EC-Council · Free Practice Questions · Last reviewed May 2026
48 real exam-style questions organised by domain, each with the correct answer highlighted and a plain-English explanation of why it's right — and why the others are wrong.
A SIEM alert indicates multiple failed logins followed by a successful login from a new IP in Splunk Enterprise Security. As a first responder, which dashboard should you navigate to in order to verify the MITRE ATT&CK mapping of this behavior?
Threat Intelligence dashboard
Access Anomalies dashboard
User Activity Monitoring
Incident Review dashboard
The Incident Review dashboard surfaces correlated notables and displays their associated MITRE ATT&CK annotations, letting you confirm the technique mapped to the failed-login-then-success pattern. It satisfies the stem's requirement to verify ATT&CK mapping directly within Splunk Enterprise Security, rather than pivoting to separate analytic or intelligence views.
While using ServiceNow Security Incident Response (SIR), you need to escalate a ticket. What is the standard process to ensure the security manager receives notification?
Update the Work notes with an @mention to the manager
Mentioning the security manager in the Work notes triggers ServiceNow's native notification engine, which routes an email or in-platform alert directly to that user's account. This satisfies the escalation requirement without altering assignment, state, or priority fields, keeping the ticket's audit trail intact while ensuring the manager is notified.
Delete the ticket and create a new one
Manually email the manager with incident details
Change the State to 'Closed'
During incident triage, you realize an alert is a False Positive. What is the most appropriate action to take within the SIEM ticketing system?
Assign it to another team to verify
Set status to 'Closed' with resolution code 'False Positive'
Setting status to 'Closed' with resolution code 'False Positive' satisfies the triage requirement to document the alert's disposition accurately. The resolution code preserves the reason for closure, enabling trend analysis and tuning of detection rules, while the closed status removes the alert from the active queue so analysts focus on genuine incidents.
Ignore the ticket and let it expire
Delete the incident
You are triaging an alert in CrowdStrike Falcon. An endpoint shows a 'Suspicious File' detection. To verify the process tree and identify the parent process, which view do you use?
Host Timeline
Detection Details
Process Tree
Falcon's Process Tree view reconstructs the full ancestry of a detection, showing each parent-child relationship from the initiating executable down to the suspicious file. This exposes the parent process needed to judge whether the detection is malicious.
Network Activity
You are managing a containment procedure for an external C2 callback. Which firewall rule configuration is most effective for immediate containment?
Allow all, then log
Enable Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) in 'Alert' mode
Enable SSL Inspection
Deny egress to the specific destination IP
Blocking outbound traffic to the identified C2 address severs the callback channel at the network layer, immediately halting beaconing without disrupting other legitimate egress traffic, which satisfies the containment requirement for this specific external destination.
A suspicious PowerShell script is found on an endpoint. Which tool would you use to perform volatile memory analysis to identify if the script injected malicious code?
Volatility
Volatility parses raw memory images, reconstructing process lists, injected code regions and network artefacts that disk-only tools miss. It identifies code injected into legitimate processes, which is precisely what the suspicious PowerShell script's in-memory behaviour requires.
Nmap
Autopsy
Wireshark
Procmon
Want more Incident Response practice?
Practice this domainIn Azure, you suspect a compromised VM is being used for cryptocurrency mining. You want to see process-level execution details on that VM. Which tool should you use?
Microsoft Defender for Servers
Microsoft Defender for Servers provides endpoint detection and response, capturing process-level execution telemetry on the VM, including command lines and parent processes. This satisfies the stem's requirement to see process execution details on the suspected cryptomining virtual machine.
Azure Advisor
Azure Network Watcher
Azure Resource Graph
You are configuring AWS GuardDuty to improve threat detection. You need to ensure it monitors for unusual S3 bucket access. Which data source must be enabled for this?
VPC Flow Logs
EBS Snapshot logs
S3 Data Events
GuardDuty's S3 protection analyses CloudTrail management events by default, but detecting unusual object-level activity such as GetObject or PutObject requires S3 Data Events enabled on the target buckets. That data source supplies the object-level telemetry the scenario demands.
