SC-900 Practice Exam 1 — 20 Questions

Question 1

A company uses a cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) application for customer relationship management. According to the shared responsibility model, which security responsibility is primarily handled by the customer?

Accepted Answer

Managing user access and permissions for the application. In a SaaS model like a cloud-based CRM application, the customer is responsible for managing user access and permissions, including identity and access management (IAM), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and role-based access control (RBAC). The cloud provider handles the underlying infrastructure, platform, and application security, but the customer must control who can access the application and what they can do within it.

Answer

Physical security of the data center hosting the application

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Security of the underlying networking infrastructure

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Applying security patches to the application's code

Question 2

A company has a document management system. The security policy requires that a user in the Sales department can only view documents related to sales and cannot access documents in the Finance or HR folders. Which security principle is being applied?

Accepted Answer

Least privilege. The security policy restricts a Sales user's access to only sales-related documents, explicitly denying access to Finance and HR folders. This aligns with the principle of least privilege, which mandates that users be granted only the minimum permissions necessary to perform their job functions. In Microsoft 365, this is implemented via role-based access control (RBAC) or sensitivity labels that enforce read-only access on specific SharePoint document libraries or folders.

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Availability

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Defense in depth

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Non-repudiation

Question 3

A company implements a security measure to ensure that only authorized employees can view sensitive customer records. Which principle of the CIA triad does this measure primarily protect?

Accepted Answer

Confidentiality. Confidentiality ensures that sensitive information is accessible only to authorized individuals. By restricting access to customer records to authorized employees, the company directly prevents unauthorized disclosure, which is the core goal of confidentiality in the CIA triad.

Answer

Integrity

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Availability

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Accountability

Question 4

A company has a SharePoint Online site that stores project documents. Due to legal requirements, all documents in this site must be retained for exactly 5 years from the date they were created, and then automatically deleted. No user should be able to permanently delete a document before the retention period ends. Which Microsoft Purview solution should the administrator configure?

Accepted Answer

Retention policy. Option A is correct because a retention policy in Microsoft Purview can be configured to retain documents for exactly 5 years from creation and then automatically delete them. This policy enforces a mandatory retention period that prevents users from permanently deleting documents before the period ends, meeting the legal requirement.

Answer

Sensitivity label

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Data loss prevention (DLP) policy

Answer

Audit policy

Question 5

A company has deployed Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Defender for Identity, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. The security operations team wants a single, unified portal where they can view alerts from all these products, perform cross-domain investigations, and orchestrate automated response actions. Which Microsoft security solution should they use?

Accepted Answer

Microsoft 365 Defender. Microsoft 365 Defender is the correct answer because it is a unified pre- and post-breach enterprise defense suite that natively coordinates detection, prevention, investigation, and response across endpoints, identities, email, and cloud applications. It provides a single portal (security.microsoft.com) where alerts from Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, Defender for Identity, and Defender for Cloud Apps are correlated into incidents, enabling cross-domain investigation and automated response via playbooks and the Microsoft 365 Defender API.

Answer

Microsoft Sentinel

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Microsoft Defender for Cloud

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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Question 6

A company deploys firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and endpoint antivirus software at multiple layers of its network. This strategy is intended to ensure that if one security control fails, others still provide protection. Which security concept does this approach represent?

Accepted Answer

Defense in depth. Defense in depth is a security strategy that layers multiple independent controls—such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and endpoint antivirus—across different network segments. The core principle is that if one layer is breached or fails, subsequent layers continue to provide protection, ensuring no single point of failure compromises the entire security posture.

Answer

Least privilege

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Separation of duties

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Zero trust

Question 7

A company deploys full disk encryption on all employee laptops to protect data in case a device is lost or stolen. Which security goal does this measure primarily address?

Accepted Answer

Confidentiality. Full disk encryption (FDE) ensures that data stored on the laptop's hard drive is unreadable without the correct decryption key. This directly protects the confidentiality of the data by preventing unauthorized access if the device is lost or stolen, as the encrypted data cannot be deciphered without the key.

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Integrity

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Availability

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Non-repudiation

Question 8

A company hosts a mission-critical customer portal on Azure virtual machines. To ensure continuous availability, they deploy the application across two separate Azure regions. If one region experiences a failure, traffic is automatically routed to the other region with minimal disruption. Which security goal is primarily being addressed by this architecture?

