An analyst reviews the following web server log entries: %2E%2E/%2E%2E/%2ES2E/%2E%2E/%2E%2E/%2E%2E/etc/passwd No attacks or malicious attempts have been discovered. Which of the following most likely

The correct answer is D. Directory traversal was performed to obtain a sensitive file for further reconnaissance.. Directory traversal, also known as path traversal, is an attack that allows attackers to access restricted directories and execute commands outside the web server's root directory. The %2E encoding corresponds to a dot (.) in ASCII, and %2E%2E resolves to ../. The log entries ind

Submitted by femi9· Mar 6, 2026Security operations

Question

An analyst reviews the following web server log entries:

%2E%2E/%2E%2E/%2ES2E/%2E%2E/%2E%2E/%2E%2E/etc/passwd No attacks or malicious attempts have been discovered. Which of the following most likely describes what took place?

Options

AA SQL injection query took place to gather information from a sensitive file.
BA PHP injection was leveraged to ensure that the sensitive file could be accessed.
CBase64 was used to prevent the IPS from detecting the fully encoded string.
DDirectory traversal was performed to obtain a sensitive file for further reconnaissance.

How the community answered

(43 responses)

A
16% (7)
B
7% (3)
C
5% (2)
D
72% (31)

Explanation

Directory traversal, also known as path traversal, is an attack that allows attackers to access restricted directories and execute commands outside the web server's root directory. The %2E encoding corresponds to a dot (.) in ASCII, and %2E%2E resolves to ../. The log entries indicate attempts to navigate directories upward to access sensitive files like /etc/passwd. Since no malicious activity was flagged, it is inferred this was either an unsuccessful or reconnaissance

Topics

#directory traversal#URL encoding#web server logs#reconnaissance

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