Route 53 Resolver query logs
You are managing security for GCP. You need to detect if a service account has been created with excessive permissions. Which Google Cloud tool provides this insight?
Cloud Trace
Security Command Center
Security Command Center's IAM findings continuously scan for service accounts granted excessive permissions, surfacing over-privileged identities through its built-in misconfiguration detectors. This directly satisfies the requirement to detect a service account created with excessive permissions in GCP, unlike audit logs or policy analysers that report activity rather than flagging the risky entitlement itself.
Deployment Manager
Cloud Billing
In Azure, you have detected a suspicious VM login. You need to investigate the sign-in patterns, including geographic location and device risk level. Where in the Azure portal should you look?
Azure Policy Compliance dashboard
Azure Monitor Metrics
Microsoft Entra ID Sign-in logs
Microsoft Entra ID Sign-in logs record each authentication attempt with geographic location, IP address, and device risk level, giving the investigation data needed. They are the portal location for reviewing suspicious VM sign-in patterns and assessing risk.
Azure Service Health
You are performing a cloud-native incident response in AWS. You need to isolate a compromised EC2 instance without deleting the volume. What is the standard process?
Modify Security Group to deny all traffic
Replacing the instance's Security Group with one denying all inbound and outbound traffic severs network access while the EBS volume and instance state remain intact, satisfying the stem's requirement to isolate without deleting the volume.
Remove the IAM Role
Disable the VPC
Terminate the instance
Which Azure feature allows you to automatically enforce security settings on your resources to prevent unauthorized changes?
Azure Front Door
Azure Policy
Azure Policy evaluates resource properties against defined rules and enforces compliance by denying non-compliant deployments or remediating existing resources. It satisfies the stem's requirement for automatic enforcement preventing unauthorised configuration changes, unlike role-based access control, which governs permissions rather than resource settings.
Azure Bastion
Azure Key Vault
Want more SOC For Cloud Environments practice?
Practice this domainYou are analyzing a packet capture (PCAP) and find a beaconing pattern with a consistent 30-second interval and jitter of 5%. Which detection strategy is most effective for this IoC?
Port-based blocking
Frequency analysis on connection flow metadata
Beaconing is defined by timing regularity, not payload content, so analysing connection flow metadata for consistent intervals and low jitter detects it regardless of encryption. This directly matches the 30-second interval with 5% jitter observed.
Signature-based IDS alert
Static IP blocklisting
An analyst notices a spike in outbound traffic to a known sinkhole IP address. What does this indicate?
An attempted DDoS attack
A network misconfiguration
A successful data exfiltration
A compromised host attempting to reach a C2
Outbound traffic to a sinkhole IP indicates malware beaconing to command-and-control infrastructure, since sinkholes are DNS or IP addresses that security teams redirect known C2 domains to. The compromised host satisfies the stem's constraint: it is attempting C2 communication, which the sinkhole intercepts and logs.
A SOC analyst is reviewing logs in a SIEM and notices multiple failed login attempts followed by a successful one from an unknown IP. Which specific IoC category does this activity represent?
Data exfiltration indicator
Unauthorized access attempt
The failed-then-successful login sequence from an unfamiliar IP is the defining signature of a brute-force or credential-stuffing attack achieving entry, which is precisely what an unauthorised access attempt IoC captures. It satisfies the stem's constraint of identifying the specific IoC category for this authentication pattern, rather than a broader indicator such as anomalous traffic.
Network anomaly signature
System resource exhaustion
You are tracking a threat actor who uses 'Living off the Land' (LotL) techniques. Which of the following commands is a classic indicator of this methodology?
malware.exe
mimikatz.exe
powershell.exe -enc JABz...
Encoded PowerShell commands (-enc) execute obfuscated, base64 payloads using a trusted, pre-installed Windows binary, so no malware is dropped. This native-tool abuse is the defining signature of Living off the Land, satisfying the stem's LotL indicator requirement.
netcat.exe
A system administrator reports high CPU usage on a server. Upon checking task manager, you find 'svchost.exe' running from a temp folder. What is the most immediate action?
