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Microsoft SC-401 Exam Questions
A fair amount of the SC-401 material circulating online is recycled SC-400 content with a new number on the front, and it is easy to see why: the two exams share a portal and half a vocabulary. They do not share a syllabus. Microsoft retired SC-400 on 31 May 2025, and the outline behind Administering Information Security in Microsoft 365 is built around information protection, data loss prevention and retention, and insider risk, with protection for data used by AI services written into it. The SC-401 exam questions below are free to answer here, come from the bank our candidates prepare with, and are written against Microsoft's current skills outline rather than its predecessor. If your exam is booked, work a set now and check the result against the three skill areas below. If you are still planning, the revision timeline shows what Microsoft has changed and when.
| Exam name | Administering Information Security in Microsoft 365 |
| Exam code | SC-401 |
| Certification | Information Security Administrator Associate |
| Practice questions in our bank | 223 |
| Questions on the real exam | 40 |
| Time allowed | 100 minutes |
| Passing score | 700 on a scale of 1000 |
| Exam fee | USD 165 (Prices vary by country or region) |
| Retake policy | 24 hours after a first fail, 14 days between later attempts, 5 attempts per 12 months |
| Certification validity | 1 year, renewed free through an online assessment on Microsoft Learn |
| Languages | English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish |
| Replaces | SC-400, Information Protection and Compliance Administrator, retired 31 May 2025 |
SC-401 Exam Practice Questions
Free samples from our SC-401 bank, grouped the way Microsoft's outline is: protection first, then loss prevention and retention, then risk and alerts.
Your company has Microsoft 365 E5 subscription and plans to use Microsoft Purview Advanced Message Encryption.
Each product group at your company must show a distinct product logo in encrypted emails instead of the standard Microsoft 365 logo.
What should you do to create the branding templates?
Correct Answer: C
You have a Microsoft 365 E5 subscription that contains two users named User! and User2. The subscription has a data loss prevention (DLP) policy named Policy 1.
User2 sends an outbound message that generates a false positive for Policy1.
You need to ensure that User1 can download the message that generated the alert The solution must follow the principle of least privilege.
To which role group should you add User1?
Correct Answer: A
You implement Microsoft 365 Endpoint data loss prevention (Endpoint DLP).
You have computers that run Windows 11 and have Microsoft 365 Apps installed. The computers are joined to a Microsoft Entra tenant.
You need to ensure that Endpoint DLP policies can protect content on the computers.
Solution: You enroll the computers in Microsoft Intune.
Does this meet the goal?
Correct Answer: B
You have a Microsoft 365 E5 subscription that contains 500 Windows devices.
You plan to deploy Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management for AI (DSPM for AI).
You need to ensure that you can monitor user activities on third-party generative AI websites.
Which two prerequisites should you complete for DSPM for AI? Each correct answer presents part of the solution.
NOTE: Each correct selection is worth one point.
Correct Answer: A, C
You are creating a DLP policy named Policy1 that will be applied to the locations as shown in the following exhibit.
Policy1 contains an advanced data loss prevention (DLP) rule named Rule1.
Which two conditions can you use in Rule1? Each correct answer presents a complete solution.
NOTE: Each correct selection is worth one point.
Correct Answer: D, E
SC-401 Exam Topics and Weightings
Topics and weightings follow Microsoft's official skills outline.
Implement information protection
30–35%Data classification in Microsoft Purview, from sensitive information types and trainable classifiers through to the classification results you interpret in content explorer and activity explorer. Then sensitivity labels end to end: creating them, scoping them with label policies, applying them automatically, and configuring encryption and the rights that come with it. The domain closes with protection outside the collaboration surface: Windows endpoints, file shares and Exchange.
Implement data loss prevention and retention
30–35%Data loss prevention policies across Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams and the Defender for Cloud Apps surface, including the rule conditions, actions and user notifications that make a policy behave the way an organisation intended. Endpoint data loss prevention gets its own treatment, covering onboarding, device settings and alert monitoring. Retention sits alongside it: retention labels, label policies, retention policies and the precedence rules that decide which one wins.
Manage risks, alerts, and activities
30–35%Insider risk management in full: prerequisites, policy templates, indicators, triggering events, and the alert triage and case workflow that follows. Alongside it, the day-to-day of running information security in Purview, which means alerts, audit search and the activity signals the other two domains generate. The newest content on the outline sits here too, covering the protections applied to data used by artificial intelligence services.
Official Revisions by Microsoft
28 July 2026 — : Minor objective updates inside the third skill area, affecting managing information security alerts and activities and protecting data used by AI services. The audience profile and the other two skill areas were unchanged, as were the weightings.
