T Level Digital: Security Threats and Controls

Security questions in a written paper come in two shapes, and this practice alternates between them. Half give you an incident and ask what it is called: a search box that returns rows it was never meant to reach, a site unreachable under a flood of requests from thousands of addresses, an employee copying the client list on their way out using an account they are still entitled to use, a caller pressuring a helpdesk into a password reset before an urgent meeting. The other half name a control and ask which risk it actually reduces, which is where most marks are lost, because a control that sounds relevant usually is not. Multi-factor authentication does nothing about an email sent to the wrong person. A patch matters not because a weakness exists but because it is now documented, so attackers know exactly what to look for. And encrypting the disks in a server protects nothing at all when the worry is someone reading traffic on cafe wifi — that is the single most common confusion in this topic, and one question is built around it. The set closes with a firm that forces a password change every thirty days and finds staff writing the results on notes by the screen, which is why current UK guidance advises against the practice. Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with any exam board and it is not an exam centre.

• Name an attack from what actually happened: SQL injection, a distributed denial-of-service attack, social engineering
• Recognise an insider threat, where access was legitimate and only the purpose was not
• Say which risk multi-factor authentication reduces, and which risks it leaves untouched
• Explain why patching matters more once a weakness is publicly documented
• State the objection to giving every account full access to everything
• Choose encryption in transit for data crossing a network, and keep it separate from encryption at rest
• Put containment first when an infection is spreading, and see why rebuilding immediately destroys evidence
• Judge a security policy by how people actually behave under it

Staff use cafe wifi, and the concern is that someone on the same network could read data as it travels between laptop and server. — Encryption in transit. Encryption at rest is the closest wrong answer and the classic confusion: it protects a disk that is stolen, and does nothing about traffic crossing a network.