SY0-401 Security+ Exam Syllabus

Security+ PDF, SY0-401 Dumps, SY0-401 PDF, Security+ VCE, SY0-401 Questions PDF, CompTIA SY0-401 VCE, CompTIA Security Plus Dumps, CompTIA Security Plus PDFUse this quick start guide to collect all the information about CompTIA Security+ (SY0-401) certification exam. This study guide provides a list of objectives and resources that will help you prepare for items on the SY0-401 Security+ exam. The Sample Questions will help you identify the type and difficulty level of the questions and the Practice Exams will make you familiar with the format and environment of an exam. You should refer this guide carefully before attempting your actual CompTIA Security Plus certification exam.

The CompTIA Security+ certification is mainly targeted to those candidates who want to build their career in IT Security domain. The CompTIA Security+ exam verifies that the candidate possesses the fundamental knowledge and proven skills in the area of CompTIA Security Plus.

CompTIA Security+ Exam Summary:

Exam Name CompTIA Security+
Exam Code SY0-401
Exam Price $330 (USD)
Duration 90 mins
Number of Questions 90
Passing Score 750 / 900
Books / Training CompTIA CertMaster for Security+
Schedule Exam CompTIA Marketplace
Sample Questions CompTIA Security+ Sample Questions
Practice Exam CompTIA SY0-401 Certification Practice Exam

CompTIA SY0-401 Exam Syllabus Topics:

Topic Details

Network Security 20%
Implement security configuration parameters on network devices and other technologies.
 1. Firewalls
2. Routers
3. Switches
4. Load balancers
5. Proxies
6. Web security gateways
7. VPN concentrators
8. NIDS and NIPS
  1. Behavior-based
  2. Signature-based
  3. Anomaly-based
  4. Heuristic
9. Protocol analyzers
10. Spam filter
11. UTM security appliances
  1. URL filter
  2. Content inspection
  3. Malware inspection
12. Web application firewall vs. network firewall
13. Application aware devices
  1. Firewalls
  2. IPS
  3. IDS
  4. Proxies
Given a scenario, use secure network administration principles. 1. Rule-based management
2. Firewall rules
2. VLAN management
3. Secure router configuration
4. Access control lists
5. Port security
6. 802.1x
7. Flood guards
8. Loop protection
9. Implicit deny
10. Network separation
11. Log analysis
12. Unified threat management
Explain network design elements and components. 1. DMZ
2. Subnetting
​3. VLAN
4. NAT
5. Remote access
6. Telephony
7. NAC
8. Virtualization
9. Cloud computing
  1. PaaS
  2. SaaS
  3. IaaS
  4. Private
  5. Public
  6. Hybrid
  7. Community
10. Layered security/defense in depth
Given a scenario, implement common protocols and services. 1. Protocols
  1. IPSec
  2. SNMP
  3. SSH
  4. DNS
  5. TLS
  6. SSL
  7. TCP/IP
  8. FTPS
  9. HTTPS
  10. SCP
  11. ICMP
  12. IPv4
  13. IPv6
  14. iSCSI
  15. Fibre Channel
  16. FCoE
  17. FTP
  18. SFTP
  19. TFTP
  20. TELNET
  21. HTTP
  22. NetBIOS
​2. Ports
  1. 21
  2. 22
  3. 25
  4. 53
  5. 80
  6. 110
  7. 139
  8. 143
  9. 443
  10. 3389
3. OSI relevance
Given a scenario, troubleshoot security issues related to wireless networking.
 1. WPA
2. WPA2
3. WEP
4. EAP
5. PEAP
6. LEAP
7. MAC filter
8. Disable SSID broadcast
9. TKIP
10. CCMP
11. Antenna placement
12. Power level controls
13. Captive portals
14. Antenna types
15. Site surveys
16. VPN (over open wireless)

