Question 610
Before a monitored change is approved, the SOC finds: A privileged admin account logs in from an unfamiliar geographic location and the SOC needs to assess the risk without assuming geolocation is definitive. Which analysis correctly identifies the underlying operational gap?
Explanation
Correct Answer
The underlying principle is: IP-based geolocation can reflect VPN egress or cloud proxies, so an unusual country is a risk signal rather than absolute identity proof. Address this by: Correlate administrative logs with known VPN gateways, MFA records, source reputation and recent account activity. The confirming operational observation is: The investigation classifies the login with supporting identity evidence and tracks any associated administrative changes.
Incorrect Answers
A tunnel negotiation success does not establish that subsequent policy, routing or encrypted application flows were permitted. “Join tunnel events with related traffic logs and check the intended application session and routing behavior” would remedy that alternative situation, but it would not correct the present issue: IP-based geolocation can reflect VPN egress or cloud proxies, so an unusual country is a risk signal rather than absolute identity proof.
“Inspect query name, DNS action and subsequent sessions to distinguish attempted lookup from successful command-channel access” is the supported response when DNS filtering or sinkhole behavior can alter a lookup result; a detected query does not necessarily mean the endpoint connected to the original attacker IP. Here the decisive response is “Correlate administrative logs with known VPN gateways, MFA records, source reputation and recent account activity”, so that different intervention does not meet the stated requirement.
A category-based web-filter policy can block a site even without an identified malware signature. “Inspect the web-filter category, action, matching policy and exact requested hostname before proposing an exception” applies to that other condition. The reported evidence is a privileged admin account logs in from an unfamiliar geographic location and the SOC needs to assess the risk without assuming geolocation is definitive; this alternative would address the wrong dependency.