Certified Threat Intelligence Analyst (CTIA) Questions and Answers
James, a senior threat intelligence officer, was tasked with assessing the success and failure of the threat intelligence program established by the organization. As part of the assessment, James reviewed the outcome of the intelligence program, determined if any improvements were required, and identified the past learnings that can be applied to future programs.
Identify the activity performed by James in the above scenario.
Sam works as an analyst in an organization named InfoTech Security. He was asked to collect information from various threat intelligence sources. In meeting the deadline, he forgot to verify the threat intelligence sources and used data from an open-source data provider, who offered it at a very low cost. Through it was beneficial at the initial stage but relying on such data providers can produce unreliable data and noise putting the organization network into risk.
What mistake Sam did that led to this situation?
Tim is working as an analyst in an ABC organization. His organization had been facing many challenges in converting the raw threat intelligence data into meaningful contextual information. After inspection, he found that it was due to noise obtained from misrepresentation of data from huge data collections. Hence, it is important to clean the data before performing data analysis using techniques such as data reduction. He needs to choose an appropriate threat intelligence framework that automatically performs data collection, filtering, and analysis for his organization.
Which of the following threat intelligence frameworks should he choose to perform such task?
What term describes the trust establishment process, wherein the first organization relies on a body of evidence presented to the second organization, and the level of trust is contingent upon the degree and quality of evidence provided by the initiating organization?
Alice, an analyst, shared information with security operation managers and network operations center (NOC) staff for protecting the organizational resources against various threats. Information shared by Alice was highly technical and include threat actor TTPs, malware campaigns, tools used by threat actors, and so on.
Which of the following types of threat intelligence was shared by Alice?
An XYZ organization hired Mr. Andrews, a threat analyst. In order to identify the threats and mitigate the effect of such threats, Mr. Andrews was asked to perform threat modeling. During the process of threat modeling, he collected important information about the treat actor and characterized the analytic behavior of the adversary that includes technological details, goals, and motives that can be useful in building a strong countermeasure.
What stage of the threat modeling is Mr. Andrews currently in?
Which of the following components refers to a node in the network that routes the traffic from a workstation to external command and control server and helps in identification of installed malware in the network?
SecurityTech Inc. is developing a TI plan where it can drive more advantages in less funds. In the process of selecting a TI platform, it wants to incorporate a feature that ranks elements such as intelligence sources, threat actors, attacks, and digital assets of the organization, so that it can put in more funds toward the resources which are critical for the organization’s security.
Which of the following key features should SecurityTech Inc. consider in their TI plan for selecting the TI platform?
While analyzing a series of security incidents, you notice a pattern of attacks originating from specific geographical locations. To gain deeper insight into the spatial aspects of these threats, what contextualization method would you employ to understand the geographic origin and distribution of the attacks?
What is the correct sequence of steps involved in scheduling a threat intelligence program?
1. Review the project charter
2. Identify all deliverables
3. Identify the sequence of activities
4. Identify task dependencies
5. Develop the final schedule
6. Estimate duration of each activity
7. Identify and estimate resources for all activities
8. Define all activities
9. Build a work breakdown structure (WBS)
Jacob, a professional hacker, created an exact replica of an online shopping website. He copied the entire contents of the original website onto the local system that enables him to create a dummy spam website for performing social engineering attacks over the employees.
What type of technique did Jacob use for cloning the website?
Karry, a threat analyst at an XYZ organization, is performing threat intelligence analysis. During the data collection phase, he used a data collection method that involves no participants and is purely based on analysis and observation of activities and processes going on within the local boundaries of the organization.
Identify the type of data collection method used by Karry.
Joe works as a threat intelligence analyst with Xsecurity Inc. He is assessing the TI program by comparing the project results with the original objectives by reviewing project charter. He is also reviewing the list of expected deliverables to ensure that each of those is delivered to an acceptable level of quality.
Identify the activity that Joe is performing to assess a TI program’s success or failure.
