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For Renee, the most patient and caring person I know. Thank you for being the heart of our family.
—MJC
This book is dedicated to my longtime friend Amanda Hanover, who always combined unlimited curiosity with equally infinite numbers of questions about security topics. Amanda lost her fight with mental health struggles in 2019, but you, our reader, should know that there is support out there. Mental health challenges are a struggle that many in the security community face, and community support exists for those who need it. Visit www.mentalhealthhackers.org to find mental health activities at security conferences in your area, as well as resources and links to other resources. You are not alone.
And Amanda—here are a thousand more security questions for you. Your friend, David
—DAS
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the many people who made this book possible. Kenyon Brown at Wiley has been a wonderful partner through many books over the years. Carole Jelen, our agent, worked on a myriad of logistic details and handled the business side of the book with her usual grace and commitment to excellence. Chris Crayton, our technical editor, pointed out many opportunities to improve our work and deliver a high-quality final product. Kezia Endsley served as developmental editor and managed the project smoothly. Thank you to Runzhi “Tom” Song, Mike's research assistant at Notre Dame, who spent hours proofreading our final copy. Many other people we'll never meet worked behind the scenes to make this book a success.
About the Authors
Mike Chapple, PhD, CISSP, is an author of the best-selling CySA+ Study Guide and CISSP (ISC)2 Certified Information Systems Security Professional Official Study Guide, now in its eighth edition. He is an information security professional with two decades of experience in higher education, the private sector, and government.
Mike currently serves as teaching professor of IT, analytics, and operations at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches courses focused on cybersecurity and business analytics.
Before returning to Notre Dame, Mike served as executive vice president and chief information officer of the Brand Institute, a Miami-based marketing consultancy. Mike also spent four years in the information security research group at the National Security Agency and served as an active duty intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force.
Mike earned both his BS and PhD degrees from Notre Dame in computer science and engineering. He also holds an MS in computer science from the University of Idaho and an MBA from Auburn University.
David Seidl is the Vice President for Information Technology and CIO at Miami University. During his IT career, he has served in a variety of technical and information security roles, including serving at the Senior Director for Campus Technology Services at the University of Notre Dame, where he co-led Notre Dame's move to the cloud and oversaw cloud operations, ERP, databases, identity management, and a broad range of other technologies and service. He also served as Notre Dame's Director of Information Security and led Notre Dame's information security program. He has taught information security and networking undergraduate courses as an instructor for Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business and has written books on security certification and cyberwarfare, including co-authoring CISSP (ISC)2 Official Practice Tests (Sybex 2018) as well as the previous editions of both this book and the companion CompTIA CySA+ Practice Tests: Exam CS0-001.
David holds a bachelor's degree in communication technology and a master's degree in information security from Eastern Michigan University, as well as CISSP, CySA+, Pentest+, GPEN, and GCIH certifications.
About the Technical Editor
Chris Crayton, MCSE, CISSP, CASP, CySA+, A+, N+, S+, is a technical consultant, trainer, author and industry leading technical editor. He has worked as a computer technology and networking instructor, information security director, network administrator, network engineer, and PC specialist. Chris has served as technical editor and content contributor on numerous technical titles for several of the leading publishing companies. He has also been recognized with many professional and teaching awards.
Introduction
CompTIA CySA+ (Cybersecurity Analyst) Practice Tests, Second Edition is a companion volume to the CompTIA CySA+ Study Guide, Second Edition (Sybex, 2020, Chapple/Seidl). If you're looking to test your knowledge before you take the CySA+ exam, this book will help you by providing a combination of 1,000 questions that cover the CySA+ domains and easy-to-understand explanations of both right and wrong answers.
If you're just starting to prepare for the CySA+ exam, we highly recommend that you use the Cybersecurity Analyst+ (CySA+) Study Guide, Second Edition to help you learn about each of the domains covered by the CySA+ exam. Once you're ready to test your knowledge, use this book to help find places where you may need to study more or to practice for the exam itself.
Since this is a companion to the CySA+ Study Guide, this book is designed to be similar to taking the CySA+ exam. It contains multipart scenarios as well as standard multiple-choice questions similar to those you may encounter in the certification exam itself. The book itself is broken up into seven chapters: five domain-centric chapters with questions about each domain, and two chapters that contain 85-question practice tests to simulate taking the CySA+ exam itself.
CompTIA
CompTIA is a nonprofit trade organization that offers certification in a variety of IT areas, ranging from the skills that a PC support technician needs, which are covered in the A+ exam, to advanced certifications like the CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner, or CASP certification. CompTIA recommends that practitioners follow a cybersecurity career path as shown here:
The Cybersecurity Analyst+ exam is a more advanced exam, intended for professionals with hands-on experience and who possess the
