SDSI AI Automation And Devsecops Practice Test 2 — 15 Questions

Question 1

What is the primary benefit of 'Shift Left' security in a DevSecOps pipeline?

Accepted Answer

Reduced remediation costs. Shift Left security moves security testing, scanning, and review earlier in the SDLC — into design, coding, and CI stages — so vulnerabilities are caught before they reach production. The primary measurable benefit is reduced remediation cost, because fixing a flaw during development is far cheaper than fixing it after deployment or after a breach.

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Automated hardware deployment

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Increased development speed

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Elimination of security teams

Question 2

In DevSecOps, what is the role of an 'Artifact Repository' such as Artifactory in relation to security?

Accepted Answer

Store and secure immutable build artifacts. An artifact repository like Artifactory stores and secures immutable build artifacts, providing a trusted source of truth for binaries, container images, and packages. It supports security through access controls, vulnerability scanning integration, and immutability guarantees that prevent tampering with released artifacts. This makes it a critical control point in the DevSecOps supply chain.

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Manage user identities

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Monitor real-time network traffic

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Execute live security testing

Question 3

You are implementing automated policy enforcement for Cisco Secure Access by Duo. Which API allows you to programmatically manage users and authentication settings?

Accepted Answer

Duo Admin API. The Duo Admin API is the RESTful interface designed for programmatic management of users, groups, phones, and authentication settings within Duo. It allows administrators to automate onboarding, policy assignment, and configuration changes, which is exactly what an automated policy enforcement pipeline requires.

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Duo Web SDK

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Duo Auth API

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Duo Telemetry API

Question 4

Which Cisco technology should be included in an automated design to ensure 'Zero Trust' access for remote developers accessing internal development servers?

Accepted Answer

Cisco Secure Access. Cisco Secure Access is Cisco's cloud-delivered Security Service Edge (SSE) platform that enforces Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) for remote users, verifying identity and device posture before granting access to internal applications. It replaces implicit network trust with per-session, least-privilege authorization, which is exactly what remote developers need when reaching internal dev servers. The other options are networking, OS, or collaboration products that do not deliver ZTNA.

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Cisco Catalyst Center

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Cisco IOS-XE

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Cisco Webex

Question 5

In the context of AI-driven security, what does 'False Positive Reduction' primarily achieve?

Accepted Answer

Improved analyst efficiency. It minimizes unnecessary alerts, allowing security teams to focus on high-fidelity, real threats.

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Increased hardware throughput

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Lower bandwidth consumption

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Faster packet forwarding

Question 6

When designing an automated remediation workflow for Cisco Secure Firewall, what is the specific function of the 'Cisco Secure Firewall REST API' in the context of threat intelligence feeds?

Accepted Answer

Dynamic update of Network Objects. The Cisco Secure Firewall REST API enables programmatic creation, update, and deletion of Network Objects (such as IP addresses, ranges, and FQDN objects) that are used in access control policies. In an automated remediation workflow, threat intelligence feeds can push malicious IPs to these Network Objects via the API, and the firewall policy referencing those objects is updated dynamically without manual intervention. This is the specific function relevant to threat intelligence feed integration.

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Encryption key rotation

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Automated firmware flashing

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Traffic scrubbing

Question 7

When utilizing Cisco DevNet tools for security, which Python library is the standard for interacting with the Cisco FMC API efficiently?

Accepted Answer

fmcapi. The `fmcapi` library is the de facto standard Python library for interacting with Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC) REST API. It abstracts the low-level HTTP requests, handles authentication (token generation and refresh), and provides object-oriented classes for FMC objects like access policies, network objects, and rules. This makes it efficient for automation tasks such as bulk configuration, policy management, and reporting. Other options are not recognized libraries for FMC API interaction.

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requests_cisco

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cisco_py

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fmc_sdk

Question 8

What is the primary role of a 'Security Policy Engine' (e.g., Cisco Secure Firewall) within an automated data center architecture?