Mr. Bob, a threat analyst, is performing analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH). He has reached to a stage where he is required to apply his analysis skills effectively to reject as many hypotheses and select the best hypotheses from the identified bunch of hypotheses, and this is done with the help of listed evidence. Then, he prepares a matrix where all the screened hypotheses are placed on the top, and the listed evidence for the hypotheses are placed at the bottom.
What stage of ACH is Bob currently in?
Daniel is a professional hacker whose aim is to attack a system to steal data and money for profit. He performs hacking to obtain confidential data such as social security numbers, personally identifiable information (PII) of an employee, and credit card information. After obtaining confidential data, he further sells the information on the black market to make money.
Daniel comes under which of the following types of threat actor.
CalSoft is a large-scale organization that wants to establish a certain level of trust before sharing intelligence within the organization. As various departments in the organization share information frequently, they decided to use different trust models for different departments. In addition, the organization acts as a provider of threat intelligence to all connected members and organizations.
Which of the following organizational trust models should be used by CalSoft?
Cybersol Technologies initiated a cyber-threat intelligence program with a team of threat intelligence analysts. During the process, the analysts started converting the raw data into useful information by applying various techniques, such as machine-based techniques, and statistical methods.
In which of the following phases of the threat intelligence lifecycle is the threat intelligence team currently working?
Organizations must choose the right threat intelligence platform to assess and leverage intelligence information, monitor multiple enforcement points, manage intelligence feeds, and select appropriate security for digital assets.
Which of the following key factors ensures that the threat intelligence platform offers a structured way to perform investigations on attacks by processing the threat intelligence and utilizing internal security controls to automate the detection process?
In a team of threat analysts, two individuals were competing over projecting their own hypotheses on a given malware. However, to find logical proofs to confirm their hypotheses, the threat intelligence manager used a de-biasing strategy that involves learning strategic decision making in the circumstances comprising multistep interactions with numerous representatives, either having or without any perfect relevant information.
Which of the following de-biasing strategies the threat intelligence manager used to confirm their hypotheses?
ABC is a well-established cyber-security company in the United States. The organization implemented the automation of tasks such as data enrichment and indicator aggregation. They also joined various communities to increase their knowledge about the emerging threats. However, the security teams can only detect and prevent identified threats in a reactive approach.
Based on threat intelligence maturity model, identify the level of ABC to know the stage at which the organization stands with its security and vulnerabilities.
Philip, a professional hacker, is planning to attack an organization. In order to collect information, he covertly collects information from the target person by maintaining a personal or other relationship with the target person.
Which of the following intelligence sources is used by Philip to collect information about the target organization?
A threat analyst obtains an intelligence related to a threat, where the data is sent in the form of a connection request from a remote host to the server. From this data, he obtains only the IP address of the source and destination but no contextual information. While processing this data, he obtains contextual information stating that multiple connection requests from different geo-locations are received by the server within a short time span, and as a result, the server is stressed and gradually its performance has reduced. He further performed analysis on the information based on the past and present experience and concludes the attack experienced by the client organization.
Which of the following attacks is performed on the client organization?
Alison, an analyst in an XYZ organization, wants to retrieve information about a company’s website from the time of its inception as well as the removed information from the target website.
What should Alison do to get the information he needs.
A company, TechSoft Solutions, implemented a threat intelligence program and began developing operational capabilities obtained in the previous levels and created an organized team approach for strategic analysis. The company also established necessary intelligence processes and workflows to extract their own threat intelligence.
Identify the threat intelligence maturity level at which the company stands.
The cybersecurity team seeks to enhance its threat hunting capabilities in a large enterprise. They plan to search systematically and proactively for adversaries within their networks. What type of threat hunting approaches are they most likely to adopt, involving predefined processes, methodologies, and frameworks for their investigation?
Karry, a threat analyst at an XYZ organization, is performing threat intelligence analysis. During the data collection phase, he used a data collection method that involves no participants and is purely based on analysis and observation of activities and processes going on within the local boundaries of the organization.
Identify the type data collection method used by the Karry.
