Information Assurance Interview Questions

Information assurance deals with protecting data and information system to keep the data reliable using non-repudiation techniques, backup and so on.

However, information protection simply deals with methods to keep the data safe through the use of encryption, security-related tools, and other ways.

CIA is a basic principle of information assurance where C means Confidentiality- keeping data secure, I means Integrity – Keeping data intact and A means availability- keeping data accessible when required.

Succinctly put, the red team is the offensive and blue team is a defensive one. Red team needs to succeed only once to be able to achieve its target whereas Blue team needs to stay alert all the time to see if any breach has been made.

Security is a sensitive business. It is always advised to ask for privilege from higher authority. So, I would mail the admin with my Manager cc’d and keep the records if I am advised to solve the problem by one of those people.

External auditors will be able to bring those missed and dangerous issues to notice. They will have a fresh look at your system and are more likely to discover issues that are unseen or doesn’t want to be seen by insiders.

False positive means a detection of a packet that actually isn't malicious. But false negative is something that passes from Firewall and becomes an incident. False positive can be rectified by changing rule-set and manual testing. But false negative could cause compromise of an entire system. Thus, false negative is far dangerous than false positive detection by a firewall or an anti-virus software.

In white box testing, a tester is provided with source code, network diagrams, programs running on the server side, or in a word 'complete privilege'. On the other hand, a black box tester will be given nothing -- he will have to perform or simulate an attack from a random outsider.

Literally, it means risk that remains. In infosec domain, it means acceptable risk for the company. Even if an issue is valid but due to usability problem and such, it’s not surely going to be fixed.

No, A file isn't deleted when you press that delete button. Actually what happens is your OS flips a bit telling that you don’t need this file for now and can be overwritten, if required. You could use several tools to recover deleted files because they are not actually deleted but are ready to be overwritten.

It is a technique of social engineering, a way of extracting data from a company without getting noticed.