Send us Fan Mail

495 organizations woke up and could not get to their servers. Railways. A prefectural police force. A food logistics company that could not receive or ship goods. All on the same cloud provider, all locked out at once.

Then the provider said this, in writing: "At this time, our view is that data restoration will only be possible from backup data held by the customer themselves."

Read that again. You are getting your data back from your own backups — and for some of those customers, the backups were sitting in the same cloud that had just gone dark.

This episode is CISSP Domain 7.10 — implement recovery strategies — and it is the subdomain people assume they already know, because everybody has backups. Almost nobody has asked the second question, which is what else has to be working for them to reach those backups.

You keep a spare key to your house. Smart. The only question that matters is where you keep it, and inside the house is a backup you cannot get to on the one day you need it.

We cover RTO versus RPO versus MTD — which number means what, and which control actually satisfies each one, because candidates swap the first two constantly. Backup storage strategies across onsite, offsite, cloud, air-gapped and immutable, and why "offsite" is not a distance. Recovery site tiers from cold through hot, sized by RTO, plus the two nobody revises. Reciprocal agreements and the three ways they fail. Resource capacity agreements, and why a hot site contract can still leave you in a queue. Why high availability is not a recovery strategy, and why synchronous replication copies corruption as faithfully as it copies good data. Shared fate, including the version everybody misses — shared credentials. And the untested restore, where your real recovery time actually comes from.

Then four practice questions set inside the same scenario. Question three is the one that catches well-prepared candidates, and I say so before I ask it.

Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox. Don't miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success.

Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!

Source: Cybernews, "Japanese cyberattack hits 495 organizations, railways and police" — https://cybernews.com/security/japanese-cloud-cyberattack-railways-police-495-organizations-idcf/

Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success.

Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!

Send us Fan Mail

An AI agent gets blocked by access controls, then calmly finds another way in anyway and that is the wake-up call. I use a recent Hacker News story about an automated agent bypassing an Australian government health portal to dig into what CISSP Domain 6.2 is really testing: not your ability to recite a list of techniques, but your ability to manage authorization, scope, and rules of engagement so a “test” does not turn into an intrusion.

We break down why the portal controls could still be “working as configured” while the outcome is still unacceptable, especially when the client is autonomous and treats refusal as an obstacle instead of an answer. I map the scenario to a simple locksmith model: the same tools and actions can be legitimate with a signed work order, or criminal without one. From there, we get concrete about what must be written down, including in-bounds systems, forbidden actions like writing or persistence, stop conditions, evidence handling, time windows, and a named human point of contact on both sides.

Then we translate the messy reality into clear exam thinking: vulnerability assessment versus penetration testing, black box versus white box versus gray box, and the commonly missed tools like misuse case testing, synthetic transactions, coverage analysis, and interface testing. I also clarify the difference between a penetration test, a red team engagement, and breach and attack simulation, so you can match the method to the question. We close with CISSP-style practice questions that reinforce triage priorities, engagement selection, and how to extend policy and accountability to AI agents acting on your organisation’s behalf.

If you want more Domain 6.2 clarity and fewer distractor traps, subscribe, share this with a study partner, and leave a review so more CISSP candidates can find the show.

Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success.

Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!

Send us Fan Mail

A stolen password is annoying. A stolen session token can be invisible, valid, and instantly profitable. Today we dig into a real warning sign from Okta threat intelligence: infostealer malware lifted live session tokens from browsers, and thousands of Google sessions were still working weeks later. No MFA prompt. No brute force. Just a legitimate session replayed by the wrong person, with real dollar damage through unauthorized usage and credits.

We use that story to sharpen the CISSP Domain 5.6 mindset around implementing authentication systems and, more importantly, validating tokens after sign-in. I walk through why authentication and token validation are different security functions with different “owners,” why forcing password resets does not invalidate an attacker’s existing session, and what a token signature does and does not prove. Then we get practical: audience claim checks, expiration and token lifetime ceilings, scope validation, and why “skipping the audience check breaks nothing in testing” is exactly how breaches scale.

We also cover the controls that shrink risk when you cannot reliably detect theft: short access token lifetimes, narrow scoping to limit blast radius, hardware-backed signing key storage, and automated key rotation with defined crypto periods. To lock it in, we run through four CISSP-style questions and explain the traps so you can answer like a risk-focused manager, not a spec reciter.

Subscribe for more CISSP exam training, share this with a teammate who owns IAM, and leave a review so more candidates can find the show.

Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success.

Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!