A security analyst working for a financial institution notices abnormal behavior in a workstation's operating system $($OS$)$ and identifies multiple unauthorized scheduled tasks and file system anomalies on the affected workstation.

Which of the following options is the MOST likely explanation for these issues?

answer

The security analyst is experiencing false positives from their security tools, and there are no actual anomalies present.

A virus has infected the workstation, allowing remote attackers to execute arbitrary code and run malicious tasks.

An insider threat with access to the workstation is intentionally creating these abnormalities to sabotage the company's security posture.

The operating system of the workstation is outdated, and the security patches have not been applied, leading to system vulnerabilities that have been exploited.