CAS-003 · Question #951
As a result of a recent breach a systems administrator is asked to review the security controls in place for an organization's cloud-based environment. The organization runs numerous instances and…
The correct answer is B. The use of staging to harvest production-level account credentials. Staging and production environments often share administrator accounts, service accounts, or developer credentials. Because staging lacks MFA, it is easier for an attacker to compromise staging credentials through brute force or phishing. If those same credentials are reused or…
Question
As a result of a recent breach a systems administrator is asked to review the security controls in place for an organization's cloud-based environment. The organization runs numerous instances and maintains several separate accounts for managing cloud-based resources. As part of the review the systems administrator finds MFA is enabled for production-level systems but not staging systems. Which of the following is the primary risk associated with this configuration?
Options
- APivoting between staging and production instances
- BThe use of staging to harvest production-level account credentials
- CThe loss of data integrity within the code repositories being migrated to staging
- DThe accidental disclosure of data in production due to the use of unsecure protocols
How the community answered
(20 responses)- A20% (4)
- B65% (13)
- C10% (2)
- D5% (1)
Explanation
Staging and production environments often share administrator accounts, service accounts, or developer credentials. Because staging lacks MFA, it is easier for an attacker to compromise staging credentials through brute force or phishing. If those same credentials are reused or shared with production (a common real-world problem), the attacker can use the harvested staging credentials to access production systems - bypassing MFA entirely by using already-validated credentials. This is the primary risk. Pivoting (A) requires already being inside the network. Code repository integrity (C) and accidental disclosure via insecure protocols (D) are not directly caused by the MFA disparity between environments.
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