50 XSIAM Analyst Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

An analyst wants to understand the primary purpose of Cortex XSIAM in a security operations center (SOC). Which statement best describes XSIAM?

During an investigation, an analyst needs to quickly see all alerts, assets, users, and evidence related to a specific security event in one place. Which XSIAM capability is most appropriate?

A SOC lead wants to reduce mean time to respond (MTTR) for common phishing incidents by automatically enriching email indicators and isolating affected endpoints when confidence is high. What is the best approach in XSIAM?

An analyst needs to share a weekly summary of incident volume and top incident categories with leadership. Which XSIAM feature best supports this requirement?

An incident contains multiple alerts from different data sources that appear related to the same attacker IP and targeted user. What is the main benefit of XSIAM correlating these alerts into a single incident?

A playbook is designed to run automatically when a malware incident is created, but it never triggers. The incident is visible in XSIAM and has the expected category. Which is the most likely configuration issue?

You need to create a detection that alerts when a user logs in from two geographically distant locations within an impossible time window. What is the best way to implement this in XSIAM?

A stakeholder asks why incident counts increased after onboarding a new log source. Which analysis best supports explaining whether this is due to improved visibility versus an actual rise in attacks?

A containment playbook automatically isolates endpoints when a high-severity incident is created. However, an analyst notices the playbook sometimes isolates a critical server due to a false positive. What is the best practice to reduce business risk while keeping automation benefits?

An analyst is building an investigation that requires joining endpoint process events with identity events to confirm which user initiated a suspicious script. What approach is most appropriate in XSIAM to reliably connect the activity across datasets?

An analyst wants to quickly pivot from a suspicious IP address observed in an alert to view related evidence across endpoints, identities, and network telemetry within Cortex XSIAM. Which XSIAM feature best supports this investigation workflow?

A new data source is not appearing in Cortex XSIAM search results. The data is being forwarded through a Cortex Broker VM. What is the most likely first troubleshooting step?

An incident is created in Cortex XSIAM and you want to ensure the correct team is notified and the incident is assigned automatically based on type and severity. Which approach is best practice?

A phishing incident contains multiple email alerts. You need to confirm whether any recipient executed the malicious attachment and if it resulted in process activity on an endpoint. Which sequence is the most effective in XSIAM?

You are creating a response playbook to contain a suspected compromised endpoint. Which action is typically the safest initial containment step to reduce risk while preserving evidence?

An analyst wants a dashboard to show the trend of incidents by MITRE tactic and highlight the top 5 affected users over the last 30 days. What is the best way to build this in Cortex XSIAM?

Your SOC is receiving a high volume of low-confidence alerts that are being grouped into incidents, slowing triage. Which change is most appropriate to reduce noise without losing visibility?

A playbook step that enriches indicators with an external reputation service is failing intermittently. Manual runs work sometimes, but scheduled runs often fail. Which is the most likely cause?

After onboarding a new log source, you notice fields like username and host are not consistently populated in incidents, making correlation difficult. What is the best corrective action in XSIAM?

A critical incident indicates possible credential theft. You must automate containment but also prevent accidental lockouts of service accounts used by production systems. What is the most appropriate design pattern for the response playbook?

An analyst wants to quickly pivot from an alert to understand the full sequence of related events (process, network, file) on a specific endpoint without manually searching multiple datasets. Which XSIAM capability best supports this workflow?

A SOC lead wants to reduce false positives from a brute-force detection while keeping visibility. What is the best practice approach in XSIAM?

Your manager asks for a recurring, high-level view of security posture showing incident volume trends and top incident categories for the last 30 days. Which XSIAM feature is the most appropriate starting point?

During an investigation, you suspect an attacker used a single IP address to attempt access across multiple user accounts. Which query approach is most effective to validate this hypothesis in XSIAM?

An automated response playbook is failing at a step that uses a user-provided IP address. Sometimes the input is a hostname, and the step expects an IP, causing errors. What is the best way to make the playbook resilient?

Your team wants to ensure analysts always capture specific details (impacted user, business impact, containment action) before closing an incident. Which design is most appropriate in XSIAM?