Isolate the host from the network
Isolating the host contains the likely malware before it can spread or communicate with command-and-control infrastructure. A legitimate svchost.exe never executes from a temp folder, indicating process masquerading. Network isolation preserves volatile evidence for later forensic analysis while preventing lateral movement, satisfying the stem's demand for the most immediate containment action.
Delete the file
Update antivirus signatures
Restart the server
Which of the following describes the 'Reconnaissance' phase in the Cyber Kill Chain?
Deploying a remote access trojan
Exploiting a software vulnerability
Scanning for open ports and services
Reconnaissance is the kill chain's first phase, where adversaries gather information about the target. Scanning for open ports and services fits here, since it identifies exposed attack surface before weaponisation, delivery or exploitation occur. Other phases involve action, not discovery.
Encrypting data for ransom
Want more Cyber Threats Iocs And Attack Methodology practice?
Practice this domainWhile investigating a potential malware infection, a SOC analyst needs to determine if a specific binary has been analyzed by the security community before. Which platform is the industry standard for checking the reputation of a file hash across dozens of antivirus engines?
Malwarebytes Nebula
VirusTotal
VirusTotal aggregates results from over seventy antivirus engines and file-analysis tools, letting the analyst submit a hash and immediately see prior community detections without uploading the binary itself. This directly satisfies the requirement to check a file hash's reputation across dozens of engines, which no single-vendor sandbox or SIEM can match.
Nessus
Splunk ES
You have captured a malicious binary and are performing dynamic analysis. You observe the malware attempting to resolve a domain that you want to intercept. Which tool allows you to simulate a DNS server response to redirect the malware traffic to a local analysis machine?
Wireshark
Netcat
Nmap
INetSim
INetSim simulates common internet services, including DNS, on a local host. It answers the malware's DNS queries with the analysis machine's address, redirecting traffic there for observation. This satisfies the requirement to intercept resolution without touching real DNS infrastructure.
During an incident response, you identify a persistent malware process. You need to see exactly which files and registry keys the process is touching in real-time. Which Sysinternals tool provides this capability?
Autoruns
TCPView
Process Explorer
Process Monitor
Process Monitor captures real-time file system, registry and process/thread activity in a single unified event stream, letting you filter by process name to see precisely which files and registry keys the persistent malware touches as it executes.
You are performing static analysis on an suspicious executable. You want to view the imported functions, strings, and headers without executing the code. Which tool is most appropriate for this task?
Procmon
Cuckoo Sandbox
PEview
PEview parses the Portable Executable structure, displaying the import table, embedded strings and section headers directly from disk. It performs no execution, satisfying the static-analysis constraint, unlike dynamic tools such as sandboxes or debuggers that require running the sample.
x64dbg
You are examining a suspicious file and suspect it is packed (obfuscated). Which technique or tool helps identify if a file is likely packed?
Process Hacker
Wireshark
Detect It Easy (DIE)
Detect It Easy inspects PE headers, section entropy and packer signatures to flag likely packing or obfuscation. High entropy and unusual section names are the indicators it surfaces, directly answering whether the suspicious file is packed.
HashCalc
When conducting a forensic investigation, you need to ensure the integrity of the collected digital evidence. What is the most critical step to perform immediately after copying the original media to a forensic workstation?
Calculate a cryptographic hash of both
Hashing both source and copy with the same algorithm (SHA-256) produces matching digests, proving bit-for-bit integrity and that no alteration occurred during acquisition. This satisfies the stem's requirement to verify evidence integrity immediately after copying, establishing the copy's admissibility as an exact duplicate.
Mount the image read-write
Run an antivirus scan
Rename the file
Want more Forensic Investigation And Malware Analysis practice?
Practice this domainWhat is the purpose of normalizing logs in a SIEM?
To compress log size for storage efficiency.
To hide sensitive information.
To increase the ingestion speed.
To provide a common format for cross-vendor correlation.
Normalisation parses each vendor's proprietary log schema into a shared field structure, such as common timestamps, source IPs and event types. This lets the SIEM correlate events across heterogeneous sources, which raw vendor-specific formats cannot support directly.
You are designing a correlation rule in Microsoft Sentinel to detect lateral movement. You decide to use KQL to join 'SecurityEvent' and 'SigninLogs'. What is the primary benefit of using a join over a union in this scenario?
