Information Security Management Examination (SG) | Section A Questions on AI Attacks, Email Authentication, and SBOM 10

The user directly supplied an instruction intended to override the AI system's existing instructions, making this direct prompt injection. Do not rely solely on screening input. Restrict the functions and privileges available to the AI, and route important actions such as approval through deterministic business rules or human confirmation. Data poisoning targets training data and therefore occurs at a different stage.

When an AI reads a web page or other resource controlled by an attacker and follows instructions embedded in it, the event is indirect prompt injection. TLS can help authenticate the peer and protect the connection, but it does not prove that page content is a safe instruction for an AI. Separate external content from trusted instructions, minimize agent privileges, and independently confirm actions such as external transmission.

The attacker inserted or altered part of the training data to create specific behavior in the trained model, so this is data poisoning. Unlike an evasion attack that supplies a crafted input to an already deployed model, the point of attack here is the retraining stage. The organization should control data provenance, integrity, and label-change history and compare model behavior before and after an update.

A crafted input similar to the original was supplied to a deployed model to change its prediction, so this is an evasion attack using an adversarial example. Data poisoning changes data during training; no retraining data was changed here. Operational safeguards can combine input-anomaly monitoring, model evaluation, and additional review of decisions with significant business consequences.

SPF uses a policy published in DNS to check whether the connecting host is authorized to send using a domain such as the MAIL FROM domain. DKIM attaches a cryptographic signature identifying a signing domain, and the receiver uses a public key to verify the signed portions. Alignment with the visible From domain and policy for failures are areas addressed by DMARC.

DMARC requires not only successful SPF or DKIM authentication but also alignment between the authenticated domain and the domain in the visible From field. Here, SPF passed for an unrelated attacker-controlled domain and there is no aligned DKIM signature, so DMARC cannot pass. Actual disposition follows the sender's published DMARC policy together with the receiver's processing decisions.

An SBOM is an inventory of software components, so it provides a starting point for checking which products contain an affected component and version. The organization can then examine how it is used and prioritize fixes, mitigations, and notifications. The existence of an SBOM does not prove that software is vulnerability-free, and the inventory and vulnerability monitoring must remain current.

Under shared responsibility, a provider may protect infrastructure and portions of a service, but responsibility for customer data, identities, permissions, and sharing settings does not disappear. Because the exact division varies by service model and contract, it must be made explicit and the customer-side controls must be operated. A provider's certification does not automatically prevent customer misconfiguration.

Manually entered passwords and OTPs can be captured on a fake site and relayed by an attacker. WebAuthn/FIDO2 binds authentication to the verifier domain, helping prevent a valid response from being produced for a fraudulent verifier. Deployment also requires safe authenticator enrollment and revocation and a secure account-recovery process for lost devices.

Ransomware may encrypt or delete backups reachable from production, so a separated copy, such as an offline backup, should be maintained. A job-success record is insufficient; regular testing must show that complete data can actually be restored within the required time. Backups also do not replace intrusion prevention or investigation of possible data exfiltration.