The correct answer is By providing a mechanism to trace actions back to individuals or entities.

Implementing a robust audit trail contributes to the principle of accountability in information security by recording and preserving detailed logs of user actions, system events, and data access. This allows organizations to trace specific actions back to the individuals or entities that performed them, facilitating the identification of responsible parties in the event of a security incident or policy violation.

Here's a brief overview of the other options:

1. By ensuring that only authorized users can access sensitive data: This relates more to access controls and user authentication rather than accountability directly.
2. By enforcing secure default configurations for all systems: While secure configurations are essential for reducing vulnerabilities, they do not directly contribute to accountability.
3. By reducing the attack surface through minimized exposure: This focuses on reducing the potential entry points for attacks, which is important for security but does not address accountability.

The correct answer is Encrypting data at rest with AES-256 and using SSL/TLS for data in transit.

This strategy effectively addresses data integrity during both storage and transmission by employing encryption to protect the data:

1. Encrypting data at rest with AES-256: This ensures that the data stored on disk is secure and cannot be tampered with or accessed by unauthorized users. AES-256 is a strong encryption standard that provides robust protection for stored data.
2. Using SSL/TLS for data in transit: SSL/TLS protocols secure data being transmitted over networks by encrypting it, thus preventing eavesdropping and tampering during transmission. This ensures the integrity of the data while it is being sent from one location to another.

Here's a brief overview of the other options:

1. Using SHA-256 hashing for data storage and base64 encoding for data transmission: While SHA-256 is a strong hashing algorithm, hashing alone does not provide data integrity during storage (as it’s not reversible and doesn’t protect against unauthorized access) or secure the data during transmission. Base64 encoding does not provide security; it's merely a method for encoding binary data into text.
2. Masking sensitive data fields in the database and using HTTP for data transmission: Masking is useful for obfuscating sensitive data but does not secure the data against unauthorized access. Using HTTP for data transmission does not provide encryption, making it vulnerable to interception.
3. Implementing RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) and logging all data access events: While RBAC and logging can help manage who has access to the data, they do not address the integrity of the data itself during storage or transmission.

Configurable options for credential management, auditing, and exception logging should be managed through security management interfaces for several key reasons. These interfaces are designed to uphold security best practices, providing a secure and controlled environment for configuring sensitive aspects of a system. They incorporate access control mechanisms, permitting only authorized personnel to modify critical security settings, preventing unauthorized changes that could compromise the system. Centralized control is achieved, ensuring a consistent and standardized approach to credential management, auditing, and logging system-wide. Security management interfaces also offer robust auditing and logging capabilities, facilitating the tracking of any security configuration changes for accountability and forensic purposes.

The correct answer is Resource Throttling: Limiting resource consumption by individual users.

Resource throttling is an effective strategy for mitigating Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks because it limits the amount of resources (such as bandwidth, CPU, or memory) that can be consumed by individual users or processes. By imposing limits on resource usage, the system can prevent any single user from overwhelming the service, thereby maintaining availability for legitimate users.

Here’s a brief overview of the other options:

1. Least Privilege: This principle focuses on minimizing the permissions granted to users, which helps reduce the risk of misuse or attacks by insiders but does not directly address DoS attacks.
2. Defense in Depth: While this approach involves layering multiple security controls to provide redundancy and overall security, it does not specifically target the resource exhaustion aspect of DoS attacks.
3. Fail-Safe Design: This principle ensures that systems can gracefully handle unexpected events, but it does not inherently protect against the deliberate attempt to overload a system, which is the nature of DoS attacks.

Leaving default passwords of an application without changing them is considered a form of "Insecure Configuration" or "Default Credentials" security issue. It's a common security best practice to change default passwords during the installation or setup process of an application to reduce the risk of unauthorized access.

If default credentials are not changed, it creates a significant vulnerability because attackers often know or can easily find default passwords for various applications and devices. Exploiting default credentials is a straightforward method for unauthorized individuals to gain access to systems, applications, or devices, leading to potential security breaches. To mitigate this risk, administrators should always change default passwords to unique, strong passwords during the initial configuration of any system or application.

Detective controls are designed to detect and respond to security incidents or deviations from security policies. In this case, recording application events allows for the detection of unusual or potentially malicious activities during later audit reviews. It doesn't prevent the events from occurring, but it helps in identifying and responding to security incidents after they have taken place.

Views in a database provide a way to implement data abstraction by allowing users to see a specific subset of the data in the database, hiding the underlying complexity. Additionally, views can be used to enforce security and access controls by restricting the columns and rows visible to certain users or roles. This helps in controlling and securing access to sensitive information in the database.

Security patterns are design solutions to recurring security problems. By incorporating security patterns during the design phase, developers can leverage proven, reusable solutions to address common security challenges. This helps in building secure software systems by following established best practices and avoiding the need to reinvent the wheel for each security concern. It contributes to the overall security and reliability of the software by ensuring that known security issues are appropriately addressed from the outset of the development process.

The correct answer is Storing logs securely with access control and encryption.

