WGU Managing-Cloud-Security Dumps

TheProcess for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis (PASTA)is a risk-centric threat modeling methodology that explicitly focuses on simulating real-world attacks from an adversary’s perspective. Unlike STRIDE or DREAD, which classify threats and rate severity, PASTA evaluates how an attacker would exploit vulnerabilities step by step.

PASTA has seven stages, including defining objectives, decomposing applications, and simulating attacks. This methodology helps organizations understand both technical and business risks by looking at the application as an attacker would.

STRIDE categorizes threats, DREAD provides scoring, and ATASM emphasizes architecture and mitigation. While valuable, they are not primarily attack-simulation frameworks. PASTA enables proactive testing of defenses against realistic adversary behaviors, making it especially relevant in modern cloud and DevSecOps environments.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivers fundamental computing resources over the cloud. These include virtual machines, block storage, networking, and load balancers. Customers use these resources to build and manage custom IT solutions, while the provider manages the underlying hardware.

PaaS abstracts infrastructure further, providing a development environment for applications without requiring infrastructure management. SaaS delivers fully functional applications over the internet. NaaS is a narrower category focusing on network delivery.

IaaS is the correct answer because it gives maximum flexibility and control compared to the other models, allowing organizations to build tailored environments. It also requires customers to manage operating systems, middleware, and runtime security, making shared responsibility an essential part of the model.

Acceptance testingevaluates whether the system meets user requirements and performs as expected in real-world conditions. In this case, employees need the graphical interface to work properly for customer data entry. Acceptance testing confirms usability, accuracy, and functionality from the end user’s perspective.

Load testing measures performance under stress, regression testing checks for errors introduced by new changes, and security testing ensures system defenses. These are valuable, but they do not validate end-user satisfaction and workflow alignment.

Acceptance testing is the final validation step before production deployment. It ensures that updates deliver intended business value and user experience. By involving employees in acceptance testing, organizations ensure successful adoption of new systems.

Reliabilityin cloud design ensures workloads can recover quickly from disruptions and continue operating as expected. This concept focuses on high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery. Reliability requires implementing redundancy, backup strategies, and robust monitoring.

Security ensures data protection, operational excellence covers continuous improvement, and resource hierarchy refers to organizational structures, but none focus specifically on availability and resilience.

By prioritizing reliability, organizations design cloud architectures capable of withstanding failures at multiple layers—compute, storage, networking, and even regions. This design principle ensures customer trust and compliance with service-level agreements.

The STRIDE threat model identifies six categories: Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information disclosure, Denial of service, and Elevation of privilege. In this scenario, the accountant modified data they were not authorized to change. This is an act ofTampering, which refers to unauthorized alteration of data or systems.

Spoofing would involve impersonating another identity, denial of service would block availability, and elevation of privilege would involve gaining higher access rights. The accountant already had legitimate access but misused it to alter data outside their scope of responsibility.

Tampering compromises data integrity, one of the pillars of the CIA triad. In cloud and enterprise systems, safeguards against tampering include role-based access control, least privilege, and auditing to detect unauthorized changes. Recognizing this as tampering helps in identifying insider misuse and implementing compensating controls.

Abastion hostis a hardened system placed at the boundary between different security zones. It acts as a gateway, controlling access from a less secure network (such as the internet or a lower-trust zone) into a higher-security zone (such as an internal cloud environment).

Secure Shell (SSH) provides secure communication but does not create a boundary. Virtual clients and host isolation are endpoint measures, not boundary defenses.

By placing a bastion host at the perimeter, organizations centralize monitoring, apply strict access controls, and reduce attack surfaces. These hosts are typically stripped down to essential services, patched frequently, and monitored closely. In cloud environments, bastion hosts are essential for controlling administrative access while enforcing strong authentication and logging.

Continuous monitoring is the control that allows organizations to actively verify that a cloud provider is fulfilling contractual and compliance obligations. This involves automated collection and analysis of operational, security, and performance data. It enables organizations to ensure that service-level agreements (SLAs) are being honored and that compliance requirements are being met in real time.

While regulatory oversight is provided by external authorities and incident management is reactive in nature, continuous monitoring is a proactive approach. It allows customers to maintain visibility into provider operations. Confidential computing focuses on data protection but does not verify contract adherence.

By employing continuous monitoring, organizations establish transparency and accountability. It also supports audit processes by providing evidence that controls remain effective over time. This reduces risk associated with outsourcing critical functions to a cloud provider and ensures resilience against potential provider-side failures.

In a cloud environment, responsibility forhardware managementshifts primarily to the cloud provider. Customers no longer manage servers, storage devices, or physical networks directly. As a result, hardware management policies are less critical for customer audits compared to data classification, procurement, or acceptable use.

Data classification remains essential to secure sensitive information. Software procurement policies are important to control licensing and compliance. Acceptable use policies govern employee behavior in cloud environments.

While organizations may still need high-level oversight of hardware through contracts and SLAs, detailed hardware policies have a reduced role. Instead, emphasis shifts to managing the shared responsibility model, ensuring cloud provider controls complement customer governance.

