Security Fundamentals Practice Question 1: CIA Triad DDoS

Security Fundamentals · Test 1 · question 1 of 10

Core Security Principleseasy

A retailer's online store is flooded with junk traffic from thousands of compromised devices and becomes unreachable for customers for six hours. No data was read, copied, or changed. Which property of the CIA triad was primarily affected?

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Answer:

C. Availability

The CIA triad is Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. NIST defines availability as ensuring timely and reliable access to and use of information. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that makes a service unreachable is the textbook attack on availability (C).

- A. Confidentiality is about preventing unauthorized disclosure. The stem says no data was read or copied, so nothing was disclosed. - B. Integrity is about preventing unauthorized modification. No data was changed. - D. Non-repudiation (being unable to deny having performed an action) is a related security property, but it is not one of the three CIA properties and is not what an outage affects.

Reference: NIST CSRC Glossary: availability

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