Annex A Controls Practice Questions for the Lead Auditor Exam
Practice questions on the Annex A controls. They test what the examination tests, which is not whether you can recite the control list but whether you can put a piece of evidence against the right control number and defend the choice.
Practice questions on the Annex A controls. They test what the examination tests, which is not whether you can recite the control list but whether you can put a piece of evidence against the right control number and defend the choice.
The organisations in the worked examples on this page are invented, and so are the examples. They show how a finding against a control is built and graded; they are not a list of the findings you should expect to encounter.
These questions are written for this page. Nothing on it is drawn from any examination paper.
If you have just read the four ISO 27001 Annex A theme pages
Several of these questions test points those pages make, which is deliberate: this set is the check that the reasoning stuck, not a cold mock. If you find an answer obvious because you read it an hour ago, that is not the same as being able to reach it from evidence. The test is whether you can say why each of the other options fails.
What these ISO 27001 Annex A questions are testing
Almost every Annex A question in an examination reduces to one skill: reading a piece of evidence and naming the control it belongs to, when two or three controls sit close enough together to look plausible. That is why so many of the questions below offer you neighbouring controls rather than obviously wrong ones.
Three habits do most of the work.
Read the control title to the end. A.7.13 is equipment maintenance, not equipment; A.5.16 is identity management, not access. Half a title read is half a control.
Find the limb that failed. A.8.9 asks for configurations to be established, documented, implemented, monitored and reviewed. A control with five verbs can be four-fifths performed, and the finding has to name the verb that was not.
Ask what the evidence would have to show. If it is about a rule, look in A.5. If it is about whether the technology enforces the rule, look in A.8. If it is about an arrangement covering a workforce, look in A.6.
Want structured preparation?One year of LMS access and HD recordings come with the course.
The ISO 27001 Annex A practice questions
Looking for an approved provider?3FOLD TRAINING is a CQI and IRCA Approved Training Partner, ATP 6039853.
Where the marks go on ISO 27001 Annex A questions
The examination is scenario-led in its later domains, and Annex A questions rarely arrive as definitions. They arrive as evidence, and the mark is for the attribution and the reasoning behind it rather than for recognising a control name. Two consequences follow for how you revise.
Learn the neighbours, not the list. Knowing that A.5.19 to A.5.23 are the supplier controls is worth little; knowing which of the five each piece of evidence belongs to is worth a great deal. The same is true of A.5.29 against A.5.30, of the A.5.15 to A.5.18 access rules against their A.8.2 to A.8.5 enforcement, and of A.6.3 against Clauses 7.2 and 7.3.
And practise saying why every option you did not choose is wrong. If you can defeat each of them out loud, the answer is secure. If you can only say that one option feels right, you have recognised a pattern rather than applied a requirement, and a differently worded question will catch you.
Frequently asked questions about ISO 27001 Annex A practice questions
How many Annex A questions are in the ISO 27001 Lead Auditor exam?
The paper is not divided by annex theme, so there is no fixed count. Annex A material appears wherever a scenario turns on a control, which in practice means most heavily in the domains dealing with conducting the audit and with findings.
Do I need to memorise all 93 ISO 27001 Annex A controls?
You need to be able to navigate them. A.5 has 37, A.6 has 8, A.7 has 14 and A.8 has 34, and knowing the groups within each theme is more useful than reciting titles, because the questions ask you to choose between neighbours rather than to recall a name.
Is ISO 27001 Annex A open in the exam?
What you may take into an examination is set by the examination rules issued to you before the course, and by the regulations for the format you are sitting. Check those rather than assume, and check them early enough to revise accordingly.
Should I cite the control or the clause in an ISO 27001 audit answer?
Whichever the evidence is about. If the requirement that failed is a control, cite the control. If it is a management system requirement, cite the sub-clause. Where the evidence supports both, say so — that is a stronger answer than choosing one and ignoring the other.
Are these ISO 27001 Annex A questions the same as the ones in the exam?
No. They are written for this page to test the same skills, and no examination question is reproduced anywhere on this site.
The other ISO 27001 Annex A themes
The four theme pages set out what each group of controls requires and what evidence it produces:
the A.5 organizational controls
the A.8 technological controls
For the management system requirements behind them, the clause map for lead auditors covers Clauses 4 to 10.
3FOLD TRAINING is a CQI and IRCA Approved Training Partner, ATP number 6039853. Its ISO 27001 Lead Auditor training course is the CQI and IRCA Certified ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Lead Auditor (Information Security Management Systems) Training Course. The course identification number is 2889. Both the partner approval and the course certification are on 3FOLD TRAINING’s Approved Training Partner record, and any provider’s certified courses can be looked up in CQI and IRCA’s own directory of certified courses and approved training partners. The course page carries the schedule and what the course includes. If you would rather ask a person first, use the course enquiry form.
Booking a PR373 course? See the schedule, trainers and what’s included.
Leave a reply