Security Plus Best Answer Strategy

What Most Candidates Get Wrong About This

You’re reading every word of every question. You’re second-guessing yourself. You’re trying to pick the “most correct” answer when the exam is designed to have one clearly better choice.

Here’s the trap: Security+ questions aren’t trick questions. They’re not trying to confuse you. But 70% of failing candidates treat them like they are.

The exam doesn’t reward knowledge of obscure edge cases. It rewards decision-making under pressure. It rewards knowing what to do right now in a real security scenario. The difference between a 650 score and a 750 score isn’t more knowledge—it’s faster, better decisions when you have four options and only one that actually works in practice.

The Specific Problem You’re Facing

You’re stuck somewhere in the 650–710 range. You know the material. You’ve done practice tests. But on test day, questions that should be easy suddenly feel ambiguous. You pick B, then wonder if C was better. You second-guess yourself. You run out of time on the last 15 questions. Your score report shows uneven performance across domains.

The issue isn’t knowledge gaps. It’s strategy gaps.

The CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) exam has 90 questions in 90 minutes. That’s 60 seconds per question if you allocate time perfectly. But you won’t. You’ll spend 90 seconds on three hard questions and 30 seconds on five easy ones. The candidates who score 750+ don’t know more than candidates who score 680. They just know how to spend their time better and eliminate wrong answers faster.

A Step-By-Step Approach That Works

Step 1: Read the question stem first. Not the options.

Before you look at A, B, C, D—read only the question itself. What is it actually asking? Is it asking for what you should do, what might happen, what is required, or what is a best practice?

Example scenario: “A company’s HR department receives an email claiming to be from IT requesting password reset verification. An employee forwards the email to the security team. Which of the following best describes this incident type?”

The question is asking for incident classification, not response. That’s crucial. Wrong candidates are thinking “how do I respond to phishing.” Right candidates are thinking “what is this called.”

The answer is social engineering or phishing. Not credential harvesting (too specific), not malware distribution (wrong attack vector).

You saved 20 seconds because you knew exactly what was being asked before looking at options.

Step 2: Eliminate two answers immediately.

On most Security+ questions, two answers are obviously wrong. Your job is to find them and cross them out mentally.

Same question: “An email claiming to be from IT requesting password reset verification.”

“Malware deployment” — No malware involved. Eliminate it.
“DDoS attack attempt” — Wrong attack type entirely. Eliminate it.

Now you’re choosing between two options, not four. Your odds just doubled.

Step 3: Read the remaining two options word by word.

This is where most candidates fail. They skim. They see “phishing” and pick it without reading the full option text.

A real exam might say:

“Phishing attack targeting general users for credential harvesting”
“Social engineering attack using email impersonation”

Both are correct concepts, but one might be more specific to what the question is asking. Read the justification, not just the label.

Step 4: Pick the answer that solves the actual problem, not the theoretical one.

Security+ isn’t abstract. It’s about what works in real security operations.

Example: “A security team wants to reduce the number of weak passwords across the organization. Which control is most effective?”

Candidates debate:

Mandatory password resets every 30 days
Password complexity requirements (minimum 12 characters, special characters)
Hardware token authentication

In practice, password complexity beats mandatory resets. Resets annoy users and cause them to write passwords on sticky notes. Hardware tokens are better but more expensive and harder to deploy organization-wide. The best answer is the one that actually gets adopted and actually works.

That’s the Security+ mindset. Best practice means “what security professionals actually do when they have real constraints.”

What To Focus On (And What To Skip)

Focus on these high-leverage topics:

Authentication and access control: This is 20%+ of the exam. Know the difference between authentication factors. Know why MFA beats single-factor. Know when to use RBAC vs. attribute-based access control. Practice 20 questions on this alone.
Threat identification: You need speed here. See a scenario with suspicious network behavior, lateral movement, persistence mechanisms—you should know if it’s malware, APT activity, or insider threat within 10 seconds.
Incident response steps: The order matters. Containment before eradication. Eradication before recovery. Know this cold. One question might ask about preserving evidence; another might ask about stopping active attacks. Same incident, different priority based on the question.
Encryption and cryptography basics: Not deep math. Just: when to use symmetric vs. asymmetric, why TLS matters, what hashing does vs. encryption. Five essential concepts that show up repeatedly.

Skip these time-wasters:

Memorizing every cipher name. You don’t need to know the difference between Blowfish and Twofish.
Historical attack details. You don’t need to know what Heartbleed affected. You need to know the concept (buffer overflow, TLS vulnerability).
Perfect scoring on domains you already own. If you’re scoring 85%+ on Identity and Access Management, spend less time there.

Your Next Move

Do this today:

Get a realistic practice test (CompTIA official or well-reviewed third-party). Not a quiz. A full 90-question, timed test.
Set a timer for 60 minutes. Stop at question 60. You’re not trying to finish. You’re training your brain to decide faster.
Review only the questions you missed. Not the ones you got right. For each wrong answer, write down: “What was I actually being asked?” and “Why is the correct answer better than what I picked?”
Identify your elimination weakness. Do you struggle more with eliminating the first two wrong answers or choosing between the final two? That’s your target.
Schedule your retake for 2 weeks out. Not sooner. You need time to drill the weak spots, not time to panic-cram.

You’re close. Most candidates at 680 pass their next attempt with strategy fixes alone. The knowledge is there. The decision-making process isn’t sharp yet.

Fix the process. The score follows.