31 May 2025 — : Microsoft retired SC-400, Administering Information Protection and Compliance in Microsoft 365, at 11:59 PM Central Standard Time. SC-401 is the exam behind the current Information Security Administrator Associate certification.
February 11, 2025 — :SC-401 (Administering Information Security in Microsoft 365) first became available in beta on February 11, 2025 as the successor to the retiring SC-400, with an objective revision applied to the English-language version on April 2, 2025 ahead of general availability and official course rollout in late April 2025.
Source: Microsoft's official SC-401 study guide change log, which shows the most recent revision. Our question bank is updated to match each revision.
What the SC-401 Exam Really Tests, and How
Three skill areas at roughly a third each is unusual for a Microsoft associate exam, and it tells you something useful: there is no domain small enough to skip and no domain large enough to carry you. What varies is not how much each area is worth but what it asks you to do, and the wording of Microsoft's outline gives that away. Objectives that say create and configure behave differently from ones that say monitor or investigate.
Turning a stated requirement into a policy configuration
Tested via: configuration-choice multiple-choice questionsMost of the outline is written as create, configure or implement, and those objectives surface as short requirements with four configurations under them. Which condition, which action, which scope. The requirement usually contains one qualifier that eliminates two options immediately, and the remaining pair differ by a single setting.
Choosing between protections that overlap
Tested via: scenario-based multiple-choice questionsA sensitivity label with encryption, a data loss prevention rule and a retention policy can all be argued into the same scenario, and Purview lets you build all three. The exam wants the one that meets the requirement as written, which means knowing what each mechanism is actually for rather than what it can be forced to do.
Predicting what an existing configuration will do
Tested via: exhibit-based questionsYou are shown a policy, a label scope or a set of retention settings and asked what happens to a specific item. Retention precedence is the classic version of this, where a retention policy and a retention label both apply and only one outcome is correct. Reading a configuration is a different skill from building one, and it is the half most candidates practise less.
Putting a rollout in the right order
Tested via: sequencing drag-and-drop question setsEndpoint data loss prevention and insider risk management both have prerequisites that have to be satisfied before anything else works: device onboarding, permissions, audit logging, connectors. Items ask you to order the steps or to identify the one that has been missed, and getting a prerequisite in the wrong place is treated as getting the whole item wrong.
How to Pass the SC-401 Exam on Your First Attempt
SC-401 is a hundred minutes on a product surface that changes several times a year, so the risk is not that you study too little. It is that you study material aimed at the wrong version of Purview. The sequence below assumes you have weeks rather than months, which is what most people booking this exam actually have.
Answer a full set cold, before you open anything else. With three skill areas weighted almost identically, the only useful early information is which of them is your weakest. Twenty minutes of questions produces that; a week of reading in the portal does not.
Look each miss up in Microsoft Learn before you move on. Check the option you picked against the current documentation for that Purview feature, not against a blog post. Purview settings get renamed and relocated often enough that the documentation is the only source that stays honest, and SC-401 reuses the same handful of decision points across many items.
Spend your remaining time where the outline is deepest, not where the percentage is highest. The three areas are worth the same, so weight is no guide here. Depth is: data loss prevention and retention has the most sub-objectives and the most precedence rules, and insider risk management has the most prerequisites. Those two absorb time; information protection rewards it faster.
Run one timed, full-length session before test day. A hundred minutes is not generous once exhibits and sequencing items start appearing, and pacing is the thing you cannot fix in the room. Treat whatever that session exposes as your final review list and add nothing new after it.
What to Look for in SC-401 Practice Questions
and Why Prefer Pass4Success Practice Material
A failed SC-401 attempt costs another USD 165 and a wait before you can rebook. Weighed against that, the price of practice material is a small number. The question that matters more is whether it was written for this exam or for the one it replaced. Five things worth checking.
Written for SC-401, not adapted from SC-400
The two exams overlap enough that relabelled material reads convincingly. It will carry objectives the current outline no longer lists, and it will miss the AI data protection content entirely.
✓ Ours: the bank is maintained on a regular cycle to reflect how Microsoft actually tests, not only when the skills outline is republished. When Microsoft does revise the outline, as it did on 28 July 2026, the affected questions are re-checked on top of that cycle. The current bank date is shown in the exam details above.
Keeps up with Purview's renaming habit
Features in this product move between portals and change names between one quarter and the next. A question that names a blade which no longer exists is not a hard question, it is a broken one.