Unions only support structured data.
Joins allow matching records between two datasets based on a common field.
Joins correlate records across SecurityEvent and SigninLogs by matching a shared field, such as account or IP address, which is essential for linking authentication activity to endpoint events during lateral movement. A union merely stacks rows from both tables without relating them, so it cannot satisfy the requirement to correlate the two datasets.
Joins consume less memory than unions.
Unions cannot be used in detection rules.
When performing alert triage in a SIEM, which metric is most important for prioritizing incidents based on the potential business impact?
Alert frequency.
Log source vendor.
Asset Criticality.
Asset criticality maps each alert to the business value of the affected system, so triage effort follows potential impact rather than raw severity or volume. It directly satisfies the stem's requirement to prioritise on business impact.
Number of alerts per user.
In ArcSight, a correlation rule is failing to trigger despite matching event patterns. You verify the filter logic is correct. What is the most likely cause?
The parser is disabled.
The user interface is loading slowly.
The aggregation window is configured incorrectly.
Correlation rules evaluate events within a defined aggregation window; if that window is too short or misaligned, matching events never co-occur in the same evaluation cycle, so the rule cannot fire even though the filter logic itself is correct.
The license has expired.
You are reviewing a SIEM alert for a 'Brute Force Attack'. You notice the source IP is from a cloud provider. How should you classify this during triage?
Check threat intelligence feeds to see if the IP is flagged as malicious.
A cloud-provider source IP is not inherently malicious, so reputation must be established before classifying. Querying threat intelligence feeds determines whether that address is flagged, supplying the evidence needed to decide if the brute force alert is genuine or benign.
Escalate to the ISP immediately.
Disable the rule for all cloud traffic.
Ignore the alert as cloud IPs are always false positives.
An analyst is investigating an alert regarding an outbound connection to a known malicious IP. Which step should be taken first according to standard triage procedures?
Isolate the host immediately.
Verify if the connection was successful or blocked by the firewall.
Checking whether the firewall allowed or blocked the outbound connection establishes whether the threat is real or already contained, which determines the urgency and direction of the remaining triage. This verification precedes host isolation or escalation, since a blocked connection requires no containment action.
Reimage the affected workstation.
Contact the user's manager.
Want more Incident Detection And Triage practice?
Practice this domainYou are defining log retention policies. According to general compliance standards like PCI-DSS, what is the primary requirement for log retention?
Archive all logs in a local text file format only
Retain logs for exactly 30 days
Keep logs for one year, with 3 months immediately available
PCI-DSS requires audit trail history retention of at least twelve months, with the most recent three months immediately available for analysis. Keeping logs for one year with three months online satisfies both the retention duration and the rapid-access constraint that auditors and incident responders demand.
Delete logs after they are indexed in the SIEM
When implementing a centralized logging architecture, which protocol is preferred for log transmission to ensure delivery confirmation between the collector and the aggregator?
UDP
TCP
TCP provides connection-oriented, acknowledged delivery, so the collector retransmits lost segments until the aggregator confirms receipt. This satisfies the stem's requirement for delivery confirmation between collector and aggregator, unlike connectionless UDP, which offers no acknowledgement and silently drops logs under congestion.
ICMP
ARP
An organization is migrating to a cloud-native logging architecture using AWS CloudWatch. You need to forward logs from an on-premises server to CloudWatch. Which agent is the correct choice to facilitate this stream?
Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Kinesis Firehose
CloudWatch Unified Agent
The CloudWatch Unified Agent collects metrics and logs in one package and can stream on-premises log files to CloudWatch Logs via its logs section. It satisfies the forwarding requirement, unlike the older CloudWatch Logs agent or SSM Agent.
AWS Config
A security analyst needs to ensure that sensitive log data is protected during transmission between a remote web server and the central SIEM. Which mechanism provides the highest level of security?
Utilizing SNMPv1 traps
Implementing TLS-based log forwarding
TLS-based forwarding encrypts syslog or log payloads in transit using certificates, providing confidentiality and integrity between the remote web server and the SIEM. Plain TCP or UDP syslog sends cleartext, so TLS satisfies the requirement for the highest protection during transmission.
