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Interview question · Cloud, Container & AI Infrastructure Security

How does agentless cloud security scanning (CNAPP) work, and what does it miss compared with an agent on the workload?

Snapshot a disk, read it somewhere else, delete the snapshot. That trick built a product category. Interviewers ask how it works, what permissions it needs, and what it cannot see.

mediumNewPreparation tags: Wiz, Google, Palo Alto NetworksUpdated Nov 2026

Snapshot a disk, read it somewhere else, delete the snapshot. That trick built a product category. Interviewers ask how it works, what permissions it needs, and what it cannot see.

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What would you say before reading the answer?

  1. 01 State the assumptions your answer depends on.
  2. 02 Explain the mechanism and choose a control.
  3. 03 Name a condition that would change your decision.

The worked answer includes an approach, scoring criteria and follow-up questions. Compare the reasoning with your own.

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What if · the follow-ups in this answer

The answer works through 5 follow-ups like an interviewer would

A company adopts an agentless cloud security platform across 300 cloud accounts. On day one it reports 48,000 vulnerabilities and 2,000 misconfigurations.

  1. How did it see inside the VMs without agents?
  2. Where do you start with 48,000 findings?
  3. A crypto-miner ran for six hours on a VM yesterday and the platform did not alert. Why?
  4. What risk did the platform itself add?
  5. How should the platform fit into the cloud security programme?

Each rung has a nudge, a model answer, the principle that carries over and the weak answer to avoid. Premium opens every answer and ladder.

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