Microsoft Certified: Security Operations Analyst Associate Practice Exam 2025: Latest Questions

You are investigating a user account that might be compromised. You want to see a consolidated timeline of alerts, incidents, and related activities for that user across endpoints, identities, and email. Which Microsoft 365 Defender capability should you use?

You need to determine whether a suspicious file hash has been seen on any endpoints onboarded to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Which action is the most appropriate?

Your organization wants Microsoft Defender for Cloud to automatically deploy the required Azure monitoring agent extensions and collect security data from supported Azure VMs. What should you enable?

A SOC analyst needs to view and work with alerts grouped into a single case for investigation within Microsoft Sentinel. Where should the analyst work from?

You are deploying Microsoft Sentinel and need to ingest Azure AD sign-in logs. Which prerequisite is required to collect these logs into Sentinel?

In Microsoft Sentinel, you create a scheduled analytics rule that runs every 5 minutes. You notice duplicate incidents created for the same activity because the query window overlaps. What should you configure to reduce duplicate incidents for the same entities?

You need to ensure a specific Azure resource type is continuously assessed against security requirements and that non-compliant resources are flagged in Microsoft Defender for Cloud recommendations. Which approach should you use?

An analyst wants to quickly pivot from a Microsoft Sentinel incident to see the raw events that triggered it and continue investigation with KQL. Which Sentinel feature provides this pivot directly from the incident experience?

You ingest firewall logs into Microsoft Sentinel. Your detection rule is intended to identify port scans by summarizing distinct destination ports per source IP in 5-minute bins. However, the rule is missing many scans because events arrive late (up to 15 minutes). What is the best change to make while minimizing missed detections without dramatically increasing noise?

Your organization uses Microsoft Defender for Cloud and wants to automatically trigger remediation when a high-severity security alert is generated for an Azure VM (for example, suspected malware). The remediation should isolate the VM from the network using Defender for Endpoint capabilities. Which design best meets this requirement?

You need to ingest Windows security events from several on-premises servers into Microsoft Sentinel. You want the highest fidelity parsing and the ability to use advanced hunting-style queries across normalized fields. Which data connector should you use?

A SOC analyst wants to suppress a recurring, known-benign Microsoft Defender for Endpoint alert on a specific device group without disabling the detection globally. What should the analyst configure?

You are reviewing Defender for Cloud recommendations and need to understand which recommendations will be evaluated against industry and regulatory benchmarks. Which Defender for Cloud capability maps recommendations to standards such as CIS and NIST?

Your organization wants Sentinel incidents to automatically create a ticket in a third-party ITSM tool whenever an incident is set to High severity. You need a low-code solution. What should you use?

You create a new Microsoft Sentinel analytics rule that uses a KQL query returning multiple entities (Account, Host, IP). Incidents are created but the entities are not mapped, making investigation graphs incomplete. What is the most likely fix?

You need to investigate sign-in activity related to a Sentinel incident and pivot to raw Microsoft Entra ID sign-in logs. Which built-in Sentinel feature provides a guided investigation experience with entity pivots and timeline views?

A security team wants to reduce alert fatigue by grouping repeated detections into a single Sentinel incident when they share the same user and source IP within a 1-hour window. What should they configure?

You are investigating an attack and want to query across Microsoft Defender for Endpoint device events and Defender for Office 365 email events from within Microsoft 365 Defender. Which capability allows you to run a single query across multiple Defender data sets?

You enabled Microsoft Sentinel UEBA and want to prioritize investigations on risky users. Your stakeholders ask for a method to identify anomalies such as 'impossible travel' and unusual login patterns and then surface them as incidents. Which approach best aligns with Sentinel capabilities?

Your Sentinel workspace is in Azure. You must allow a third-party SOC platform to query Sentinel logs using the Log Analytics API, but you want to follow least privilege and avoid granting full workspace access. What should you use?

You are onboarding multiple Windows servers to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. In the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, the servers appear but are grouped under unexpected device groups, causing the wrong automation to run. You want devices to be placed into the correct device groups automatically based on a consistent attribute without manual assignment. What should you configure?

You are using Microsoft Defender for Cloud and notice that some security recommendations are not appearing for several Azure subscriptions. Those subscriptions were recently moved into a new management group. You need Defender for Cloud to assess resources and generate recommendations for all subscriptions. What is the most likely cause?

You are building an investigation workflow in Microsoft Sentinel. Analysts want to pivot from an incident to the exact raw events that triggered it, even when the incident includes alerts from multiple sources. What Sentinel feature should you use to view the underlying events tied to the incident?

Your SOC uses Microsoft Sentinel. Analysts complain that a custom analytics rule generates too many incidents because the same user triggers the rule multiple times in a short period. You want to reduce noise by creating a single incident that groups repeated matches for the same user over a time window while still keeping all the events. What should you configure?

You ingest firewall logs into Microsoft Sentinel and run a KQL query that works in Logs but fails when used in an analytics rule with an error indicating that the query uses an unsupported operator for scheduled analytics. The query uses the "join" operator across two large tables without specifying a key and uses "make-series". You need the detection to run reliably on a schedule. What is the best approach?