Encapsulating logs in cleartext UDP packets
Using standard port 514 without encryption
You are configuring a syslog-ng server to receive logs from multiple network devices. To ensure that logs from different departments are stored in separate directories based on the hostname, which directive should you utilize in the destination path?
Utilizing template macros such as /var/log/$HOST/$YEAR/$MONTH/
Template macros expand per-message at runtime, so $HOST resolves to each device's hostname and dynamically builds a separate directory path for every department's logs. This satisfies the stem's requirement to segregate files by hostname without defining a destination per device, unlike static paths or filters that cannot vary output location per sender.
Defining separate log paths for every individual IP address
Configuring the global log_level to debug
Using hardcoded static path strings only
You are managing log rotation on a Linux-based log aggregator. Which configuration file is used by the logrotate utility to define the retention and compression settings for log files?
/var/log/messages
/etc/rsyslog.conf
/etc/sysctl.conf
/etc/logrotate.conf
/etc/logrotate.conf is logrotate's primary configuration file, holding global directives such as rotation frequency, retention count and compression. It satisfies the stem's requirement for defining retention and compression settings, and typically includes per-application stanzas from /etc/logrotate.d/, making it the correct location.
Want more Log Management practice?
Practice this domainYou are configuring an EDR tool to detect potential credential dumping. Which specific behavioral indicator is most effective at identifying an attacker attempting to access the LSASS process memory?
Failed login attempts to the local administrator account
Process access requests to lsass.exe from an unauthorized or unsigned process
LSASS holds credential material, so unauthorised or unsigned processes requesting access to lsass.exe memory is the strongest behavioural indicator of credential dumping tools such as Mimikatz. It targets the specific access pattern rather than generic process or file activity.
Increased CPU usage on the Domain Controller
Modification of registry keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM
While hunting for persistence mechanisms, you observe a suspicious scheduled task. Which detail in the task definition is the most critical indicator of a malicious actor rather than a legitimate software update?
The action executes a binary located in C:\Users\Public\ or C:\Windows\Temp\
User-writable directories such as C:\Users\Public\ and C:\Windows\Temp\ let any unprivileged process drop and execute payloads, so a scheduled task pointing there signals attacker staging rather than a vendor update, which would run from Program Files or a signed system path.
The task is scheduled to run every 24 hours
The task has a generic name like 'Updater'
The task is configured to run at system startup
An organization uses the Diamond Model for threat intelligence. Which component of the model should an analyst prioritize to identify the infrastructure an adversary uses to communicate with compromised internal hosts?
Infrastructure
The Infrastructure axis of the Diamond Model describes the physical and logical assets adversaries use, including command-and-control servers, domains and channels. Examining it reveals the systems compromised hosts communicate with, directly answering the analyst's requirement.
Capability
Adversary
Victim
During an investigation of an incident, an analyst identifies a beaconing pattern in network logs. Which statistical analysis method is the most reliable for distinguishing this beaconing from normal, high-volume user traffic?
Check the destination IP against a reputation database
Compare the total volume of data sent to the IP against a global average
Analyze the variance in the time delta between consecutive connections to the destination IP
Beaconing produces periodic connections with low variance in inter-arrival times, whereas normal user traffic is bursty and irregular. Measuring variance in the time delta between consecutive connections to the destination IP exposes that regularity, reliably separating automated callbacks from genuine high-volume activity.
Perform a DNS lookup on the destination IP address
During a threat hunting exercise, an analyst discovers a suspicious PowerShell execution pattern using encoded commands. Which technique should the analyst employ next to determine if the activity is malicious or legitimate system administration?
Enable verbose logging on all domain controllers
Run a full antivirus scan on the affected workstation
Reimage the host immediately to prevent lateral movement
Perform frequency analysis (stack counting) on the command-line arguments across the environment
Stack counting command-line arguments across the estate reveals whether the encoded PowerShell pattern is rare or widespread, satisfying the need to distinguish malicious activity from routine administration. Legitimate administrative scripts recur predictably, whereas attacker tradecraft produces outliers; frequency analysis surfaces those deviations without relying on signature detection.
