50 Cloud Security Professional Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A security team wants to reduce alert fatigue by focusing on the riskiest cloud issues first across multiple cloud accounts. In Cortex Cloud, which approach best supports this goal?

A developer pushes a container image that passes vulnerability scanning but later runs in production with a suspicious process spawning from the container. What Cortex Cloud capability is most appropriate to detect and stop this behavior at runtime?

A team is adopting infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and wants to prevent misconfigurations from being introduced into cloud environments. Which practice best aligns with Cortex Cloud application security capabilities?

A SOC analyst needs to quickly understand the full context of a cloud security alert, including related resources, identities, and network exposure. Which Cortex Cloud feature best supports this investigation workflow?

A company is onboarding multiple cloud accounts and wants centralized visibility with minimal operational overhead. Which onboarding design is generally recommended for Cortex Cloud posture management?

A Kubernetes workload in production begins making outbound connections to an unusual domain. The SOC wants to contain the activity quickly without redeploying the cluster. Which runtime security response is most appropriate?

A security team wants to ensure secrets (API keys, tokens) are not committed to source control and also not baked into container images. Which combined control best addresses this requirement?

Your organization uses Cortex Cloud for posture management. A critical finding repeatedly reopens after being resolved because engineers remediate the symptom but not the underlying cause. What is the best next step to prevent recurrence?

A financial services company must meet strict segregation-of-duties requirements. They want Cortex Cloud operators to investigate posture and runtime alerts but not modify cloud resources directly. Which design best satisfies this requirement?

A containerized application is protected by runtime policies. After enabling enforcement, legitimate deployments begin failing because new application binaries are blocked. The team wants strong protection while minimizing business disruption. What is the best troubleshooting and tuning approach?

An organization is onboarding multiple AWS accounts and Azure subscriptions into Cortex Cloud. They want a single place to view cloud asset inventory and unify identities across cloud providers for correlation in investigations. Which Cortex Cloud capability best addresses this requirement?

A security engineer wants to enforce that container images deployed to production must not include known critical vulnerabilities and must be built from approved base images. Which approach best meets this requirement in a cloud-native pipeline?

A SOC analyst is reviewing an alert in Cortex Cloud about a publicly accessible storage resource containing sensitive data. They want to reduce future noise by ensuring similar findings are grouped and prioritized consistently based on risk. What is the best action to take?

A Kubernetes cluster is protected with runtime security. The team receives an alert for a container executing a new binary not included in the image. They suspect the container was modified after deployment. Which additional data point would best validate this suspicion?

A company uses serverless functions to process customer uploads. They want to prevent functions from accessing unintended cloud resources by tightening permissions while maintaining functionality. What is the recommended approach?

A security team wants to detect supply-chain risks in IaC before provisioning. They also want to ensure developers can remediate within the same workflow where changes are made. Which solution pattern best fits?

During incident response, an analyst needs to understand the potential blast radius of a compromised cloud workload. They want to identify what the workload can access based on its identity permissions and network reachability. Which investigation method is most effective?

A Kubernetes cluster generates frequent runtime alerts for command executions inside containers used by an internal operations team. The actions are expected, but the SOC still wants to detect suspicious behavior reliably. What is the best next step?

A company must meet strict regulatory requirements ensuring cryptographic keys are centrally managed and rotated, and that applications never handle long-lived secrets. They run workloads across multiple cloud providers. Which design best meets these requirements?

A threat actor gains access to a pod and attempts to escalate privileges by leveraging the Kubernetes API using the pod's service account. The organization wants to prevent this class of attack while keeping the cluster functional for microservices. Which control combination is most effective?

A security engineer wants to validate that Cortex Cloud is successfully receiving audit logs from an AWS account to support posture and threat detections. Which artifact most directly confirms end-to-end ingestion is working?

A team is onboarding Kubernetes clusters to Cortex Cloud Runtime Security. They want to detect suspicious process execution inside containers (for example, unexpected shells) with minimal operational overhead. Which approach is recommended?

A developer asks why Cortex Cloud flags an API key embedded in a public Git repository as a critical issue. What is the primary risk this finding indicates?

After enabling agentless workload scanning in a cloud account, the security team sees significantly fewer vulnerability findings than expected for virtual machines. What is the most likely cause?

A SOC lead wants Cortex Cloud alerts to automatically open incidents only when multiple related signals indicate a likely compromise (for example, suspicious container process plus anomalous outbound connection). Which capability best supports this requirement?

