XSIAM Engineer Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

An organization is deploying XSIAM across three regions. Due to regulatory constraints, raw security logs must remain within each region, but the SOC wants a single global detection and case-management workflow. Which architecture best satisfies these requirements while minimizing operational overhead?

After onboarding a new EDR source, the SOC notices duplicated incidents: the same endpoint event triggers both an EDR analytic and a generic “suspicious process” analytic. The duplicates share identical entities and timestamps, but the incident merging logic does not consolidate them. What is the most likely root cause to validate first?

You are designing high-availability ingestion for critical audit logs. The customer requires that if an on-prem collector goes down, ingestion continues with minimal data loss and without changing the log sources. Which approach best meets the requirement?

After onboarding cloud audit logs, detections that rely on user identity suddenly drop in fidelity: many events show a username, but the identity entity is not populated, breaking joins with UEBA-style analytics. The raw events include multiple fields: userPrincipalName, email, and a provider-specific userId. What is the best corrective action?

A customer onboards a high-volume firewall source and observes intermittent gaps in query results for the most recent 10–15 minutes, while older data is complete. The collector shows no packet loss, and the source confirms logs are being sent continuously. Which explanation is most likely?

You must onboard a custom application log format where the same field name (“user”) alternates between an email address and an internal numeric ID depending on the event type. Detections require both a consistent identity entity and the raw value for investigation. What is the best design?

A playbook auto-remediates compromised accounts by disabling the user in the IdP. During an outage of the IdP API, the playbook repeatedly retries and floods the IdP once it recovers, triggering rate limits and delaying remediation for high-severity incidents. Which redesign is most appropriate?

You have a playbook that isolates an endpoint when a high-confidence malware incident is created. However, the SOC reports occasional isolation of shared jump hosts caused by false positives. You need to keep fast containment for true positives while reducing business impact. Which change is best practice?

A playbook uses multiple parallel branches: one enriches IP reputation, another queries EDR telemetry, and a third searches recent auth logs. Sometimes the incident is closed as benign because the reputation branch returns “unknown” before the other branches complete, even when EDR later finds a confirmed malicious process. What is the best fix?

After rolling out new detection rules and playbooks, incident volumes spike and analyst workload becomes unmanageable. Leadership wants rapid stabilization without losing visibility into truly critical threats. Which operational approach is most effective?