Accepted Answer

Centralized policy enforcement. A Security Policy Engine (such as Cisco Secure Firewall) in an automated data center architecture is responsible for centralized policy enforcement — it applies security rules, intrusion prevention, and access control consistently across the environment. It acts as a policy decision and enforcement point, ensuring that traffic is inspected and allowed or denied based on centrally managed policies.

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Application load balancing

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Server virtualization

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DNS resolution

Question 9

In an AI-enhanced security design, what is 'Supervised Learning' primarily used for?

Accepted Answer

Classification of malicious vs. benign data. Supervised learning uses labeled training data to learn a mapping from inputs to outputs, making it ideal for classification tasks such as distinguishing malicious from benign data. In AI-enhanced security, labeled datasets of known malware and clean files train models to classify new, unseen samples. This is the foundational use case for supervised learning in security analytics.

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Predicting hardware failure

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Automated documentation generation

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Unsupervised clustering of anomalies

Question 10

When designing automated security for Cisco Secure Workload, what does 'Micro-segmentation' provide in the context of DevSecOps?

Accepted Answer

Reduced lateral movement risk. Micro-segmentation in Cisco Secure Workload enforces granular, workload-level policies (often based on process, user, and flow attributes) that restrict which workloads can communicate with each other. In DevSecOps, this directly limits lateral movement if an attacker compromises a container or VM, because east-west traffic is denied by default except for explicitly allowed flows. It is a containment control, not a performance, redundancy, or database feature.

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Increased server performance

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Hardware redundancy

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Database optimization

Question 11

Which of the following is a key requirement for implementing successful DevSecOps in a large organization?

Accepted Answer

Cultural alignment between teams. Cultural alignment between developers and security teams is the foundational requirement for successful DevSecOps.

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Manual approval for every commit

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Removing all open-source code

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Restricting code access to security only

Question 12

For a DevSecOps pipeline involving Cisco Secure Firewall, what is the 'CI' (Continuous Integration) component responsible for?

Accepted Answer

Validating and testing code changes. In a DevSecOps pipeline for Cisco Secure Firewall, the Continuous Integration (CI) component is responsible for validating and testing code changes — automatically building, linting, and running tests on firewall policy or automation code before it is merged. This ensures that changes meet quality and security standards before progressing to deployment.

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User access authentication

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Monitoring runtime attacks

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Deploying to production

Question 13

What is the primary function of an 'API Gateway' in a secure automated environment?

Accepted Answer

Enforce security and rate limits on APIs. An API Gateway sits between clients and backend services and is the enforcement point for authentication, authorization, rate limiting, throttling, and request validation. In secure automated environments it centralizes these controls so individual microservices don't each reimplement them. This makes it the primary security and traffic-control chokepoint for API traffic.

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Host static websites

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Store user data

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Compile application code

Question 14

You are automating Cisco Secure Firewall policies. Why is 'Version Control' (e.g., Git) considered a security control?

Accepted Answer

Provides audit trails and change history. Version control systems like Git provide audit trails and change history, which are essential security controls for tracking who changed firewall policies, when, and why. This enables accountability, rollback of malicious or erroneous changes, and compliance with change management requirements. In automated environments, version control ensures that policy changes are reviewed and approved before deployment, reducing the risk of unauthorized modifications.

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Automatically encrypts all traffic

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Increases bandwidth

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Replaces the need for a firewall

Question 15

When automating security with Cisco XDR, which component allows for the execution of arbitrary scripts on third-party security tools?

Accepted Answer

Cisco XDR Workflow Engine. The Cisco XDR Workflow Engine allows for the execution of arbitrary scripts and actions on third-party security tools by orchestrating automated response workflows. It connects to integrated tools via APIs and runs playbooks that can invoke scripts, isolate endpoints, block IPs, or create tickets. This is the automation and orchestration layer of Cisco XDR.

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Cisco XDR Threat Intel module

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Cisco XDR Telemetry API

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Cisco XDR Dashboard