hardMultiple Choice
200-201 Practice Question: During an incident response, the SOC needs to…
During an incident response, the SOC needs to determine the scope of a compromise by identifying all hosts that communicated with a known malicious IP in the last 30 days. Which data source would best support this analysis?
⚠ Common exam trap
Cisco often tests the distinction between logs that record only denied traffic (firewall deny logs) versus logs that record all traffic (NetFlow), leading candidates to mistakenly choose firewall deny logs because they associate firewalls with security monitoring.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
NetFlow records from the router
NetFlow records capture metadata about all IP traffic flows traversing a router, including source and destination IP addresses, ports, and timestamps. This allows the SOC to query for any host that communicated with the known malicious IP over the past 30 days, providing a complete picture of the compromise's scope. Unlike logs that only record denied traffic or administrative events, NetFlow records all successful communications, making it the ideal data source for this analysis.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
SNMP traps from routers
Why it's wrong here
SNMP traps report device health events such as link state changes, not per-flow IP conversations, so they cannot enumerate hosts that contacted the malicious address. Traps suit network fault monitoring and interface alerting, where a router pushes an unsolicited event when a threshold or interface condition changes.
- ✗
Syslog from the DHCP server
Why it's wrong here
DHCP syslog maps IP addresses to MAC addresses at lease time, but contains no record of which external destinations each host contacted. It is the correct source for attributing a historical IP to a device during host identification, not for enumerating communication with a malicious address.
- ✗
Firewall deny logs
Why it's wrong here
Deny logs record only blocked connection attempts, so any host that successfully reached the malicious IP leaves no entry, understating compromise scope. They are the right source for tuning rule effectiveness or spotting scanning activity, not for proving which internal hosts actually established sessions.
- ✓
NetFlow records from the router
Why this is correct
NetFlow records capture IP-level flow metadata for every connection traversing the router, letting analysts query 30 days of historical traffic to enumerate all hosts that contacted the malicious IP. This directly satisfies the scope-identification requirement, unlike host-based logs limited to individual endpoints.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every 200-201 question from scratch — 968 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This 200-201 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Cisco certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the 200-201 exam.