The unplanned event described is adisruptionof service. In IT service management frameworks like ITIL, disruptions occur when an incident prevents normal service delivery. The goal of incident management is to restore service quickly and minimize impact on customers.

A bug refers to a software defect, which may cause disruptions but is not synonymous with the event itself. An error represents a fault, while change refers to deliberate modifications. Only disruption captures the unplanned nature of service unavailability.

Recognizing incidents as disruptions helps organizations apply structured processes such as escalation, root-cause analysis, and communication. It ensures resilience in cloud-based environments where uptime is a key performance indicator and customer trust is closely tied to availability.

The engineers are concerned aboutportability. Vendor-specific APIs and tools create a dependency on a single provider, leading to vendor lock-in. This limits the ability to migrate services or workloads to another provider without significant rework.

Reliability and availability refer to service uptime and continuity, while scalability addresses performance under demand. Although important, none of these directly relate to cross-platform flexibility. Portability ensures that services, data, and applications can be easily moved or integrated across environments.

By adopting portable solutions—such as open standards, containerization, and multi-cloud strategies—organizations reduce long-term risks, increase negotiation power with providers, and enhance resilience.

AnIdentity Provider (IdP)is a system that stores and manages identity information and validates authentication and authorization requests. IdPs are critical in cloud and hybrid environments, supporting protocols such as SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect for federated access.

An HSM manages encryption keys, not identities. Zero Trust is a security philosophy requiring continuous verification, but the system that enforces authentication is the IdP. A bastion host provides secure administrative access but does not manage identity.

By using an IdP, organizations centralize credential management, enforce multifactor authentication, and integrate with Single Sign-On (SSO). This reduces password fatigue, increases security, and ensures consistent access control policies across applications and services.

Categorizationis the process of systematically identifying and classifying files according to content and relevance. In preparation for a PCI DSS audit, it is critical to identify which files fall within scope—those that contain cardholder data or impact its security.

Normalization adjusts data format, tokenization substitutes sensitive data with tokens, and anonymization removes identifiers. While useful, none directly address the task of isolating “relevant files” for audit. Categorization ensures that files are grouped correctly, allowing auditors to focus on the proper scope and preventing unnecessary exposure of unrelated data.

This step aligns with PCI DSS requirements that limit scope to systems and data directly affecting cardholder data security. Proper categorization streamlines audits and demonstrates effective data governance.

TheZero Trustsecurity model assumes that no user, device, or application should be trusted by default, whether inside or outside the network perimeter. Every access request must be continuously verified using strict identity, authorization, and context-based checks.

Unlike traditional perimeter security, Zero Trust emphasizes the principle of “never trust, always verify.” Traffic inspection looks at data packets, intrusion prevention identifies malicious activity, and secret management safeguards sensitive keys and credentials. None of these approaches enforce constant, adaptive identity verification the way Zero Trust does.

By adopting Zero Trust, organizations ensure that access is not granted simply because a user is “inside” the network. Instead, continuous checks evaluate credentials, device posture, location, and other risk factors. This significantly reduces the risk of insider threats, credential theft, and lateral movement within cloud environments.

In Agile development,user storiesare the standard way to capture requirements for new features or improvements. A user story describes the functionality from the perspective of the end user, ensuring that development aligns with business needs.

“Cases” might refer to test cases, which validate requirements, but they are not used to describe them. Cookies are technical elements for web sessions, and notes are informal documentation.

User stories typically follow a format such as:“As a [role], I want [goal] so that [benefit].”This provides clarity, fosters communication between developers and stakeholders, and ensures that acceptance criteria can be defined and tested. Using stories as a requirement tool aligns with iterative, customer-focused release cycles.

A cloud service partner plays a complementary role by offering products or services that enhance or interact with the primary cloud provider’s offerings. Examples include managed service providers, value-added resellers, or software vendors that integrate their solutions with the core infrastructure or platform of a cloud service provider.

The customer is the end user of cloud services, regulators ensure compliance with laws, and developers create applications but do not represent an independent ecosystem role. Partners, on the other hand, extend the value of the primary offering by providing additional tools, support, or integrations that enhance customer experience.

This ecosystem role is recognized by major cloud frameworks, such as the Cloud Security Alliance, which notes the importance of partners in ensuring interoperability, extending services, and supporting shared responsibility. For customers, this means greater flexibility and choice in tailoring cloud solutions to business needs.

Multivendor pathway connectivityrefers to a cloud provider’s ability to maintain connections with multiple internet service providers (ISPs). This ensures redundancy and reduces the risk of outages due to a single ISP failure.

Electric providers, fuel vendors, and HVAC contracts support facility resilience, but they are not directly tied to connectivity. The purpose of multivendor pathways is specifically to guarantee uninterrupted network access and resilience for customer workloads.

By maintaining ISP redundancy, cloud providers improve availability and meet SLA commitments. This capability is especially critical for enterprises requiring high uptime or operating in regions where connectivity disruptions are common. It also provides flexibility in bandwidth management and routing optimization.

Trust in digital certificates comes from their issuance by aCertificate Authority (CA). A CA is a trusted entity that validates identities and signs certificates. In internal environments, organizations often operate aprivate CAto issue certificates for users, systems, and services.