Compliance and Operational Security 18%
Explain the importance of risk related concepts. 1. Control types
  1. Technical
  2. Management
  3. Operational
2. False positives
3. False negatives
4. Importance of policies in reducing risk
Privacy policy
Acceptable use
Security policy
Mandatory vacations
Job rotation
Separation of duties
Least privilege
5. Risk calculation
  1. Likelihood
  2. ALE
  3. Impact
  4. SLE
  5. ARO
  6. MTTR
  7. MTTF
  8. MTBF
​6. Quantitative vs. qualitative
7. Vulnerabilities
8. Threat vectors
9. Probability/threat likelihood
10. Risk avoidance, transference, acceptance, mitigation, deterrence
11. Risks associated with cloud computing and virtualization
12. Recovery time objective and recovery point objective
Summarize the security implications of integrating systems and data with third parties.
 1. On-boarding/off-boarding business partners
2. Social media networks and/or applications
3. Interoperability agreements
  1. SLA
  2. BPA
  3. MOU
  4. ISA
4. Privacy considerations
5. Risk awareness
6. Unauthorized data sharing
7. Data ownership
8. Data backups
9. Follow security policy and procedures
10. Review agreement requirements to verify compliance and performance standards
Given a scenario, implement appropriate risk mitigation strategies. 1. Change management
2. Incident management
3. User rights and permissions reviews
4. Perform routine audits
5. Enforce policies and procedures to prevent data loss or theft
6. Enforce technology controls
  1. Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Given a scenario, implement basic forensic procedures. 1. Order of volatility
2. Capture system image
3. Network traffic and logs
4. Capture video
5. Record time offset
6. Take hashes
7. Screenshots
8. Witnesses
9. Track man hours and expense
10. Chain of custody
11. Big Data analysis
Summarize common incident response procedures. 1. Preparation
2. Incident identification
3. Escalation and notification
4. Mitigation steps
5. Lessons learned
6. Reporting
7. Recovery/reconstitution procedures
8. First responder
9. Incident isolation
  1. Quarantine
  2. Device remova
​10. Data breach
11. Damage and loss control
Explain the importance of security related awareness and training. 1. Security policy training and procedures
2. Role-based training
3. Personally identifiable information
4. Information classification
  1. High
  2. Medium
  3. Low
  4. Confidential
  5. Private
  6. Public
5. Data labeling, handling and disposal
6. Compliance with laws, best practices and standards
7. User habits
  1. Password behaviors
  2. Data handling
  3. Clean desk policies
  4. Prevent tailgating
  5. Personally owned devices
8. New threats and new security trends/alerts
  1. New viruses
  2. Phishing attacks
  3. Zero-day exploits
9. Use of social networking and P2P
10. Follow up and gather training metrics to validate compliance and security posture
Compare and contrast physical security and environmental controls. 1. Environmental controls
  1. HVAC
  2. Fire suppression
  3. EMI shielding
  4. Hot and cold aisles
  5. Environmental monitoring
  6. Temperature and humidity controls
2. Physical security
  1. Hardware locks
  2. Mantraps
  3. Video surveillance
  4. Fencing
  5. Proximity readers
  6. Access list
  7. Proper lighting
  8. Signs
  9. Guards
  10. Barricades
  11. Biometrics
  12. Protected distribution (cabling)
  13. Alarms
  14. Motion detection
3. Control types
  1. Deterrent
  2. Preventive
  3. Detective
  4. Compensating
  5. Technical
  6. Administrative
Summarize risk management best practices. 1. Business continuity concepts
  1. Business impact analysis
  2. Identification of critical systems and components
  3. Removing single points of failure
  4. Business continuity planning and testing
  5. Risk assessment
  6. Continuity of operations
  7. Disaster recovery
  8. IT contingency planning
  9. Succession planning
  10. High availability
  11. Redundancy
  12. Tabletop exercises
2. Fault tolerance
  1. Hardware
  2. RAID
  3. Clustering
  4. Load balancing
  5. Servers
3. Disaster recovery concepts
  1. Backup plans/policies
  2. Backup execution/frequency
  3. Cold site
  4. Hot site
  5. Warm site
Given a scenario, select the appropriate control to meet the goals of security.
 1. Confidentiality
  1. Encryption
  2. Access controls
  3. Steganography
2. Integrity
  1. Hashing
  2. Digital signatures
  3. Certificates
  4. Non-repudiation
3. Availability
  1. Redundancy
  2. Fault tolerance
  3. Patching
4. Safety
  1. Fencing
  2. Lighting
  3. Locks
  4. CCTV
  5. Escape plans
  6. Drills
  7. Escape routes
  8. Testing controls