✓ Ours: questions are checked against current Microsoft documentation as part of each update pass and bank coverage across all three skill areas, with per-area counts.
Something you can inspect before paying
For a newer exam code there is less community consensus about which material is any good, which puts more weight on being able to look for yourself.
✓ Ours: a free demo of both formats, the PDF and the practice test, before any purchase. The free questions on this page come from the same bank.
Timed practice, not just a list to read through
Reading questions and answering them inside a hundred minutes are different skills. Exhibit and sequencing items are where the clock disappears, and you find that out under time or you find it out on the day.
✓ Ours: the practice test runs timed sessions and the PDF covers offline review. Both arrive in one purchase rather than as separate products.
A price that makes sense beside the exam fee
The useful comparison is not between providers. It is between preparing once properly and booking SC-401 twice.
✓ Ours: the full question bank is $69 less than half of the $165 exam fee. A retake means paying that $165 again, on top of the time already spent preparing. Getting it right the first time costs a fraction of what a second attempt does.
SC-401 Exam Discussion: What Recent Candidates Say
This is where SC-401 candidates compare notes: which skill area ran deeper than the percentage suggested, how much Purview experience the exam really assumes, and what they would prepare differently. Add yours if you have sat it.
Ready to Pass SC-401 on Your First Attempt?
Get Premium AccessFrequently Asked Questions
What skills are measured on the SC-401 exam?
Three skill areas, each worth 30 to 35%: implement information protection, implement data loss prevention and retention, and manage risks, alerts and activities. The weightings come from Microsoft's skills outline, most recently revised on 28 July 2026, and the topic map above sets out what each area covers.
Is SC-401 the same as SC-400?
No, and this is the most expensive assumption a candidate can make here. Microsoft retired SC-400 on 31 May 2025. SC-401 covers the same Purview surface, but its outline is organised around information protection, data loss prevention and retention, and insider risk, and it carries objectives on protecting data used by AI services that SC-400 never had.
What are the prerequisites for taking the SC-401 exam?
None. You can book SC-401 directly, with no other certification required first. Microsoft's audience profile does assume working familiarity with Microsoft 365 services, PowerShell, Microsoft Entra, the Defender portal and Defender for Cloud Apps, and candidates without hands-on Purview time tend to feel that gap in the insider risk material.
How hard is the SC-401 exam?
Moderate for anyone administering Purview already, harder than expected for anyone learning it from documentation alone. The difficulty is not conceptual, it is that several mechanisms can plausibly satisfy the same requirement and only one is right. Candidates who have configured labels, policies and retention in a real tenant tend to see that immediately.
What types of questions are on the SC-401 exam?
Microsoft does not publish the item mix for a specific exam. Expect the formats its role-based exams use: multiple choice and multiple select, drag and drop sequencing, hot area items where you click the correct setting in a screenshot, and exhibits you interpret. Microsoft's free exam sandbox lets you try each format before test day.
What are the most common mistakes on the SC-401 exam?
Getting retention precedence backwards, confusing a sensitivity label's scope with a label policy's scope, reaching for a data loss prevention rule where the requirement describes a retention outcome, and skipping the prerequisite steps in endpoint and insider risk items. Most of these come from studying features one at a time rather than studying where they collide.
How do the SC-401 topics connect in a real deployment?
In the order the outline lists them. You classify data, label it, then stop it leaving through data loss prevention, then keep or delete it under retention, then watch what people do with it through insider risk and alerts. The exam mirrors that chain, which is why items regularly cross two skill areas and why studying each in isolation only gets you partway.
What is an effective final-week review plan for SC-401?
Drill the collisions rather than the features: label against label policy, retention label against retention policy, data loss prevention against sensitivity label encryption. Sit one full timed session midweek and review only the misses. The day before, walk the Purview portal and name what each blade does, then stop.
Where does SC-401 fit in the Microsoft security certification path?
It is an associate-level exam and it earns its certification on its own, with no fundamentals exam required first. SC-900 is the optional starting point. Alongside it sit SC-300 for identity and SC-200 for security operations, and the expert-level SC-100 architect certification is the usual destination for people who hold two of the associate credentials.
Related Microsoft Security Exams
Editorial policy on this bank is set by us, not by Microsoft's publication calendar. Purview features are renamed and relocated between outline revisions, so the questions are reviewed on a regular cycle to reflect how the exam is actually being tested. When Microsoft does revise the SC-401 skills outline, most recently on 28 July 2026, the affected questions and answers are additionally re-checked against current Microsoft documentation. The date of the most recent pass appears in the exam details table at the top of this page.