Which set of tools includes Strings, whois, VirusTotal, hashing, and hex editors?

• A. Staging Areas and Data Exfiltration
• B. Shadow AI
• C. Strings, whois, VirusTotal, hashing, hex editors
• D. Session Management - protection

Answer: (C)

These tools form a defender’s toolkit for investigating suspicious artifacts. Strings lets you pull readable text from binaries, revealing clues like embedded URLs or API calls. Whois helps map the origin of infrastructure by showing domain ownership and registration details, which aids in tracing attacker infrastructure. VirusTotal aggregates many antivirus engines and community reports, giving quick insight into whether a file, hash, or URL is known malware. Hashing creates fixed-length fingerprints to verify integrity or compare against known-good baselines or reported malicious hashes. Hex editors let you inspect and edit the raw bytes of a file, essential for low-level analysis and uncovering hidden payloads.

Together, these are the exact kinds of tools a security analyst uses for malware analysis, threat hunting, or incident response. The other choices describe concepts or domains rather than a concrete toolset, so they don’t fit as the set of tools listed.