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ExamsCAS-001Questions#260
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CAS-001 · Question #260

CAS-001 Question #260: Real Exam Question with Answer & Explanation

The correct answer is A: Visibility on the traffic between the virtual machines can impact confidentiality. The critical security risk is that all VMs - including externally facing web servers, customer data processors, and financial data processors - share the same virtual network interface (and likely the same virtual switch). In a properly segmented environment, these workloads shou

Question

A company has a legacy virtual cluster which was added to the datacenter after a small company was acquired. All VMs on the cluster use the same virtual network interface to connect to the corporate data center LAN. Some of the virtual machines on the cluster process customer data, some process company financial data, and others act as externally facing web servers. Which of the following security risks can result from the configuration in this scenario?

Options

  • AVisibility on the traffic between the virtual machines can impact confidentiality
  • BNIC utilization can exceed 50 percent and impact availability
  • CShared virtual switches can negatively impact the integrity of network packets
  • DAdditional overhead from network bridging can affect availability

Explanation

The critical security risk is that all VMs - including externally facing web servers, customer data processors, and financial data processors - share the same virtual network interface (and likely the same virtual switch). In a properly segmented environment, these workloads should be on isolated network segments. When they share a virtual switch, traffic between VMs may traverse the same virtual network fabric. A compromised external web server could sniff traffic from VMs handling sensitive customer or financial data, violating confidentiality. This is the classic risk of improper virtual network segmentation. Option B is a performance concern (and 50% NIC utilization is not even a threshold for concern), not a security risk. Option C is incorrect because virtual switches do not inherently corrupt packet integrity - shared switching is not an integrity threat. Option D describes a performance impact from network bridging overhead, which is not a security risk specific to this configuration, and bridging is not inherent to the described scenario.

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