When specifying requirements for secure logging, it is crucial to prioritize the security of the logs themselves. This includes ensuring that logs are protected from unauthorized access and tampering through the use of access controls and encryption. Securely storing logs helps maintain their integrity and confidentiality, which is essential for effective incident response and auditing.

Here's a brief overview of the other options:

1. Logging all user activity regardless of its sensitivity: While it can be important to log certain user activities, indiscriminately logging everything can lead to excessive data that may not be useful and can complicate the analysis and storage of logs. It's essential to log relevant activities based on risk assessments.
2. Capturing detailed information about events and actions: Capturing detailed information is important, but it must be balanced with security considerations. Detailed logs can be useful for investigations, but without secure storage, they can be vulnerable to unauthorized access.
3. Automatically deleting logs after a predefined time period: While log retention policies are necessary, automatically deleting logs can lead to loss of critical data needed for investigations or compliance. Instead, it’s better to define retention periods that comply with regulations and organizational policies.

The correct answer is Minimizing shared mechanisms to reduce the impact of security breaches.

The principle of "least common mechanism" in secure software design advocates for minimizing the use of shared mechanisms among system components. By reducing the number of shared resources, such as libraries, services, or data, the potential impact of a security breach is diminished. If a shared mechanism is compromised, it could lead to a cascading failure affecting multiple components.

Here’s a brief overview of the other options:

1. Encouraging the use of shared resources among system components: This is contrary to the principle of least common mechanism, which advises against excessive sharing to improve security.
2. Maximizing the complexity of system components: This is also contrary to secure design principles; increasing complexity can lead to more potential vulnerabilities and makes systems harder to manage securely.
3. Allowing unlimited access to system resources: This directly violates security principles, including the principle of least privilege, which states that users should have only the access necessary to perform their functions.

The insecure design in the zoo management's website allows attackers to exploit the system by reserving an unusually large number of guests (300,000) across all zoos without requiring a deposit. This vulnerability poses a significant threat to the zoo's revenue as attackers could abuse the group booking discounts, highlighting a flaw in the website's capacity management and financial controls.

The significance of the threat modeling technique known as DREAD is prioritizing security threats based on their severity.

DREAD is an acronym that stands for:

1. Damage potential: How severe would the damage be if the threat were realized?
2. Reproducibility: How easy is it to reproduce the attack?
3. Exploitability: How easy is it to launch the attack?
4. Affected users: How many users would be affected by a successful attack?
5. Discoverability: How easy is it to discover the vulnerability?

This technique helps security teams assess and rank the potential threats, making it easier to focus on addressing the most critical risks first. By providing a structured way to evaluate threats, DREAD supports risk management in the software development lifecycle.

This includes documenting user interface (UI) forms and fields, HTTP headers and cookies, APIs, files, databases, and run-time arguments. Each of these components represents potential entry points into the system that could be targeted by attackers, making them critical to document and analyze during attack surface analysis.

The type of user account privilege that should be used to access a database is privilege account to the required application database

This means using an account that has the necessary privileges to perform the required operations on the specific database, but no more than that. This follows the principle of least privilege, ensuring that the account has only the permissions needed to perform its tasks, thereby reducing the risk of misuse or compromise.

Granting access to only those resources that have been explicitly allowed.

This principle ensures that access is restricted by default and only granted when explicitly authorized, thereby enhancing security by minimizing unnecessary access.

The security control that prevents access to compromised user accounts and data, including passwords is MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication).

MFA adds an additional layer of security by requiring users to provide two or more verification factors—such as a password plus a one-time code sent to their phone—before gaining access. Even if an attacker has the user's password, they would still need the second factor to access the account, effectively preventing unauthorized access.

Here’s why the other options are less effective in this context:

1. Asking cognitive personal questions: This is a weaker method because attackers can often guess or find answers to these questions through social engineering.
2. Intrusion detection system (IDS): IDS helps detect suspicious activities but does not directly prevent access to compromised accounts.

Secure session management should consider:

Limiting session timeout and session scope: Implementing automatic session timeouts after a period of inactivity and ensuring that sessions have the least privilege necessary.

Securing session tokens: Using secure mechanisms to generate and store session tokens, ensuring they are transmitted securely.

Session token hijack prevention and session fixation: Protecting session tokens from hijacking through secure cookie attributes and regenerating session tokens after authentication to prevent fixation attacks.

All these measures are important for maintaining secure user sessions.

Secure password requirements should consider:

Set Minimum length and maximum length for passwords: Ensuring passwords are long enough to be secure but not so long that they become impractical.

Reject easily guessable and common passwords: Preventing the use of common passwords like "password123" to enhance security.

Set password expiration and don’t allow past passwords: Requiring regular password changes and preventing the reuse of previous passwords to reduce the risk of compromised credentials being used again.

All these measures contribute to enhancing the security of passwords.

While centralizing data can simplify management, it also creates a single point of failure and can be a significant security risk. It is better to distribute data and use appropriate security measures to protect it, reducing the risk of a single breach compromising all data.

This approach adds an extra layer of security by verifying the user's identity through multiple channels, making it more difficult for an attacker to compromise the account.