Security Breaches and Lessons Questions

Study of real world security incidents, breach case studies, and historical failures in cryptography and system design. Topics include common attack chains and kill chain methodology, threat actor techniques such as lateral movement, privilege escalation, persistence, and data exfiltration, and supply chain and implementation weaknesses. Also covers famous cryptographic and protocol failures, for example weak randomness, algorithm collisions, padding oracle and memory safety exploits, and how they arose. Candidates should be able to explain root causes, detection and forensics approaches, incident response and mitigation strategies, lessons learned that changed best practices, and how to apply those lessons to secure design, threat modeling, testing, and operational controls.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

A production ML service currently logs full request payloads and model inputs to a centralized logging cluster for debugging. Explain the privacy and security risks introduced by this practice, list at least three mitigations (technical and operational), and discuss trade-offs between observability and data minimization.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

You must architect a policy and automated checks to prevent insecure randomness usage across many ML codebases (e.g., developers using random.seed, numpy.random for cryptographic purposes). Define a clear policy, static and dynamic detection rules, remediation patterns, and a migration/enforcement plan for legacy repositories.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

As a staff ML engineer leading the post-mortem after a third-party dependency allowed remote code execution in production, draft the key sections your report will include, the remediation timeline you would propose, and specific procurement/vendor-risk process changes to reduce recurrence across the organization.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Implement a simple Python function detect_large_transfers(logs, threshold_mb) that scans an unsorted list of network transfer events (each event is a dict like {'timestamp': '2025-01-02T15:04:05Z', 'bytes_sent': 12345, 'source': 'node-23'}) and returns all events that exceed threshold_mb (in megabytes). The function should be O(n) time and handle missing fields gracefully.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a continuous monitoring system that uses statistical baselines to detect stealthy data exfiltration via model outputs (for example, model memorization exploited by repeated probing). List features to monitor, techniques to reduce false positives, model architectures that are more/less prone to memorization, and how to integrate alerts with SIEM and automated response.

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