A SOC analyst is tuning IDS signatures to reduce false positives while maintaining visibility. Which approach best balances detection efficacy with analyst workload?
Update all signatures to the most restrictive settings available
Create suppression rules for alerts originating from known-good internal system administration scanners
Suppression rules scoped to known-good internal administration scanners remove predictable, benign scan traffic without disabling the signatures themselves, so genuine malicious activity on other hosts still triggers alerts. This cuts analyst triage volume while preserving detection coverage elsewhere.
Disable all low-severity alerts in the IDS management console
Set the IDS to 'Alert Only' mode for all signatures
Want more Proactive Threat Detection practice?
Practice this domainWhich role is responsible for the ongoing tuning of correlation rules and maintaining the SIEM health in a mature SOC?
Security Content Engineer
The Security Content Engineer owns detection content, tuning correlation rules to reduce false positives and validating that the SIEM parses and alerts correctly. This role keeps rule logic and platform health aligned, distinct from analysts who triage alerts or architects who design the deployment.
Incident Responder
Compliance Officer
SOC Manager
You are configuring a SIEM alert threshold to reduce noise. Which metric should you adjust to ensure that only events occurring 5 times within a 60-second window trigger a high-severity alert?
Event Parser Configuration
Correlation Rule Threshold
Correlation rule thresholds define how many matching events within a specified time window trigger an alert. Setting the count to five and the window to 60 seconds produces exactly the required high-severity alert condition, filtering out lower-frequency noise.
Aggregation Key
Suppression Window
During incident lifecycle management, your team needs to transition from 'Detection' to 'Containment'. What is the most critical action to perform first within your SOAR platform's playbook?
Reset all user passwords
Perform full forensic imaging
Run host isolation playbook
Running the host isolation playbook immediately severs network connectivity for the compromised endpoint, preventing lateral movement and further exfiltration. This directly satisfies the stem's requirement to move from Detection into Containment, since isolating the affected host is the fastest way to limit incident scope before deeper forensic investigation or eradication begins.
Update the firewall rule base
Which SOC service model involves an organization outsourcing its security monitoring to a third-party provider while retaining internal control?
MSSP
A Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) remotely delivers monitoring, detection and response as an outsourced service, while the client retains ownership of its security posture and policies. This satisfies the constraint of outsourcing monitoring yet keeping internal control.
Virtual SOC
Internal SOC
Hybrid Cloud SOC
You are auditing your SOC workflow and find that incident escalations are delayed. Which metric should you analyze to identify the bottleneck between alert detection and analyst assignment?
MTTR
False Positive Rate
Dwell Time
MTTA
MTTA measures the interval from alert detection to an analyst acknowledging and beginning work on it, directly exposing delays between detection and assignment. MTTR would obscure this, since it spans the entire incident lifecycle through to resolution, masking the specific escalation bottleneck the audit identified.
Your organization is evaluating its SOC maturity using the CMMI-based model. If the SOC has documented standard processes but lacks consistent automation, which maturity level has been achieved?
Level 3
Level 3 requires documented, standardised processes applied across the organisation, yet still permits reliance on manual effort. Since automation is absent, the SOC sits at Level 3 rather than Level 4, where processes are quantitatively measured and managed.
Level 5
Level 2
Level 1
Want more Security Operations And Management practice?
Practice this domainThe 312-39 exam has 100 questions and must be completed in 180 minutes. Always confirm current details on the vendor's official exam page.
Scenario-based questions covering exam objectives with detailed answer explanations.
The exam covers 8 domains: Incident Response, SOC For Cloud Environments, Cyber Threats Iocs And Attack Methodology, Forensic Investigation And Malware Analysis, Incident Detection And Triage, Log Management, Proactive Threat Detection, Security Operations And Management. Questions are weighted by domain — higher-weight domains appear more on your actual exam.
No. These are original exam-style practice questions written against the official EC-Council 312-39 exam objectives. They are not copied from the real exam. Courseiva focuses on genuine understanding, not memorisation of braindumps.
Courseiva tracks your accuracy per domain and routes you toward weak areas automatically. Free, no account required.