Detailed Exam Domain Coverage

The CompTIA Security+ certification exam validates your foundational, hands-on cybersecurity skills. To ensure your success on the actual exam, I have structured this practice test core repository to align precisely with the official exam weightage and domains:

Security Operations (28%)
- Core focus: Master the processes of continuous monitoring, organizational alerting mechanisms, proactive threat hunting, and daily operational security hygiene.
Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigations (22%)
- Core focus: Identify and analyze various malware types, social engineering tactics, critical indicators of compromise (IoCs), and apply the correct mitigation techniques to neutralize risks.
Security Architecture (18%)
- Core focus: Comprehend secure design principles, establish resilient architectural patterns, secure network perimeters, and understand distinct cloud deployment models.
Security Program Management and Oversight (20%)
- Core focus: Implement effective organizational governance, achieve compliance alignment with global standards, and manage risk through structured assessment frameworks.
General Security Concepts (12%)
- Core focus: Build a solid grounding in foundational security principles, basic cryptography concepts, and industry-standard security terminology.

Course Description

Earning your CompTIA Security+ certification requires a balance of theoretical knowledge and practical troubleshooting skills. The actual exam is widely recognized as a rigorous, moderately difficult assessment for entry-level professionals. It features a mix of traditional multiple-choice items and complex performance-based questions designed to test how you handle real-world security incidents under pressure.

Because memorizing definitions is not enough to clear this hurdle, I built this practice question bank to challenge your critical thinking. Each question mirrors the tone, style, and technical depth you will encounter on test day. I have spent significant time creating comprehensive answer breakdowns so that you understand not just what the correct answer is, but exactly why the other five choices fail to meet the criteria. This approach helps you eliminate weak options quickly and builds the analytical mindset needed to pass on your first attempt.

Practice Questions Preview

Here is a preview of the type of rigorous questions included in this course:

Question 1: Security Operations & Threats

A cybersecurity analyst monitors a network segment and notices unauthorized lateral movement combined with highly encrypted outbound traffic traveling to an unlisted external IP address. Internal system baselines indicate no configuration updates or scheduled tasks are active on the affected hosts. Which of the following threats or indicators of compromise is most likely observed here?

Options:
- A) A local logic bomb detonation.
- B) An active phishing campaign launch.
- C) Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) activity.
- D) A brute-force attack targeting Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
- E) A SQL Injection (SQLi) exploit attempt.
- F) Automated ransomware staging.
Correct Answer: C
Explanation:
- A is incorrect: A logic bomb is dormant code triggered by a specific chronological event or system condition to cause localized damage. It does not inherently involve ongoing lateral movement or data exfiltration.
- B is incorrect: Phishing is an initial access vector used to deceive users into revealing credentials or downloading malware. It does not describe the post-compromise network behavior seen on internal hosts.
- C is correct: Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are characterized by stealthy, long-term network presence. They rely heavily on lateral movement to map internal networks and use encrypted channels to exfiltrate sensitive data to external command-and-control servers.
- D is incorrect: A brute-force attack on RDP is an active, noisy external attempt to guess credentials. It generates high volumes of failed login alerts rather than covert lateral movement and outbound exfiltration.
- E is incorrect: SQL Injection targets web application input fields to manipulate backend databases. It is an inbound application-layer exploit, not an ongoing multi-host lateral network movement scenario.
- F is incorrect: Ransomware staging involves rapid file encryption and immediate ransom demands. While it can spread laterally, the primary characteristic here is covert, highly encrypted data exfiltration, which points directly to espionage-focused APT activity.

Question 2: Security Architecture & Cryptography

An enterprise architecture team is designing a highly secure environment for data analytics in a public cloud model. The primary requirement is to ensure that sensitive customer datasets remain fully encrypted even while they are actively being processed in system memory. Which architectural pattern or technology should the team implement?

Options:
- A) Transport Layer Security (TLS 1.3) tunnels.
- B) Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256) at the storage volume level.
- C) Confidential computing using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).
- D) Air-gapped network virtualization loops.
- E) Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) schemas.
- F) Symmetric key management hashing systems.
Correct Answer: C
Explanation:
- A is incorrect: TLS 1.3 protects data in transit across network paths. It does not protect data while it resides inside memory modules during compute execution.
- B is incorrect: AES-256 volume encryption protects data at rest on physical disk drives or cloud storage blocks. The data must still be decrypted when loaded into memory for processing.
- C is correct: Confidential computing relies on hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to isolate data within an encrypted portion of the CPU and memory. This ensures the data cannot be viewed or modified by the host operating system or virtualization layer during processing.
- D is incorrect: Air-gapping isolates systems from external networks entirely. It is a network security design that does not address memory-level encryption within a shared public cloud infrastructure.
- E is incorrect: RBAC controls user permissions and data access privileges. It prevents unauthorized user accounts from requesting data but does not encrypt or secure the memory registers at the hardware level.
- F is incorrect: Hashing and symmetric key management deal with the creation, rotation, and mathematical generation of cryptographic elements. They do not provide a hardware execution container to keep active memory encrypted.

Question 3: Security Program Management & Mitigation

A security officer reviews the company's risk profile and notices that a legacy server operating system cannot be patched against a critical remote code execution vulnerability. Due to operational dependencies, the server cannot be decommissioned. The officer decides to install an intrusion prevention system (IPS) directly in front of the server to block exploit traffic. What risk management strategy has been applied?

Options:
- A) Risk Avoidance.
- B) Risk Acceptance.
- C) Risk Mitigation.
- D) Risk Deterrence.
- E) Risk Transference.
- F) Risk Rejection.
Correct Answer: C
Explanation:
- A is incorrect: Risk avoidance requires eliminating the risk entirely, typically by removing the vulnerable asset, stopping the business activity, or decommissioning the server.
- B is incorrect: Risk acceptance involves acknowledging the risk and choosing to take no action to reduce it, usually because the cost of mitigation outweighs the potential loss.
- C is correct: Risk mitigation involves implementing security controls, such as a hardware or software IPS, to reduce the likelihood or overall impact of a vulnerability being exploited.
- D is incorrect: Risk deterrence relies on visible warning signs, legal threats, or physical barriers to discourage bad actors from attacking a system, rather than technically altering the vulnerability profile.
- E is incorrect: Risk transference shifts the financial or operational burden of the risk to a third party, such as purchasing an insurance policy or outsourcing operations to a vendor.
- F is incorrect: Risk rejection or denial is an improper practice where an organization ignores a verified risk. It is not a valid or recognized security governance strategy.

Welcome to the Mock Exam Practice Tests Academy to help you prepare for your CompTIA Security+ Certification.
You can retake the exams as many times as you want
This is a huge original question bank
You get support from instructors if you have questions
Each question has a detailed explanation
Mobile-compatible with the Udemy app

I hope that by now you're convinced! And there are a lot more questions inside the course.