Accepted Answer

Availability. Deploying a mission-critical application across two Azure regions with automatic traffic routing directly addresses the security goal of availability. This architecture ensures that if one region fails, the application remains accessible from the other region, minimizing downtime. Azure Traffic Manager or Azure Front Door can be used to route traffic based on priority or latency, providing high availability and disaster recovery.

Answer

Confidentiality

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Integrity

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Non-repudiation

Question 9

A company uses cryptographic hashes to verify that a downloaded software file has not been modified by an attacker during transmission. Which principle of the CIA triad is primarily being addressed?

Accepted Answer

Integrity. Cryptographic hashing (e.g., SHA-256) produces a fixed-size digest from the file's contents. By comparing the computed hash with the publisher's published hash, any change to the file—even a single bit—yields a completely different digest, proving the file has not been tampered with. This directly protects the integrity of the data, ensuring it remains unaltered during transit.

Answer

Confidentiality

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Availability

Answer

Non-repudiation

Question 10

A company implements a policy where each employee is granted only the permissions necessary to perform their specific job role. For example, a marketing specialist has read-only access to the customer database and cannot modify financial records. Which security principle is primarily being applied?

Accepted Answer

Least privilege. The principle of least privilege dictates that users should be granted only the permissions necessary to perform their job functions. In this scenario, the marketing specialist receives read-only access to the customer database and no access to financial records, which directly aligns with limiting permissions to the minimum required. This reduces the attack surface and limits potential damage from accidental or malicious actions.

Answer

Defense in depth

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Zero Trust

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Separation of duties

Question 11

A company must retain all vendor contracts for 10 years to meet regulatory requirements. After 10 years, the contracts must be permanently destroyed with no possibility of recovery. The compliance team wants to automate this lifecycle and ensure that during the retention period, the contracts cannot be edited or deleted by users. Which Microsoft Purview solution should they use?

Accepted Answer

Records Management. Records Management in Microsoft Purview is designed to declare records (regulatory or legal) that must be retained for a specific period and then disposed of in a compliant manner. It enforces immutability during the retention period—users cannot edit or delete records—and supports a disposition review or automatic permanent deletion after the retention period ends, exactly matching the requirement for 10-year retention followed by destruction with no recovery.

Answer

Data Lifecycle Management (DLM)

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eDiscovery (Premium)

Answer

Sensitivity Labels

Question 12

A company secures its network by deploying a firewall at the perimeter, an intrusion prevention system on internal segments, endpoint antivirus on all workstations, and encrypting sensitive data at rest and in transit. This layered approach ensures that if one control fails, others still provide protection. Which security concept does this strategy best represent?

Accepted Answer

Defense in depth. The strategy described uses multiple independent security controls—firewall, IPS, endpoint antivirus, and encryption—so that if one layer fails, others continue to protect the asset. This is the core definition of defense in depth, which creates overlapping layers of protection rather than relying on a single point of failure.

Answer

Least privilege

Answer

Zero Trust

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Separation of duties

Question 13

A company is moving its on-premises database to Azure SQL Database. According to the shared responsibility model, which security tasks remain the responsibility of the customer?

Accepted Answer

Managing access controls and authentication for database users. In the shared responsibility model for Azure SQL Database, Microsoft manages the physical infrastructure, including servers, storage, and network, while the customer is responsible for data and access management. Option B is correct because managing access controls and authentication for database users, such as configuring logins, users, and permissions via T-SQL or Azure Active Directory, falls squarely on the customer. Microsoft ensures the platform is patched and secure, but the customer must control who can access the database and what they can do.

Answer

Patching the physical servers hosting the database

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Securing the hypervisor running the virtual machines

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Hardening the network firewalls at the datacenter perimeter

Question 14

A company has many guest users in Microsoft Entra ID who collaborate on a project in a specific SharePoint site. The compliance team needs to periodically verify that these guest users still require access to the site. If a reviewer does not respond within 30 days, the guest's access should be automatically removed. Additionally, the company wants to ensure that once access is removed, the guest user object is eventually deleted from the directory after 90 days. Which Microsoft Entra Identity Governance features should they use together?

