🧩 Brain Puzzles

A user calls the helpdesk — they've been locked out of their account after entering the wrong password 3 times. Your company uses on-premises Active Directory. What's the fastest way to restore their access?

At 9:14 AM you get an alert: 3 workstations on the same subnet are encrypting files. The malware appears to be spreading laterally via SMB. You have 5 minutes before more hosts are affected. What is your immediate first action?

Your Azure bill doubled this month. You notice 47 VMs sitting in a 'Stopped' state (not deallocated). What is most likely causing the spike and how do you fix it?

A network switch port is going up and down every 30 seconds, causing connectivity issues for a server. No physical cable issues are visible. What should you check next?

A user in Microsoft 365 can send email but cannot receive any messages from external senders. Internal email works fine. What is the most likely cause?

Remote employees complain the VPN is slow when accessing cloud apps (Office 365, Salesforce). On-premises file shares are fast. Your VPN is configured to route all traffic through HQ. What's the best fix?

During an audit you discover a user account with Domain Admin rights that was created 6 months ago. HR has no record of this employee. The account has logged in 12 times in the past month. What do you do first?

An application returns a 403 Forbidden error when reading from an Azure Blob Storage container. The storage account exists and the container is set to private. What should you check first?

50 users suddenly can't print. The printer shows as online. You can print a test page directly from the printer. The print spooler service on the server was restarted with no fix. What should you check next?

You need to isolate IoT devices so they can access the internet but cannot communicate with any corporate servers. What is the correct network design?

An attacker has obtained a user's credentials via phishing. They repeatedly send MFA push notifications hoping the user approves one to make the prompts stop. What control would have prevented the user from approving?

Users report that files saved to a network share disappear overnight. The share has Authenticated Users with Modify permission. No errors appear in the application logs. What is most likely happening?