Threats and Vulnerabilities 20%
Explain types of malware. 1. Adware
2. Virus
3. Spyware
4. Trojan
5. Rootkits
6. Backdoors
7. Logic bomb
8. Botnets
9. Ransomware
10. Polymorphic malware
11. Armored virus
Summarize various types of attacks. 1. Man-in-the-middle
2. DDoS
3. DoS
4. Replay
5. Smurf attack
6. Spoofing
7. Spam
8. Phishing
9. Spim
​10. Vishing
11. Spear phishing
12. Xmas attack
13. Pharming
14. Privilege escalation
15. Malicious insider threat
16. DNS poisoning and ARP poisoning
17 Transitive access
18. Client-side attacks
19. Password attacks
  1. Brute force
  2. Dictionary attacks
  3. Hybrid
  4. Birthday attacks
  5. Rainbow tables
20. Typo squatting/URL hijacking
21. Watering hole attack
Summarize social engineering attacks and the associated effectiveness with each attack.
 1. Shoulder surfing
2. Dumpster diving
3. Tailgating
4. Impersonation
5. Hoaxes
6. Whaling
7. Vishing
8. Principles (reasons for effectiveness)
  1. Authority
  2. Intimidation
  3. Consensus/social proof
  4. Scarcity
  5. Urgency
  6. Familiarity/liking
  7. Trust
Explain types of wireless attacks. 1. Rogue access points
2. Jamming/interference
3. Evil twin
4. War driving
5. Bluejacking
​6. Bluesnarfing
7. War chalking
8. IV attack
9. Packet sniffing
10. Near field communication
11. Replay attacks
12. WEP/WPA attacks
13. WPS attacks
Explain types of application attacks. 1. Cross-site scripting
2. SQL injection
3. LDAP injection
4. XML injection
5. Directory traversal/command injection
6. Buffer overflow
7. Integer overflow
8. Zero-day
9. Cookies and attachments
10. Locally Shared Objects (LSOs)
11. Flash cookies
12. Malicious add-ons
​13. Session hijacking
14. Header manipulation
15. Arbitrary code execution/remote code execution
Analyze a scenario and select the appropriate type of mitigation and deterrent techniques.
 1. Monitoring system logs
  1. Event logs
  2. Audit logs
  3. Security logs
  4. Access logs
2. Hardening
  1. Disabling unnecessary services
  2. Protecting management interfaces and applications
  3. Password protection
  4. Disabling unnecessary accounts
3. Network security
  1. MAC limiting and filtering
  2. 802.1x
  3. Disabling unused interfaces and unused application service ports
  4. Rogue machine detection
4. Security posture
  1. Initial baseline configuration
  2. Continuous security monitoring
  3. Remediation
5. Reporting
  1. Alarms
  2. Alerts
  3. Trends
6. Detection controls vs. prevention controls
  1. IDS vs. IPS
  2. Camera vs. guard
Given a scenario, use appropriate tools and techniques to discover security threats and vulnerabilities.
 1. Interpret results of security assessment tools
2. Tools
  1. Protocol analyzer
  2. Vulnerability scanner
  3. Honeypots
  4. Honeynets
  5. Port scanner
  6. Passive vs. active tools
  7. Banner grabbing
3. Risk calculations
  1. Threat vs. likelihood
4. Assessment types
  1. Risk
  2. Threat
  3. Vulnerability
5. Assessment technique
  1. Baseline reporting
  2. Code review
  3. Determine attack surface
  4. Review architecture
  5. Review designs
Explain the proper use of penetration testing versus vulnerability scanning.
 1. Penetration testing
  1. Verify a threat exists
  2. Bypass security controls
  3. Actively test security controls
  4. Exploiting vulnerabilities
2. Vulnerability scanning
  1. Passively testing security controls
  2. Identify vulnerability
  3. Identify lack of security controls
  4. Identify common misconfigurations
  5. Intrusive vs. non-intrusive
  6. Credentialed vs. non-credentialed
  7. False positive
3. Black box
4. White box
5. Gray box

Application, Data and Host Security 15%
Explain the importance of application security controls and techniques. 1. Fuzzing
2. Secure coding concepts
  1. Error and exception handling
  2. Input validation
3. Cross-site scripting prevention
4. Cross-site Request Forgery (XSRF) prevention
5. Application configuration baseline (proper settings)
6. Application hardening
7. Application patch management
8. NoSQL databases vs. SQL databases
9. Server-side vs. client-side validation
Summarize mobile security concepts and technologies. 1. Device security
  1. Full device encryption
  2. Remote wiping
  3. Lockout
  4. Screen locks
  5. GPS
  6. Application control
  7. Storage segmentation
  8. Asset tracking
  9. Inventory control
  10. Mobile device management
  11. Device access control
  12. Removable storage
  13. Disabling unused features
2. Application security
  1. Key management
  2. Credential management
  3. Authentication
  4. Geo-tagging
  5. Encryption
  6. Application whitelisting
  7. Transitive trust/authentication
3. BYOD concerns
  1. Data ownership
  2. Support ownership
  3. Patch management
  4. Antivirus management
  5. Forensics
  6. Privacy
  7. On-boarding/off-boarding
  8. Adherence to corporate policies
  9. User acceptance
  10. Architecture/infrastructure considerations
  11. Legal concerns
  12. Acceptable use policy
  13. On-board camera/video
Given a scenario, select the appropriate solution to establish host security.
 1. Operating system security and settings
2. OS hardening
3. Anti-malware
  1. Antivirus
  2. Anti-spam
  3. Anti-spyware
  4. Pop-up blockers
4. Patch management
5. Whitelisting vs. blacklisting applications
6. Trusted OS
7. Host-based firewalls
8. Host-based intrusion detection
9. Hardware security
  1. Cable locks
  2. Safe
  3. Locking cabinets
10. Host software baselining
11. Virtualization
  1. Snapshots
  2. Patch compatibility
  3. Host availability/elasticity
  4. Security control testing
  5. Sandboxing
Implement the appropriate controls to ensure data security. 1. Cloud storage
2. SAN
3. Handling Big Data
4. Data encryption
  1. Full disk
  2. Database
  3. Individual files
  4. Removable media
  5. Mobile devices
5. Hardware-based encryption devices
  1. TPM
  2. HSM
  3. USB encryption
  4. Hard drive
6. Data in transit, data at rest, data in use
7. Permissions/ACL
8. Data policies
  1. Wiping
  2. isposing
  3. Retention
  4. Storage
Compare and contrast alternative methods to mitigate security risks in static environments.
 1. Environments
  1. SCADA
  2. Embedded (printer, smart TV, HVAC control)
  3. Android
  4. iOS
  5. Mainframe
  6. Game consoles
  7. In-vehicle computing systems
2. Methods
  1. Network segmentation
  2. Security layers
  3. Application firewalls
  4. Manual updates
  5. Firmware version control
  6. Wrappers
  7. Control redundancy and diversity

