______ requires multiple countermeasures to be defeated for an attack to succeed.

• A. Defense in depth
• B. Weakest link analysis
• C. Both A and B
• D. Neither A nor B

Answer: (A)

Defense in depth is about layering protective measures so an attacker must defeat several independent controls to succeed. In practice, security is built across multiple domains—perimeter, network, host, application, data, and policy—with each layer providing a separate hurdle. Because these layers are distinct, breaching one does not guarantee access; the attacker must overcome multiple countermeasures, making a successful attack much harder and reducing the chance of a breach from a single failure. The idea isn’t about a single weak point but about ensuring that even if one layer is compromised, others still stand in the way.

Weakest link analysis, by contrast, focuses on identifying and fixing the single most vulnerable point, not on requiring an attacker to bypass several defenses. Combining both concepts isn’t accurate because they describe different approaches to security; defense in depth stands alone as the scenario described in the statement.