If certificates were generated by individual private keys or systems without central authority, there would be no unified trust chain, and validating authenticity across the organization would be impossible. A certificate repository server only distributes certificates but cannot establish trust.

By using an organizational CA server, all certificates are linked to a root of trust. Systems configured to trust the organization’s CA will trust any certificate it issues. This allows secure internal communications (TLS, VPN, email signing) and ensures scalability as new services come online. It also supports compliance with enterprise PKI policies.

The method described isstriping, which is a technique used in RAID configurations to improve performance and distribute risk. Striping involves splitting data into smaller segments and writing those segments across multiple disks simultaneously. For example, if a file is divided into four parts, each part is written to a separate disk in the RAID array.

This parallelism enhances input/output (I/O) performance because multiple drives can be accessed at once. It also provides resilience depending on the RAID level. While striping by itself (RAID 0) increases performance but not redundancy, when combined with mirroring or parity (e.g., RAID 5 or RAID 10), it offers both speed and fault tolerance.

The purpose of striping in the data management context is to optimize how data is stored, accessed, and protected. It is fundamentally different from archiving, mapping, or crypto-shredding, as those serve different objectives (long-term storage, logical placement, or secure deletion). Striping is central to high-performance storage systems and supports availability in mission-critical environments.

Multifactor Authentication (MFA)is a commonly mandated control for obtaining cybersecurity insurance. MFA requires users to present at least two independent factors—something they know (password), something they have (token), or something they are (biometrics). This significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access due to stolen or weak credentials.

Network segmentation and application whitelisting are valuable, but they are not universal insurance requirements. TPM is a hardware component for securing local devices but does not protect remote access in distributed work models.

By enforcing MFA across VPNs, cloud services, email, and administrative interfaces, organizations demonstrate strong access control measures. Insurance providers recognize MFA as a foundational safeguard, reducing claims risk from credential-based breaches. This makes MFA both a compliance requirement and a best practice.

Functional testingvalidates that new or updated code performs correctly from the end user’s perspective. This type of testing ensures that the patch delivers intended results without introducing errors. It focuses on verifying user interactions, workflows, and outputs.

Full testing may cover all aspects, but it is broader than necessary. Nonfunctional testing evaluates performance, scalability, or usability, not direct functionality. Tabletop testing is a discussion-based exercise, often used for incident response.

Functional testing ensures customer satisfaction by aligning patches with expected system behavior. It is a core component of Agile and DevOps pipelines, where user experience and rapid delivery are prioritized.

Once a vendor has been chosen, the onboarding phase requires confirmingcontractual details and arranging technical agreements. This includes specifying encryption standards, data transfer methods, SLAs, and compliance responsibilities. These discussions establish a clear foundation for the partnership.

Auditing and monitoring occur later, during ongoing vendor management. Evaluating requirements and policies occurs earlier, during vendor selection. Terminating a relationship is an offboarding activity, not onboarding.

Clarifying technical and contractual details at onboarding ensures a secure, compliant, and efficient partnership. It reduces risks of miscommunication and enforces accountability from the beginning.

Before transmitting sensitive financial data to the cloud, the best defense against interception threats like packet capture and man-in-the-middle attacks isencryption. Encryption protects data in transit by converting plain text into cipher text, which can only be deciphered with the correct keys.

Hashing provides integrity verification but does not secure confidentiality. Change tracking monitors modifications but does not prevent interception. Metadata labeling adds context but does not protect against on-path attackers.

Using strong encryption protocols (e.g., TLS) ensures that even if traffic is intercepted, the attacker cannot read the data. Encryption also aligns with compliance requirements such as PCI DSS, which mandates encryption for financial data during transmission. By encrypting before upload, the user ensures end-to-end confidentiality across potentially insecure networks.

The correct approach for sanitizing a USB thumb drive while preserving its usability isoverwriting. Overwriting involves replacing the existing data on the device with random data or specific patterns to ensure that the original information cannot be recovered. This process leaves the physical device intact, allowing it to be reused securely.

Physical destruction, such as shredding, renders the device unusable. Degaussing only works on magnetic media like hard disks or tapes, not on solid-state or flash-based USB drives. Key revocation applies to cryptographic keys and not to physical devices.

By using overwriting, organizations comply with data sanitization standards while balancing operational efficiency. Many tools exist that perform multi-pass overwrites to meet regulatory requirements such as those from NIST or ISO. This ensures that sensitive data is removed while allowing the device to remain in circulation for continued use.

The capability to rapidly create and destroy virtual systems as demand fluctuates is known asephemeral computing. These short-lived resources are provisioned automatically when needed and decommissioned when demand subsides.

Resource scheduling helps allocate resources but does not imply temporary lifespans. High availability ensures continuous service, and maintenance mode is used for administrative tasks.

Ephemeral computing is central to elasticity in cloud environments, reducing costs and improving scalability. For example, containers or serverless functions may run only while needed and then disappear. This model optimizes utilization, lowers expenses, and supports modern application architectures that demand agility.