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Difficulty: MediumKey Security Concepts, Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigations

A corporate web application suddenly becomes unresponsive after an external adversary directs a massive, synchronized volume of HTTP request traffic from thousands of compromised hosts, fully saturating the internet edge routers. A subsequent incident investigation confirms that no sensitive data was intercepted or modified, but internal employees were completely prevented from accessing the application during the outage. Which principle of the CIA triad was directly violated by this attack?

  1. AvailabilityAnswer
  2. B
    Confidentiality
  3. C
    Integrity
  4. D
    Non-repudiation

Answer

Availability is the principle of the CIA triad directly compromised because the attack prevented authorized users from accessing the service without violating data confidentiality or integrity.
The correct answer is Availability. The CIA triad consists of Confidentiality (preventing unauthorized data disclosure), Integrity (preventing unauthorized data tampering), and Availability (ensuring system and data accessibility for authorized users). A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack depletes system or network resources to cause service unresponsiveness, directly violating the Availability pillar.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the attack scenario characteristics.
The attack involved thousands of compromised hosts flooding the network (DDoS attack), leading to service downtime and saturated bandwidth.
Identifying the threat vector (DDoS) helps determine which security boundary was breached.
2
Evaluate the impact on data confidentiality and integrity based on the incident report.
No unauthorized data viewing (Confidentiality breach) or data modification (Integrity breach) took place.
Rule out CIA pillars that were preserved during the event.
3
Map the primary impact to the CIA triad principles.
Because authorized users were denied legitimate access to the operational application, the Availability pillar was compromised.
Availability guarantees timely and reliable access to data and resources for authorized personnel.

Key Concept

CIA Triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) in Network Security
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Topics

Key Security Concepts, Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigations

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