Accepted Answer

Access Reviews configured to auto-apply results and delete guest users after a specified number of days. Access Reviews in Microsoft Entra ID can be configured to automatically apply results, removing guest access when a reviewer does not respond within a specified period (e.g., 30 days). Additionally, the 'Delete guest users not reviewed within' setting allows automatic deletion of the guest user object from the directory after a configurable number of days (e.g., 90 days). This directly meets both requirements: periodic verification of access and eventual cleanup of the directory object.

Answer

Entitlement Management access packages with an expiration policy

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Lifecycle Workflows to schedule a periodic task

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Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for guest roles

Question 15

A company stores customer data in Microsoft 365 and needs to identify which data is subject to GDPR. Which Microsoft Purview solution should be used?

Accepted Answer

Data Classification. Microsoft Purview Data Classification enables organizations to identify and classify sensitive data across their Microsoft 365 environment. This includes detecting personal data that may be subject to regulations like GDPR. The other options serve different purposes: lifecycle management for retention, DLP for protection, and audit for logging.

Answer

Data Lifecycle Management

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Data Loss Prevention

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Audit

Question 16

A company is migrating its on-premises virtual machines to Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Which security responsibility primarily shifts from the customer to Microsoft during this migration?

Accepted Answer

Physical security of the data center. When migrating on-premises virtual machines to Azure IaaS, Microsoft takes over responsibility for the physical security of the data centers, including environmental controls, hardware maintenance, and physical access controls. This is a fundamental shift from the customer's responsibility under the shared responsibility model, where the customer previously managed the physical infrastructure on-premises.

Answer

Patching the guest operating system

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Managing user access to the virtual machines

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Configuring the firewall rules for the virtual network

Question 17

A company uses Microsoft 365 E5 and is concerned about advanced phishing attacks that use adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) techniques to steal session cookies and bypass multifactor authentication. Which Microsoft Defender for Office 365 feature should they configure to specifically protect against this type of attack?

Accepted Answer

Anti-Phishing (advanced policies). Advanced anti-phishing policies in Defender for Office 365 include protection against adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attacks by using machine learning models and impersonation detection to analyze and block phishing attempts that aim to steal session cookies and bypass multifactor authentication. This feature specifically detects and mitigates sophisticated phishing techniques that traditional anti-spam or link-checking mechanisms might miss, such as real-time credential harvesting and session hijacking via proxy servers.

Answer

Safe Attachments

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Safe Links

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Campaign Views

Question 18

A company's security policy requires that customer data must only be accessible by authorized sales representatives. Which security principle does this requirement directly enforce?

Accepted Answer

Confidentiality. The principle of confidentiality ensures that information is accessible only to authorized individuals or systems. In this scenario, restricting access to customer data to only authorized sales representatives aligns with maintaining confidentiality. The other options are incorrect: Integrity ensures data is not improperly modified, Availability ensures systems are operational, and Non-repudiation ensures actions cannot be denied.

Answer

Integrity

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Availability

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Non-repudiation

Question 19

A company must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). They need a unified solution that provides a compliance score, actionable recommendations to improve their security posture, and the ability to track their progress over time. Additionally, they want to assign improvement actions to specific teams and automate the collection of evidence for controls. Which two Microsoft Purview solutions should the administrator use? (Select two.)

Accepted Answer

Compliance Manager. Compliance Manager is correct because it provides a unified compliance score, actionable recommendations to improve security posture, and the ability to track progress over time. It also allows administrators to assign improvement actions to specific teams and automate evidence collection for controls, directly meeting all the stated GDPR compliance requirements.

Answer

Data Lifecycle Management

Answer

Insider Risk Management

Question 20

A company subscribes to a cloud-based email service that is delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). According to the shared responsibility model, who is primarily responsible for the physical security of the data centers where the email data is stored?

Accepted Answer

The cloud provider. In the shared responsibility model for SaaS, the cloud provider is responsible for the physical security of the data centers, including hardware, network infrastructure, and physical access controls. The customer is responsible for securing their own data, user access, and compliance within the service, but not the underlying physical infrastructure.

Answer

The customer

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Both the customer and the cloud provider equally

Answer

Neither the customer nor the cloud provider