Security Operations Professional Practice Exam 2025: Latest Questions

A SOC analyst needs to quickly pivot from an alert to see the impacted endpoints, involved users, and related network activity in one place. Which Cortex capability best supports this investigation workflow?

An analyst wants to confirm whether a suspicious executable ran on any endpoints and to identify all related process activity (parent/child processes, command line, hashes). Which Cortex XDR data type is most directly used for this purpose?

A team is building an automated response to isolate an endpoint when a high-severity malware alert is triggered, but they want a human to approve the containment step first. Which XSOAR feature best satisfies this requirement?

Which SOC metric most directly measures how long it takes to contain or remediate a confirmed security incident after it has been identified?

A Cortex XDR query for suspicious PowerShell activity returns far fewer results than expected. You discover many endpoints are not providing detailed process command-line telemetry. What is the most likely cause?

A SOC wants to reduce duplicate cases when multiple low-level alerts all relate to the same malware outbreak. Which approach is most appropriate?

Your organization must ensure every automated containment action is auditable, including who approved it and what exact action was executed. Which design best meets this requirement in XSOAR?

A SOC manager wants to standardize triage quality by ensuring every phishing investigation follows the same checklist (extract IOCs, search for similar emails, check URL detonation results, and document disposition). Which XSOAR capability is best suited to enforce this workflow consistently?

A company wants to automatically block known-malicious IPs observed in Cortex XDR incidents at the perimeter firewall. They also want to avoid accidentally blocking business-critical IPs. Which approach is the best practice?

During an investigation, an analyst sees multiple alerts across endpoints that appear unrelated. After pivoting, they find the same user account is authenticating to many hosts from unusual geolocations and spawning remote execution tools. What is the most appropriate next step to scope and contain the activity using best practice?

Which Cortex capability is primarily designed to provide security posture visibility and risk prioritization across cloud environments (for example, misconfigurations and excessive permissions)?

In Cortex XDR, what is the most accurate description of an "incident"?

A SOC manager wants to reduce analyst effort by automatically enriching phishing-related alerts with WHOIS data and URL reputation, then opening a ticket only when risk is high. Which Cortex product is best suited for this requirement?

An analyst sees repeated Cortex XDR alerts for credential dumping tools across several endpoints. What is the BEST next step to determine whether these are part of a single campaign?

Your team wants to standardize how alerts become cases. The requirement is: create one case per user when multiple suspicious sign-in alerts occur within an hour, and attach all related events to that case. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A Cortex XSOAR playbook is supposed to create a ServiceNow ticket after enrichment, but tickets are not being created even though the playbook completes. Which is the MOST likely issue to check first?

A SOC lead wants to measure and improve triage efficiency using metrics that reflect operational performance, not threat prevalence. Which metric is BEST aligned to this goal?

An organization wants to ensure endpoint containment actions in Cortex XDR are only available to a small subset of senior analysts, while junior analysts can still investigate incidents. What is the recommended approach?

You are designing an architecture to correlate endpoint detections with network security logs for investigations in Cortex XDR. Which data flow best supports this goal?

A Cortex XSOAR playbook automatically quarantines endpoints when a high-severity incident is created. The SOC observes multiple business disruptions from false positives. What is the BEST design change to reduce risk while maintaining rapid response?

An analyst in Cortex XDR wants to quickly determine whether a suspicious executable was seen on other endpoints and where it first appeared. Which Cortex XDR capability best supports this task?

A SOC uses Cortex XSOAR to handle phishing reports. They want to reduce risk by ensuring every reported URL is detonated, reputations are checked, and suspicious messages are quarantined automatically, but only after an analyst approves containment actions. What is the best approach?

Cortex Data Lake is being used as the central log repository. A team notices gaps in firewall log visibility in Cortex XDR. Which issue is the MOST likely cause?

A SOC manager wants to measure and continuously improve alert handling performance. Which set of metrics is MOST directly aligned to SOC operational effectiveness for detection-to-response?

After enabling an automatic response action in Cortex XDR to isolate endpoints on a high-severity alert, the SOC reports several legitimate admin tools are being blocked and hosts are being isolated incorrectly. What is the BEST next step to reduce business impact while maintaining security?