Computer Security Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Correct answer: Virus

Viruses commonly arrive as email attachments, because opening the attachment runs the code. Spam is unwanted mail, which may or may not carry anything harmful, and a portal is a website.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Cookies

A cookie is a small piece of data a site asks the browser to store and return on later visits, which is how a site remembers a user between requests. Malware and adware are unwanted programs rather than stored data.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Antivirus

Antivirus software scans for code matching its database of known threats and removes what it finds. Adware displays advertisements, a key logger records keystrokes, and firmware is code held in hardware.

Answer: D

Correct answer: The business strategy of the company

Securing a system depends on how it is configured, how the network is laid out, and how capable the attacker is. What the company sells and how it plans to grow has no bearing on whether an attack succeeds.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Zombie

A zombie is a compromised machine that an attacker controls remotely and uses as a platform for attacks on others, which conceals the attacker's own address. A trap door is a hidden entry point into a program, not a captured machine.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Pieces of malicious code that make copies of themselves and spread without a host program

A worm is self-replicating and self-propagating: unlike a virus it needs no host file and no user action, which is why it can spread across a network on its own. An unsolicited email message is spam.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Message Integrity

Integrity says the message has not been altered; authentication goes further and says who sent it. A message could be unaltered and still come from an impostor, which is why authentication is the stronger service.

Answer: B

Correct answer: It is anti-virus software

Trend Micro is a security company whose products detect and remove malware, so it belongs with McAfee, Norton and Avast rather than with the threats they defend against.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Scams distributed through email such as phishing, pharming and spam

Social engineering attacks the person rather than the machine: it persuades someone to give up information or to run something, and email is its usual delivery route. A technical attack on a computer is the opposite approach, and a site for people with shared interests is simply a social network.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Problems

Asymmetric-key cryptography solves the key distribution problem but brings difficulties of its own: it is far slower than symmetric encryption, so it is impractical for bulk data, and it needs a trusted way of certifying that a public key really belongs to its claimed owner. In practice it is used to exchange a symmetric session key rather than to encrypt the message itself.