300-740 Practice Exam Questions with Answers Designing and Implementing Secure Cloud Access for Users and Endpoints (SCAZT) Certification

Rule 1 is a “deny all” rule placed at the top of the access control policy. Because Cisco firewalls process rules sequentially from top to bottom, Rule 1 is blocking all traffic—including RDP (Rule 2) and HTTPS (Rule 3). To allow specific traffic, the “deny all” catch-all rule should be placed last so that the specific allow rules are evaluated first.

SCAZT Section 3 (Network and Cloud Security, Pages 69–74) discusses rule hierarchy and clearly states that allow rules must precede any general deny policies to ensure intended traffic is matched correctly. This best practice is essential when dealing with multi-cloud access control.

The SCAZT documentation emphasizes that when Cisco Secure XDR identifies a high-risk threat (e.g., risk score 8 out of 10 for malware distribution, as shown in the exhibit), the first priority is to prevent lateral movement and data exfiltration. The recommended first response action is to isolate the affected endpoint from the network.

Cisco Secure Endpoint and XDR allow you to trigger an "isolate" response directly from the dashboard, cutting off all non-management communication from the compromised device. This preserves the environment and enables forensic analysis before removing malware or taking destructive actions like rebuilding the system.

In the provided screenshot of Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC), the rule labeled "Block Facebook" is intended to block access to Facebook and Facebook Apps. However, the rule lacks correct zone configurations, which is why the block is ineffective.

Per Cisco's best practices outlined in the Designing and Implementing Secure Cloud Access for Users and Endpoints (SCAZT) documentation and Cisco Secure Firewall documentation:

The source zone should reflect where the traffic is originating from—in this case, from internal users. Therefore, Source Zone must be set to inside (Answer: E).

The destination zone should reflect where the traffic is headed—in this case, towards the internet. So, Destination Zone must be set to outside (Answer: D).

Without properly defining source and destination zones, FMC rules may not match the traffic correctly, resulting in traffic being incorrectly allowed.

Automation of containment and response actions—such as isolating compromised endpoints and applying predefined security policies—is a critical capability of Cisco’s XDR and SecureX platform. According to SCAZT Section 6: Threat Response (Pages 112–117), automating threat containment allows security teams to rapidly limit the blast radius of incidents and improve mean time to respond (MTTR), without relying solely on manual intervention.

Rule 3 allows all traffic (including SSH) from 10.1.0.0/30 during the hours of 18:00–08:00, which directly conflicts with Rule 1 that is intended to deny SSH at those same hours. Since firewall rules are evaluated top-down and Rule 3 allows traffic during the exact period where SSH should be blocked, deleting Rule 3 will allow Rule 1 to apply correctly.

This behavior is explained in SCAZT Section 3 (Network and Cloud Security, Pages 72–75), where rule precedence and time-based evaluation logic are discussed.

Based on the alert of “Geographically Unusual Remote Access” from Secure Cloud Analytics and the SSH logs from foreign IPs, this device (linux-gcp-east-4c) has likely been compromised. According to SCAZT Section 6: Threat Response (Pages 114–117):

B: Isolating/quarantining the host is an immediate incident response step to prevent lateral movement and data exfiltration.

E: A firewall rule blocking inbound SSH to the GCP VM from external sources would be the appropriate access control response to prevent recurrence.

Options A and C (reinstallation) may be used later during recovery but are not immediate containment steps. Blocking outgoing SSH (Option D) is less relevant than restricting inbound SSH in this scenario.

Directory traversal attacks exploit improper file path validations to access unauthorized directories and files. To prevent this, it is critical to restrict what areas of the file system an application or user can access. Limiting file system permissions prevents attackers from gaining access to sensitive areas even if a traversal vulnerability exists.

As explained in SCAZT Section 4 (Application and Data Security, Pages 85–87), enforcing minimal privileges and file system segmentation is a key defense against such attacks.

A drive-by compromise occurs when malicious code is automatically downloaded and executed simply by visiting a compromised website—often through malicious advertising scripts (malvertising). According to SCAZT Section 4: Application and Data Security (Pages 85–87), ad blockers help prevent drive-by downloads by blocking these third-party ad scripts and redirections, which are commonly used in such attacks.

VPNs and private browsing modes (e.g., Incognito) do not provide protection against malicious content hosted on web pages.

When integrating Duo Authentication Proxy with Active Directory for multifactor authentication (MFA), you must:

Configure the Identity Source in the Duo Admin Panel as Active Directory (not SAML), since it’s using the Authentication Proxy.

Configure the authentication proxy settings in the [sso] section to communicate with both AD and the Duo cloud.

This setup allows Active Directory to be the primary identity store while Duo provides the second authentication factor.

The exhibit shows DNS Block as the reason and lists 10.1.108.100 as the Responder IP, with the Initiator being 10.1.113.7. In Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center reports, the “Initiator IP” is the source of the request and the “Responder IP” is the source of the response. Since the DNS security intelligence engine flagged the traffic, and 10.1.108.100 was the responder, the blocked traffic corresponds to a DNS response from that IP.

The screenshot from Cisco ISE shows a configuration of a “File Condition” posture check that verifies the existence and version of the “Srv.sys” file in the System32 directory. This is a known method to validate if a Windows device has received a critical security patch (in this case, one related to protection against the WannaCry vulnerability, MS17-010). Cisco ISE does not rely solely on a patch management system for this type of validation but can use specific file version and path checks. Therefore, the correct posture condition is File Condition.

The Zero Trust model relies on the principle of "never trust, always verify" and includes continuous verification based on real-time data. According to SCAZT Section 1 (Cloud Security Architecture, Pages 14–17), user and device behavior are key elements for continuous verification. Behavioral analytics evaluates deviations from typical activity, such as time of login, geolocation, access frequency, and resource usage to adapt trust levels dynamically. This is central to adaptive access control and risk-based authentication.