An analyst is asked to produce a report of 'mean time to acknowledge (MTTA)' by team over the last quarter. Which data points are essential to calculate MTTA correctly in XSIAM?

After enabling a new log source, you can see raw events in search, but detections that should trigger from that data are not producing alerts. Which is the most likely cause to investigate first?

You are designing an automated containment playbook that may quarantine endpoints. What is the best practice to minimize business disruption while still enabling rapid response?

A detection rule is intended to identify suspicious PowerShell execution across Windows endpoints. Analysts report many misses because the process command line is sometimes stored in different fields depending on the data source. What is the most robust approach in XSIAM to improve detection coverage across sources?

An analyst wants to quickly determine whether a suspicious endpoint alert is part of a broader campaign affecting multiple hosts and users. Which XSIAM capability is best suited for pivoting from one alert to related evidence across the environment?

A phishing incident triggers an XSIAM playbook that should isolate the endpoint only when two conditions are met: the user clicked the URL AND malware was later detected on the host. What is the best way to implement this logic in an automation workflow?

During onboarding, an organization wants to ensure analysts can investigate identity-related incidents with consistent user attribution across multiple data sources. Which practice most directly improves this in XSIAM?

A SOC lead wants to provide executives a high-level weekly summary showing trends in incident volume and mean time to respond (MTTR), without exposing raw event details. What is the most appropriate XSIAM approach?

An alert rule is generating many false positives because it triggers on known vulnerability scanners used by IT. You still want to detect similar behavior from unknown sources. What is the best tuning action in XSIAM?

A playbook is designed to automatically close incidents when they are duplicates. It is closing some legitimate incidents that share the same IP address but involve different users and hosts. Which change most appropriately reduces incorrect deduplication?

An analyst is investigating a suspicious PowerShell execution on a host. They want to understand what happened before and after the execution without manually searching multiple logs. Which investigation technique in XSIAM is most appropriate?

You need a report that shows the top 10 incident categories by count over the last 30 days and allows filtering by business unit. What design best meets this requirement in XSIAM?

A newly onboarded log source shows events in raw search, but detections and investigations that rely on normalized fields (like source user and destination IP) are failing. What is the most likely root cause?

A containment playbook is set to isolate endpoints automatically for any "high" severity incident. After deployment, it isolates devices during benign administrative activities because severity is sometimes set high by a noisy detection. What is the best-practice control to reduce business impact while maintaining fast response?

An analyst is new to Cortex XSIAM and wants to quickly understand which types of data are being ingested (for example, endpoint, identity, cloud) and whether ingestion is healthy. Where in XSIAM should they start?

A known malware alert is triggered on multiple hosts. The analyst wants the fastest way to confirm whether the same hash appears elsewhere in the environment. What is the most appropriate next step in XSIAM?

Your SOC wants to ensure that only the incident commander can close high-severity incidents, while analysts can investigate and add evidence. Which capability best supports this requirement in XSIAM?

A playbook is designed to isolate an endpoint when an incident reaches 'High' severity. In testing, the endpoint is not isolated even though the incident appears high in the UI. Which issue is the most likely cause?

You want to reduce false positives from a brute-force detection. You notice most alerts are generated from a single internal scanner that routinely tests credentials against a lab environment. What is the best-practice approach in XSIAM to reduce noise while preserving detection value?

During an investigation, an analyst wants to understand the sequence of events leading up to an alert, including related authentication and endpoint activity. Which feature best supports building a timeline from multiple data sources?

A manager asks for a weekly view of mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) for incidents, broken down by severity. What is the most appropriate way to deliver this in XSIAM?

A playbook posts to Slack with incident details. It works in testing but fails in production with a permissions error. Which troubleshooting step is most appropriate to confirm the root cause inside XSIAM?

A detection generates thousands of alerts per hour, causing delayed triage. You must keep the detection but ensure analysts receive a single incident that aggregates related alerts by the same source IP within a time window. Which approach best addresses this in XSIAM?

Your organization must meet a policy that requires human approval before executing any containment action (endpoint isolation, blocking indicators), but still wants automated enrichment and recommendation steps. What is the best design pattern in XSIAM automation?