AP Cybersecurity Unit 2 Lesson 4 Exercise 2

Unit 2 • 2.4 • Exercise 2

Exercise 2 — Designing Delmar’s Monitoring Plan

3 parts, 24 points — Place cameras, sensors and one guard post at Delmar Applied Optics

Score: 0 / 24Complete all 3 parts
Client Organization
Delmar Applied Optics — Monitoring Design Review

You are still on the Xtensr Research Labs physical security team, and the six controls you recommended for the acquired Delmar building are now installed: the finished-lens vault has a card reader, a door contact, an access control vestibule and an interior motion sensor; the engineering file server has moved into a locked cabinet; the badge controller sits in a locked enclosure with a tamper switch; the reception PC has port blockers and a privacy screen; the testing bay has a UPS; and the ground-floor optics bay has flood barriers with the optics racked above grade. The $150,000 capital budget is spent. What Delmar does not have is a monitoring plan: the exterior and the below-grade optics bay carry no funded detection at all. A small operating budget now covers two cameras, a handful of motion sensors and one security officer. Priya Raman and Curtis Okafor both have opinions about how to spend it.

Part 1
Scenario: What Would This Camera Capture?
The CISO proposes the two cameras go here. Camera A: above the single door off the main corridor that is the only way into the finished-lens vault. Camera B: outside, on the loading dock roll-up door. Priya Raman objects: “Both of those are narrow little views. Put Camera B on a pole over the parking lot instead — then we can see every person who comes on site, which is far more coverage for the same money.”
8 points
1a. For each proposed camera, state what an adversary would be captured doing and how that record helps after an incident. Then explain why Priya’s parking-lot view is not an acceptable substitute for either one.
Key terms: ingress, egress, point of entry, propped, forced, carried out, after-incident, which door, wide view, presence, adversary doing, moment of entry, visual coverage, identifiable, much ground
Model Response: Camera A sits on the vault’s only point of entry, so it records both ingress and egress. An adversary is captured at the moment of entry — badging in on a credential that is not theirs, or slipping through behind an authorized employee — and captured again on the way out, so the footage shows what was carried out of the vault and by whom. That is exactly the record an after-incident investigation needs: which door, which person, what left the room. Camera B does the same job for the exterior: it records the roll-up door being forced or quietly propped open for a later entry, with the adversary’s face and hands in frame at the moment of entry. Why the parking lot fails: a wide view captures presence, not action. It establishes that somebody was on site, but not which door they used, whether they badged at all, or what they were carrying when they left — and at that distance a face is not identifiable, so it does not even establish who. B.1 asks you to weigh visual coverage, angle and tamper resistance by asking what a camera in that spot would capture an adversary doing; a camera earns its position by that test, not by how much ground it covers.
Part 2
Scenario: Where Motion Sensors Belong
Motion sensors are the cheapest item on the list, so Priya wants one in every room — reception, the main corridor, both stairwells, the vault, the server cabinet alcove and the optics bay — arguing that more coverage is strictly better. When you raise false alarms she adds a second point: “If a sensor goes off a lot, that proves it is doing its job. And if the alarms really are a nuisance, we just turn the sensitivity down on all of them until they settle.”
8 points
2a. Rebut both of Priya’s claims. Your two answers must fail for different reasons, and you must say where at Delmar the sensors do belong.
Key terms: unexpected, high-traffic, high traffic, false alarm, ignore, business hours, after hours, after-hours, sensitivity, real intrusion, desensitiz, few authorized, hardware works, schedul, legitimate movement, as detection
Model Response: Claim 1 fails on placement. A motion sensor detects only where traffic is unexpected. Reception, the main corridor and the stairwells are high-traffic space during the day, so a sensor there fires on legitimate movement all day long; the resulting stream of false alarms teaches whoever receives them to ignore the alerts, and a sensor whose alerts are ignored has stopped functioning as detection even though the hardware works perfectly. The sensors belong where few authorized people ever go: the locked cabinet alcove holding the engineering file server, the vault interior, and the below-grade optics bay, which today has no detection of any kind. Claim 2 fails on the remedy, which is a different error. Alarm frequency is not evidence of effectiveness — it is usually evidence of bad placement — and dropping the sensitivity across every sensor does not remove the false alarms so much as it buries the real intrusion along with them; you cannot desensitize your way to a working detection control. The fix is placement plus scheduling: put the corridor and stairwell sensors on a schedule so they are live only outside business hours, when any movement they see really is unexpected, and leave the server alcove, the vault and the optics bay live around the clock. Claim 1 is an error about where; claim 2 is an error about how.
Part 3
Scenario: The Patrol Post and the Zero-Incident Argument
The single officer has been assigned to patrol the exterior and the below-grade optics bay rather than stand at the lobby entrance. Four months later nothing has been reported, and Curtis Okafor wants to cut the monitoring line item: “Six controls in, four months, zero incidents. The building is covered. Drop the officer and the camera feeds and put the money back into operations.”
8 points
3a. A patrolling post and a stationary post trade off differently. State what the patrol gives up, what it buys, and what the patrol design must do about the weakness.
Key terms: time pressure, unpredictab, between passes, unwatched, randomiz, interval, continuous, gap, door contact, deterrent, route, plan around
3b. Explain why Curtis’s four-months-no-incidents argument is the wrong kind of evidence for the conclusion he draws.
Key terms: no record, incomplete, absence of, wrong kind, able to detect, no detection, preventive, prevention, different function, not proof, leave no, not evidence, attempted
Model Response: 3a. A patrolling officer buys time pressure. The officer is harder to plan around than a fixed post because the route is unpredictable, so an adversary cannot know how long a break-in has before somebody walks around the corner, and that uncertainty is a deterrent in its own right. What the patrol gives up is continuous coverage: unlike a stationary post, every point on the route sits unwatched between passes, and a fast attack on the loading dock can start and finish inside a single interval. The design has to answer that directly — randomize both the route and the interval so the gap cannot be timed, and cover the gap in time with a control that watches while the officer is on the far side of the building, such as a door contact on the optics bay entrance, the one funded area with no detection on it at all.

3b. Curtis is using the wrong kind of evidence. Four months with nothing reported is not proof that nothing was attempted; it is a count of what Delmar was able to detect, and Delmar’s detection coverage is incomplete by design — the exterior and the below-grade bay have no detection funded on them, so an intrusion there would leave no record for anyone to report. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence when you already know the sensor set has holes in it. It also confuses two different functions: five of the six installed controls are preventive, and prevention and detection do different work — a lock, an enclosure or a flood barrier can stop an attack while producing no record that one ever happened. Cutting the officer and the feeds would remove the only part of the plan that generates a record at all, which is precisely what an after-incident investigation runs on.
Total Points
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