Network Security Analyst Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A security team uses address groups heavily in Security policy. They recently onboarded several SaaS providers with rapidly changing IP ranges. The team wants to minimize policy commits and reduce the risk of stale IP objects while still keeping rules readable and searchable. Which object design best meets these goals on Palo Alto Networks NGFWs?

After importing an External Dynamic List (EDL) of malicious IPs, the team notices a sharp increase in rule-matching CPU and session setup latency. The EDL contains tens of thousands of entries and is referenced by multiple rules in different positions. Which change is most likely to reduce the performance impact while preserving security intent?

An organization has strict governance requiring that some object changes (e.g., shared address objects) must not be deployable by local firewall admins, but rule authors in each business unit still need to reference those objects. Which approach best enforces this separation of duties while keeping objects reusable at scale?

A newly added Security policy rule intended to allow only Office 365 web access is unexpectedly allowing other web applications. The rule is: source zone=trust, destination zone=untrust, application=ssl, service=application-default, URL category=office365, action=allow. Decryption is enabled for this traffic. What is the most likely root cause and best corrective action?

A company uses a layered rulebase model. A global pre-rule denies known-bad destinations using an EDL. A local business-unit rule allows outbound web browsing. Users report intermittent access failures to legitimate sites, but only for a subset of sites that appear in the EDL due to false positives. The business unit is not allowed to edit global pre-rules. What is the best architecture to handle this without weakening global security broadly?

After enabling Decryption, the SOC notices that certain threats are still not being detected for a subset of outbound TLS traffic, even though the same malware is detected when using a test client in a different subnet. Policy shows Decryption rules should match all outbound internet traffic. What is the most likely troubleshooting step to identify why Threat Prevention is not inspecting those sessions?

A firewall consistently matches an overly broad interzone allow rule instead of a more specific rule intended to control traffic to a sensitive application. Both rules appear to match the traffic based on zones, users, and addresses. The specific rule uses App-ID with 'application-default' service, while the broad rule uses 'any' application and 'any' service. What is the best fix to ensure the specific control is applied without breaking other traffic?

An enterprise is migrating from local firewall management to Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) to standardize policy across multiple sites. They need to enforce a global baseline (e.g., DNS security, command-and-control blocks) while allowing site-specific exceptions with auditable approvals. Which SCM design best fits these requirements?

After onboarding multiple firewalls into Strata Cloud Manager, the team notices inconsistent object resolution: a rule referencing an address group behaves differently across sites. Investigation shows some sites have local objects with the same name as global objects but different values. What is the best remediation strategy to prevent ambiguous references and ensure consistent policy behavior?

A SOC expects newly released threat signatures to block an active campaign quickly. They confirm the subscription is valid, but a subset of firewalls is not enforcing the newest protections. Connectivity is available, but updates appear delayed or missing. Which approach best ensures timely and reliable security content distribution across the fleet while maintaining operational control?