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IT Security - Digital Skill Cup 2026

Digital Skills Cup 2026

Welcome to the Digital Skills Cup for IT Security

Once you register with your name and email, the quiz starts immediately.
You have 5 minutes to complete the quiz.
No pauses. No switching between windows, no copy-pasting.
Scoring is based on the number of correct answers and the lower time to complete the quiz, in case of a tie.
Use a valid email address and your real name for registration.
You have 1 attempt.
Good luck :)

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Digital Skill Cup 2026 - IT Security All

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Question 1

What is a “Man-in-the-Middle Attack”?

A processor design flaw

An attack on the physical middle of a cable

Overloading the central server

When an attacker secretly intercepts or alters communication between two parties

Question 2

What is the primary purpose of a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system?

Prevent unauthorized access

Monitor and analyze security events

Encrypt sensitive data

Patch vulnerabilities

Question 3

Which of the following are common indicators of compromise (IoCs)?

Unusual outbound traffic

Repeated failed login attempts

Regular system patching

Unexpected privilege escalation

Question 4

In AWS, what is the recommended way to provide an EC2 instance with permissions to access S3 without embedding access keys?

Use the root account access keys

Use an IAM Role attached to the EC2 instance

Store access keys in user-data scripts

Share keys via Systems Manager Parameter Store in plain text

Question 5

Which principle is the Foundation of Zero Trust security architecture?

Trust but verify

Verify explicitly and assume breach

Implicit trust within the network

Perimeter-based security

Question 6

Which are examples of applying the principle of least privilege to human service identities?

Assigning broad administrative roles to all IT staff to avoid operational delays, assuming internal trust and audit logs sufficiently mitigate misuse risks

Granting developers permanent write access to production systems to simplify deployment and troubleshooting processes

Allowing developers full production DB admin rights permanently

Granting only the permissions required for tasks and reviewing roles regularly for removal of excess access

Question 7

A firewall is used to control incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predefined security rules.

Yes

No

Question 8

What is the primary role of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint?

Email protection

Endpoint detection and response

Identity governance

Data classification

Question 9

Which characteristics distinguish a secure software supply chain?

Signed and verified build artifacts

Dependency vulnerability scanning

Manual code reviews only at release time

Reproducible builds

Question 10

Which European Union Regulation is the toughest privacy and security law in the world and imposes obligations onto organizations anywhere, so long as they target or collect data related to people in the EU?

NIS2

GDPR

Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0

DORA

Question 11

In AWS, which service is used to detect malicious activity and unauthorized behavior?

AWS Shield

AWS GuardDuty

AWS WAF

AWS CloudTrail

Question 12

Which design best reduces lateral movement if an attacker compromises one server?

Using a flat internal network architecture combined with strong perimeter firewalls, under the assumption that external attackers are the primary threat vector

Implementing role-based access control at the application level while leaving network-level communication largely unrestricted for operational efficiency

Network segmentation with firewalled subnets and least privilege security rules between tiers

Relying on endpoint detection and response tools to identify suspicious activity after compromise, without enforcing strict network segmentation or microsegmentation policies

Question 13

Which Microsoft service provides SIEM and SOAR capabilities?

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft Intune

Microsoft Purview

Question 14

What is “Salted Hashing”?

Adding a random string to the password before hashing

Combining two different hash algorithms (e.g., MD5 and SHA)

Encrypting the hash database with a master key

utomatically deleting hashes after a failed password attempt

Question 15

What is used to encrypt passwords stored in the SAM database?

LM algorithm

NTLM algorithm

Bootkey

SecureKey

Question 16

What is the primary purpose of a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system in an IT infrastructure?

To manage user passwords and access rights

To replace firewalls and intrusion prevention systems

To automatically patch vulnerabilities in all connected devices

To aggregate, analyze, and correlate security event logs from multiple sources for real-time threat detection

Question 17

The private communication of individuals and organizations is protected online by cryptography. Existing public-key cryptography (also known as asymmetric cryptography) is based on the difficulty of factoring and the difficulty of calculating elliptic curve discrete logarithms. It is expected that in the near furture these two problems will be readily and efficiently solved by what type of computing power?

Quantum

Agentic AI

Artificial superintelligence (ASI)

Question 18

What is encryption at rest?

Encrypting data during transmission

Encrypting stored data on disk

Hashing passwords only

Securing network traffic

Question 19

What is the purpose of the concept of “defense in depth”?

Reduce security costs

Implement multiple layers of security to protect assets

Ensure that only one control is sufficient

Avoid redundancy in systems

Question 20

What does the Zero Trust security model assume?

All internal users are trusted

Trust is based on network location

Never trust, always verify

Security is optional

Quiz Results

Good job! Thank you for participating in the Digital Skills Cup 2026! We have sent you the quiz results by email.

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