SKILL BENCHMARK

CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701): General Security Concepts Literacy (Beginner Level)

  • 17m
  • 17 questions
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The General Security Concepts Literacy (Beginner Level) benchmark measures your understanding of the foundational elements of cybersecurity. You will be evaluated on your knowledge of the core principles that guide security practices, such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability (the CIA triad), and the types of security controls used to protect assets. A learner who scores high on this benchmark demonstrates literacy in many areas of this domain and understands the essential principles and policies that form the bedrock of information security, including the identification of security goals.

Topics covered

  • compare authentication, authorization, and accounting
  • compare authorization models
  • compare control categories like technical, managerial, operational, and physical
  • compare control types including preventive, deterrent, detective, corrective, compensating, and directive
  • compare deception technologies such as honeypots, honeynets, honeyfiles, and honeytokens
  • define change management technical implications like allow lists, deny lists, restricted activities, downtime, service restart, application restart, legacy applications, and dependencies
  • define non-repudiation
  • define preventative physical security controls like bollards, access control vestibule, access badges/cards, fencing, gates, mantraps, and security guards
  • outline change management business processes including approval, ownership, stakeholders, impact analysis, test results, backout plan, maintenance window, and standard operating procedures
  • outline detective physical security controls like video surveillance, lighting, and infrared, pressure, microwave, and ultrasonic sensors
  • outline how to authenticate people
  • outline how to authenticate systems
  • outline the use of gap analysis in the context of security
  • provide an overview of the CIA Triad which includes confidentiality, integrity, and availability
  • provide an overview of the Zero Trust control plane including adaptive identity, threat scope reduction, policy-driven access control, and Policy Administrator
  • provide an overview of the Zero Trust data plane which includes implicit trust zones, subject/system, and Policy Enforcement Points
  • understand the importance of comprehensive documentation and version control