SSCP Risk Identification, Monitoring, and Analysis Practice Question
After a security incident, the incident response team needs to analyze logs from multiple sources to reconstruct the timeline. The SIEM retains logs for 90 days, but the incident occurred 120 days ago. Which action should the organization have taken to ensure log availability?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse log verbosity (option B) with log retention, thinking that capturing more data inherently preserves it longer, when in fact retention is a separate storage policy parameter.
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
✓
Extend log retention period to at least 1 year
The organization's log retention policy was insufficient to cover the incident timeline. The SIEM retained logs for only 90 days, but the incident occurred 120 days ago, meaning the logs were overwritten or purged before the incident was discovered. Extending the retention period to at least one year ensures logs are available for post-incident forensic analysis, aligning with industry best practices (e.g., NIST SP 800-61) and regulatory requirements that often mandate 6–12 months of log retention.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use a different SIEM vendor
Why it's wrong here
Changing SIEM vendor does not extend retention; the new platform would apply its own retention window and the 120-day-old logs would still be absent. It is tempting because vendor selection feels like a durability decision; the required action is configuring longer retention or archiving logs to low-cost storage before the 90-day expiry.
- ✗
Increase log verbosity
Why it's wrong here
Raising verbosity captures more detail per event but does not extend how long the SIEM keeps data, so 120-day-old records are still gone. Verbosity tuning suits investigations needing richer context within the existing retention window, not retrospective availability beyond it.
- ✗
Implement real-time alerting
Why it's wrong here
Real-time alerting notifies on events as they occur; it neither stores nor preserves historical logs, so nothing survives past the 90-day retention. Alerting is the right control when the goal is prompt detection of live threats rather than reconstructing a timeline from older data.
- ✓
Extend log retention period to at least 1 year
Why this is correct
The SIEM's 90-day retention expired before the 120-day-old incident could be investigated, so logs were gone. Extending retention to at least one year ensures evidence remains available beyond the investigation window, directly addressing the stem's availability constraint.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SSCP practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISC2 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 SSCP exam.