design approach?

Your SOC receives frequent alerts for successful logins to Google Workspace from a sanctioned third-party IdP used by contractors. Many are expected, but analysts waste time validating them. You want to reduce noise while still detecting true credential abuse. What is the best approach in Google Security Operations?

A new Kubernetes cluster is sending container logs to Google Cloud, but Google Security Operations shows only a small subset of expected telemetry. You suspect log-based ingestion filters are dropping entries. What should you check first to identify the root cause?

You need to ensure every investigation in Google Security Operations includes consistent artifacts: impacted assets, timeline, containment actions, and required approvals. The process must be standardized and auditable without relying on analyst memory. What should you implement?

You are investigating a suspected data exfiltration from a sensitive GCS bucket. You have alerts indicating unusual object reads and a spike in outbound traffic from a specific service account. What is the most effective next step to confirm scope and identify the accessed objects?

You want to automate containment when a high-confidence alert indicates a Compute Engine VM is running known cryptomining malware. The response must: (1) isolate the VM from the internet, (2) preserve evidence for forensics, and (3) be reversible if the alert is later determined to be a false positive. Which design best meets these requirements?