ITPEC FE Subject B October 2025 Question 17
From the answer group below, select the most appropriate combination of answers to be inserted into A and B in the description.
Company P is a small business that recently formed a data analytics team to perform business data analytics using internal business data. This data is stored on a database system configured with a synchronous (real-time) mirror. The database is backed up regularly. The database servers and IT infrastructure are maintained by a third-party IT support provider.
A junior data analyst was mistakenly granted database superuser privileges to the production database. This decision was made due to a lack of security understanding in the company. The data analyst, unfamiliar with the sensitivity of their access level, was tasked with executing a series of routine database queries and migrations. However, due to an error in a script, the data analyst accidentally ran a command that dropped critical tables, resulting in a significant loss of data. This caused the company’s internal applications to stop working.
The company engaged their IT support provider, and the database system was quickly put back in service by A. To prevent this incident from happening again, their IT support provider recommended that the company implement B.
Answer group
Explanation
A: restoring from backups, B: principle of least privilege — only a backup still holds the dropped tables, and the root cause was a junior analyst holding superuser rights.
Blank A: the tables were dropped by a valid command. A synchronous mirror copies every change in real time, so the drop reached the mirror at once and it holds the same damaged database. Restarting the server reloads that same database, still without the tables. Only the regular backups contain the lost data.
Blank B: the description names the cause: the analyst was mistakenly granted superuser privileges, far more than routine queries and migrations need. The principle of least privilege gives each user only the rights their task requires, so a script error by that user could not drop critical tables.
Answer (f)
Why not others:
- •(a), (b) and (c) — restarting the server does not bring back tables that were dropped; the data is gone from the database itself
- •(g), (h) and (i) — the synchronous mirror replicated the drop immediately, so switching to it gives the same missing tables
- •(d) — encryption keeps data from people who should not read it; the analyst was an authorised user, and an encrypted table can still be dropped
- •(e) — multi-factor authentication proves who is logging in; the analyst was who they claimed to be, the problem was what the account was allowed to do
Key rule: Mirroring and replication protect against hardware failure, not against logical errors such as a dropped table; those need backups, and misuse by a legitimate user is prevented by limiting that user's privileges.
Security Scenarios · AI-written, may contain errors
This question comes from an official ITPEC past paper. ITPEC Practice is an independent study tool and is not affiliated with ITPEC. See the official FE past-paper collection or Report an issue.