Last Attempt 300-220 Questions

The correct answer isit reveals operational discipline and intent. Attribution relies heavily on understandinghow attackers think and operate, not just the tools they use.

Operational discipline—such as careful reconnaissance, avoiding noisy exploitation, and operating during business hours—is ahuman behavioral pattern. These patterns are far more stable than infrastructure or malware and often correlate strongly with specific threat actor groups.

Option A and D focus on tooling, which changes frequently. Option B relates to persistence, not attribution.

Threat intelligence professionals use operational characteristics to distinguish between opportunistic criminals and advanced adversaries. Business-hour activity, careful lateral movement, and deliberate escalation often indicatetargeted intrusions, espionage, or financially motivated but sophisticated actors.

This information helps analysts align observed behavior with known threat actor profiles, improving attribution confidence. Thus, optionCis correct.

The correct answer isdocument findings and operationalize detections. In Cisco’s threat hunting methodology, confirmation of malicious activity isnot the end of the hunt.

The most critical next step is to:

Document attacker behavior

Identify detection gaps

Create or improve SIEM, EDR, or NDR detection rules

This ensures the organization does not repeatedly rediscover the same threat. Options C and D are incident response and communication activities, not threat hunting lifecycle steps. Option A skips the crucial improvement phase.

TheCBRTHD blueprintstrongly emphasizes:

Continuous improvement

Feedback loops

Detection engineering

By operationalizing findings, the SOC increases maturity and forces adversaries to change tactics.

Therefore,Option Bis correct.

The correct answers areUse of Windows Remote Management (C)andUse of tools and commands to connect to remote shares (E). Both are core mechanisms attackers leverage forlateral movementafter gaining valid credentials through techniques such as pass-the-hash or pass-the-ticket.

Windows Remote Management (WinRM) is a legitimate administrative service used for remote command execution and system management. However, attackers frequently abuse WinRM to move laterally by executing commands on remote endpoints using stolen credentials. From a threat hunting perspective, abnormal WinRM usage—such as execution outside normal administrative hours, from unusual source hosts, or by non-administrative user accounts—is a strong indicator of lateral movement activity.

Similarly, the use of tools and commands to connect to remote shares (such as net use, wmic, SMB-based access, or mounting administrative shares like C$) is a classic lateral movement technique. Attackers use remote shares to transfer tools, stage payloads, and execute malware across systems. Monitoring these activities at the endpoint level helps identify suspicious authentication attempts, unexpected share access, and abnormal file transfers.

Option A (runas) relates more to privilege escalation than lateral movement. Option B is specific to Linux privilege persistence and is not relevant to endpoint lateral movement hunting in this context. Option D (scheduled task creation) is primarily associated with persistence rather than movement between systems.

By monitoring WinRM activity and remote share usage, security teams gain visibility intocredential-based movement, which remains one of the most common and dangerous attacker behaviors in enterprise environments. Effective lateral movement hunting focuses onhow credentials are used, not just how they are stolen.

The correct answer isreduction in attacker dwell time. Dwell time measures how long an attacker remains undetected in the environment.

As threat hunting maturity increases:

Detection becomes faster

Behavioral coverage improves

Attackers are identified earlier in the kill chain

Metrics such as alert volume or blocked IPs (Options A and D) do not reflect effectiveness and may even indicate excessive noise. Option B measures inputs, not outcomes.

Cisco’sCBRTHD blueprintfocuses onoutcomes, not activity. Reduced dwell time demonstrates:

Effective hunting

Better visibility

Stronger detection engineering

This metric directly correlates with reduced breach impact and improved resilience.

Therefore,Option Cis the correct and Cisco-aligned answer.