Information Security Analyst Interview
Questions

"I am able to work both as an individual contributor or as a member of a highly functional team. The benefit of working as an individual is that you move faster and can complete a project in less time. However, you are also limited to your ideas, experience, and skills. As a member of a team, you move slower due to the need to collaborate and discuss actions and topics related to the project you're working on. However, the benefit is that many individuals contribute to the project, each providing a unique set of experiences, skills, and talents. The output of a team often eclipses the data and up to that of an individual contributor. Given a choice, I would rather function as a member of a team."

"Traceroute is a process used by a systems analyst to uncover any breakdowns or gaps in communications and pinpoint where they are occurring in the network. This technique follows the data and the route it takes, identifying the network devices along its path. Once you've identified where the connection break has occurred, you can repair it with either software or hardware."

"In one of my former positions, I set a goal for our team for 90 days of continual network uptime. This required tha there were no security intrusions to the network during this period. The team achieved this objective by first profiling the network and identifying any vulnerabilities. We then implemented patches and fixes to address these. Once this was completed, the clock started. The network actually stayed up and had zero intrusions for over 120 days. I reward my team by taking them on an exciting team-building event and providing them each with a bonus check."

"Both UDP and TCP are protocols used to move data across the Internet. UDP stands for user datagram protocol. TCP stands for transmission control protocol. Of these two, TCP is the mos common protocol used. It numbers each packet when transmitted to verify that all the packets have been received, thus providing high reliability. UDP does not have this error-checking capability."

"It is not often that my management team and I have disagreements, but it does happen. In my most recent role, there was a situation involving my recommendation to upgrade the security of our network. Management felt that it was too expensive, and the predicted results could not be cost-justified. I knew I had to convince them to do the upgrade, or our network would be at risk. I collected information about similar threats to other networks and the costs of resolving issues caused by attacks on the network. It became obvious that it would be easier to implement my suggestions than to remediate the situation after an attack occurred. Management agreed with my suggestion, and we implemented the upgrade in less time and at a lower cost than I had originally predicted. To my knowledge, the network has never suffered an attack due to this solution."

"When securing a server, the first thing I do is to check to see if there are any open ports. These occur when technicians are updating the server or installing new software. Once I close these, I examine the software in the patches on the server to ensure they're up to date with all the appropriate security measures. If not, I patch them to the most current level. The final thing I do is to minimize access to the server, allowing access to people who need to be able to update it or make authorized changes."

"I constantly perform self-checks to make sure there are no issues which are impacting my job. I also occasionally conduct 360 interviews with my peers, management, and the people I manage to make sure I'm doing everything right. If I do discover an issue, I take immediate action to correct it. I recently became aware of the fact that I did not return emails promptly. This was impacting people who were waiting for my response. Once I was aware of this, I created a system to prioritize my emails so I could respond to the important ones, and delay reading the less critical emails."

"In one of my past positions, the department's budget was reduced due to a downturn in sales for the entire company. We were asked to do more with less and still maintain the security of the company's IT infrastructure. I met with my team, and we discussed ways we could consolidate our hardware while still providing security to the network. We were able to remove 30% of our network servers and half of the routers without impacting either the performance or the security of the network. This resulted in cost savings plus an inventory of spare parts we could use if something broke."

"I am always looking for opportunities to reduce costs, save time, or improve processes. I recently noticed that my team was documenting their activities both in writing and with emails. This didn't make sense since very few people ever read the written reports. I created report templates which the team could use online to document their work. This not only eliminated the redundancy but allowed the team to complete the forms while waiting for other processes to run, thereby reducing the overall time to complete this task."

"While these two terms may seem similar, there are subtle differences between them. A vulnerability defines a weakness in the organization's IT infrastructure, which can be exploited by malicious individuals. Vulnerabilities may sit dormant for long periods and go undetected until hackers use them to gain access to the network and the data contained within it. Threats, on the other hand, are active issues or incidents which are in the process of attacking an organization or working to gain access. Vulnerabilities can be addressed by constantly monitoring the network to identify them, and then addressing them with patches, software upgrades or other methods. Threats can only be resolved by creating defenses against them. This requires constant monitoring, awareness, and active remediation or the development of protections."

"In my opinion, DNS monitoring is critically important. While I've heard counterpoints to this position, they are typically based on the assumption that DNS monitoring indicates that domain naming services are weak. However, the monitoring requires few resources and ensures that users can access any resource available on the Internet easily. It also reduces the vulnerability of data passing through port number 53 and ensures unauthorized users do not have access to the organization's network."

"Symmetric encryption is the process of encrypting data by creating a key which can then be used to decrypt it. In this process, a single key is used for the encryption and decryption of the data. Asymmetric encryption is similar but uses different keys for each transmission. Typically, technicians will use asymmetric encryption during the first transmission of data, followed by symmetric encryption for subsequent transmissions. Using the different types of encryption in this manner ensures that security of the data while expediting transmissions once the communication channel has been established."

"It used to be very simple to manage an organization's cybersecurity issues when everything was onsite at the company's datacenter. However, in today's environment, IT assets are spread across a variety of locations. These include the on-premise datacenter, a third-party hosted site, and in the cloud. While this helps ensure the security of the data through replication, it also presents challenges when transmitting data. Measures such as data encryption, replication, and tracerouting all help to ensure the data is secure and safe. Other techniques include strong user authentication and specific security measures built into the contracts with the third-party providers."

"One of the key elements of data security is user authentication. The most basic form of user authentication is supplying the user with a username and password. This is needed at any time the user logs in to the application or the network. A higher level of security is known as two-step authentication. In addition to the user ID and password, a code is sent to a device the user has pre-registered. They are then required to input the code before they are allowed to access the network."

"When using encryption to secure data, you should always encrypt the data before compressing it. If you compress the data first, you could not encrypt it properly or decrypt it when received by another device. The exact process is to create an encryption key, encrypt the data, compress it, then transmit the data and the decryption key to the receiving party."