A platform team wants to prevent deployment of containers that run as privileged or mount the host filesystem. They also want an audit trail of blocked attempts. Which control is the best fit?

A security engineer wants to prioritize remediation of vulnerabilities in container images by combining severity with real exploitability and runtime context (for example, internet exposure and whether the package is loaded). Which approach aligns best with Cortex Cloud best practices?

A company uses ephemeral serverless functions. The security team wants to detect sensitive data exfiltration attempts at runtime but cannot install traditional host agents. Which design is most appropriate?

A regulated enterprise requires strict separation of duties: cloud administrators can onboard accounts, but only the security team can change detection and posture policies. How should access be implemented in Cortex Cloud to meet this requirement?

An organization wants to standardize response actions from Cortex Cloud alerts: automatically tag the affected cloud asset, notify the on-call channel, and create a ticket with required fields. They need this to be consistent across multiple detection types. What is the best architectural approach?

A security team wants a single place to view cloud risks across AWS, Azure, and GCP and then open a ticket with context for remediation. Which Cortex Cloud capability best fits this requirement?

A developer asks why Cortex Cloud can alert on suspicious process behavior in a Kubernetes pod even when the container image is trusted. What is the best explanation?

An application security engineer wants to reduce false positives when scanning Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for misconfigurations. Which approach is most effective?

A SOC analyst needs to determine whether an IAM misconfiguration is actively being exploited or is only a posture risk. Which data source is most useful to correlate with the posture finding?

A Kubernetes workload is generating repeated runtime alerts for outbound connections to an unapproved domain. The team claims it is a required dependency but cannot identify which container is responsible. What is the best next step to speed root-cause analysis?

A security team wants to prevent leaked secrets from being introduced into container images during the build process and also wants evidence of where the secret originated. Which practice best addresses both requirements?

A company uses multiple cloud accounts/subscriptions and wants posture findings to be assigned to the correct owning team automatically. Which design is most aligned with SOC best practices?

An organization wants to adopt Cortex Cloud for both posture and runtime. They are concerned about tool sprawl and want a common investigation experience for cloud misconfigurations and runtime incidents. What architecture choice best supports this?

A runtime policy is configured to block execution of shells in containers. After enabling it, several workloads fail because their startup scripts invoke /bin/sh legitimately. The security team still wants strong protection against interactive shell abuse. What is the best policy adjustment?

A security engineer wants to prioritize remediation of vulnerabilities discovered in container images. The team has limited capacity and needs to focus on what is most likely to be exploited. Which prioritization method is most effective?

A security engineer is asked to explain how Cortex Cloud correlates findings from runtime and posture to speed up investigations. Which concept best describes this capability?

A team wants runtime visibility into suspicious process executions in Kubernetes without modifying application code. What is the most appropriate approach in Cortex Cloud Runtime Security?

An AppSec lead wants developers to get quick feedback on vulnerabilities before code is merged, while ensuring consistent enforcement across repositories. Which is the best practice approach using Cortex Cloud Application Security?

A SOC analyst sees a runtime alert indicating a container spawned a shell and then contacted an external IP. They need to quickly determine whether the container image is known-bad, whether the workload is internet-exposed, and what IAM role it uses. Where should they start to efficiently answer all three questions in Cortex Cloud?

A platform team uses ephemeral Kubernetes pods for batch jobs. They report missing runtime detections because jobs complete quickly. Which configuration change most directly improves visibility for short-lived workloads?

A company wants to prevent secrets (API keys) from being committed to source control and also ensure any discovered secrets can be traced to the owning team and repository. Which combined outcome best matches what Application Security should provide?

A security architect wants to reduce alert fatigue by ensuring only high-confidence runtime alerts become incidents, but still keep lower-severity signals available for hunting. Which approach best aligns with SOC operations best practices in Cortex Cloud?

A team is adopting Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and wants to prevent misconfigurations from reaching production. They also want exceptions to be time-bound and auditable. What is the best practice implementation pattern?

A runtime policy is intended to block cryptomining in containers by detecting execution of common miners. The SOC reports that attackers are evading the control by renaming binaries and executing them from /tmp. Which enhancement is most likely to improve detection and prevention?

After integrating multiple cloud accounts, a security team finds duplicate asset records and inconsistent ownership tagging, making it difficult to assign remediation. What is the most effective architectural strategy to improve asset identity and assignment across Cortex Cloud?