Access Control and Identity Management 15%
Compare and contrast the function and purpose of authentication services. 1. RADIUS
2. TACACS+
3.Kerberos
4.LDAP
5. XTACACS
6. SAML
7. Secure LDAP
Given a scenario, select the appropriate authentication, authorization or access control.
 1. Identification vs. authentication vs. authorization
2. Authorization
  1. Least privilege
  2. Separation of duties
  3. ACLs
  4. Mandatory access
  5. Discretionary access
  6. Rule-based access control
  7. Role-based access control
  8. Time of day restrictions
3. Authentication
  1. Tokens
  2. Common access card
  3. Smart card
  4. Multifactor authentication
  5. TOTP
  6. HOTP
  7. CHAP
  8. PAP
  9. Single sign-on
  10. Access control
  11. Implicit deny
  12. Trusted OS
4. Authentication factors
  1. Something you are
  2. Something you have
  3. Something you know
  4. Somewhere you are
  5. Something you do
5. Identification
  1. Biometrics
  2. Personal identification verification card
  3. Username
6. Federation
7. Transitive trust/authentication
Install and configure security controls when performing account management, based on best practices.
 1. Mitigate issues associated with users with multiple account/ roles and/or shared accounts
2. Account policy enforcement
  1. Credential management
  2. Group policy
  3. Password complexity
  4. Expiration
  5. Recovery
  6. Disablement
  7. Lockout
  8. Password history
  9. Password reuse
  10. Password length
  11. Generic account prohibition
3. Group-based privileges
4. User-assigned privileges
5. User access reviews
6. Continuous monitoring

Cryptography 12%
Given a scenario, utilize general cryptography concepts. 1. Symmetric vs. asymmetric
2. Session keys
3. In-band vs. out-of-band key exchange
4. Fundamental differences and encryption methods
  1. Block vs. stream
5. Transport encryption
6. Non-repudiation
7. Hashing
8. Key escrow
9. Steganography
10. Digital signatures
11. Use of proven technologies
12. Elliptic curve and quantum cryptography
13. Ephemeral key
14. Perfect forward secrecy
Given a scenario, use appropriate cryptographic methods. 1. WEP vs. WPA/WPA2 and pre-shared key
2. MD5
3. SHA 
4. RIPEMD
5. AES
6. DES
7. 3DES
8. HMAC
9. RSA
10. Diffie-Hellman
11. RC4
12. One-time pads
13. NTLM
14. NTLMv2
15. Blowfish
16. PGP/GPG
17. Twofish
18. DHE
19. ECDHE
20. CHAP
21. PAP
22. Comparative strengths and performance of algorithms
23. Use of algorithms/protocols with transport encryption
  1. SSL
  2. TLS
  3. IPSec
  4. SSH
  5. HTTPS
24. Cipher suites
  1. Strong vs. weak ciphers
25. Key stretching
  1. PBKDF2
  2. Bcrypt
Given a scenario, use appropriate PKI, certificate management and associated components.
 1. Certificate authorities and digital certificates
  1. CA
  2. CRLs
  3. OCSP
  4. CSR
2. PKI
3. Recovery agent
4. Public key
5. Private key
6. Registration
7. Key escrow
8. Trust models

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