Examkin

Question

Difficulty: EasyMitigation Strategies and Enterprise Hardening Practices

A security technician is tasked with implementing host-level hardening controls on enterprise web servers. Which of the following technical mitigation practices directly reduce the host's attack surface? (Select TWO.)

  1. Disabling unneeded background services and unused network daemonsAnswer
  2. Enforcing application allowlisting to restrict unauthorized binary executionAnswer
  3. C
    Deploying an inline honeypot to inspect and drop malicious host traffic
  4. D
    Updating perimeter network firewalls to remediate software buffer overflow vulnerabilities

Answer

Disabling unneeded background services and network daemons, as well as enforcing application allowlisting, directly reduce the host's attack surface.
Disabling unneeded services removes active software components and open ports that attackers could target, directly shrinking the attack surface. Enforcing application allowlisting ensures that unapproved or malicious software cannot execute on the host even if uploaded, providing effective endpoint defense.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the primary objective of host attack surface reduction.
Recognize that minimizing exposure involves removing unnecessary entry points and blocking unauthorized executable code on the server.
Hardening a host requires reducing active listening ports/services and enforcing strict software execution policies.
2
Evaluate host-level technical mitigation techniques.
Select disabling unnecessary services/daemons and implementing application allowlisting as valid host-level hardening controls.
These controls directly mitigate risk on the host system itself.
3
Distinguish host hardening controls from perimeter defenses and deception mechanisms.
Reject options that misapply perimeter firewalls for patching or treat honeypots as inline filtering devices.
Firewalls do not fix code flaws, and honeypots collect threat intelligence rather than blocking inline traffic.

Key Concept

Host Hardening and Attack Surface Reduction
Rate this question

Topics

Mitigation Strategies and Enterprise Hardening Practices

More questions from this topic