Cloud Security Professional Practice Exam 2025: Latest Questions

A security engineer wants a single console to prioritize and investigate cloud risks across runtime findings, posture misconfigurations, and application vulnerabilities. Which Cortex Cloud capability best enables this centralized risk view?

You are onboarding AWS accounts to Cortex Cloud. Security requires least privilege and wants to avoid long-lived access keys. What is the recommended approach?

A SOC analyst wants to focus on the most urgent runtime threats. Which factor is most helpful for prioritizing a container runtime alert?

A developer asks how to reduce the chance of secrets being committed into source control. Which approach is the best practice within an application security program?

A Kubernetes cluster shows intermittent outbound connections from a payment service pod to an unfamiliar external IP. There are no recent code changes. What is the most likely first step to validate whether this is malicious runtime behavior?

A cloud team is using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to deploy resources. They want to prevent insecure configurations (e.g., overly permissive security groups, public storage) from being merged. Where should controls be implemented for the earliest and most effective feedback?

After enabling cloud posture scanning, a large number of findings appear for resources the organization no longer owns (old projects and subscriptions). What is the best way to reduce noise while preserving meaningful visibility?

A SOC wants to reduce MTTR by ensuring high-confidence cloud incidents open in their ticketing system with enriched context (asset owner, exposure, and related alerts). What design best supports this workflow?

A container image passes vulnerability scanning, but at runtime the workload exhibits suspicious behavior (shell spawn and unexpected outbound connections). The security team suspects a fileless attack or post-deploy compromise. Which control strategy best detects and prevents this class of activity?

An organization wants a single risk posture score that reflects both misconfigurations and exploitability. They also want to avoid prioritizing low-impact misconfigurations when there is clear evidence of active exploitation paths. Which approach best meets this goal?

A security engineer wants to validate that an EC2 instance is protected by a runtime agent and is actively reporting telemetry into Cortex Cloud. Which item is the most direct indicator of successful runtime onboarding?

A team is integrating Application Security scanning into CI/CD. They want to prevent secrets (API keys, tokens) from being committed to source control and also catch them when present in container build contexts. Which scanning capability best addresses this requirement?

A SOC analyst is triaging alerts in Cortex Cloud. They want to reduce alert fatigue by grouping related events (e.g., multiple detections tied to the same workload and user) into a single investigation. Which Cortex Cloud concept supports this workflow?

After enabling container runtime protection, a team notices repeated alerts for "Suspicious process in container" triggered by a legitimate backup job that runs nightly. The team wants to keep protection enabled while suppressing only this known-good behavior. What is the best approach?

A company wants to prioritize remediation by identifying cloud resources that are both misconfigured and reachable from the internet, increasing exploitability. Which capability best helps the team focus on the highest-risk findings?

A development team uses Terraform and wants to prevent insecure cloud configurations from being deployed. They also want developers to get feedback before merge, not after deployment. Which is the most effective integration point?

A cloud security engineer is asked to design onboarding for multiple AWS accounts and Azure subscriptions into Cortex Cloud with least privilege. Which approach aligns best with least-privilege principles while still enabling posture visibility?

A team wants to use Application Security results to drive actionable remediation by assigning fixes to the correct repository owners and tracking progress. Which practice best supports this operational goal?

A Kubernetes cluster is protected with runtime controls. After enabling a new policy, critical application pods begin to crash-loop. Logs show "operation not permitted" errors when the container tries to mount a filesystem needed for normal operation. What is the most likely cause and best next step?

A regulated organization wants to ensure that developers cannot bypass security by deploying workloads outside approved regions and accounts. They already scan IaC in CI but still see resources created manually in the cloud console. Which architecture provides the strongest preventive control aligned with cloud governance best practices?

A security engineer wants to ensure that onboarding new cloud accounts into Cortex Cloud produces a complete inventory of resources and configurations for posture evaluation without deploying agents on workloads. Which onboarding approach best satisfies this requirement?

A containerized payment service must be protected against unexpected outbound connections at runtime (for example, a compromised process attempting to call an external command-and-control host). The team wants enforcement based on observed normal behavior and to minimize manual rule writing. What is the recommended approach in Cortex Cloud runtime security?

A DevSecOps team uses an IaC pipeline. They want to prevent misconfigurations from reaching production by failing builds when a Terraform change introduces an overly permissive IAM policy. Which control is the best fit?

After enabling runtime protection, multiple Kubernetes workloads are suddenly being blocked when writing to a previously used directory under /var/run. Investigation shows the enforcement policy was derived from a short learning period during a maintenance window. What is the most likely root cause and best remediation?

A SOC wants to reduce alert fatigue in Cortex Cloud by correlating related cloud posture findings into a single incident and prioritizing issues most likely to be exploited. Which approach best achieves this?