What was the main issue Joseph faced when accessing the Mason Insurance website?

• A. The website was completely inaccessible from both internal and external networks.
• B. The internal view showed a normal site, but external access returned a defaced page.
• C. The website appeared intact on his internal network but was defaced when accessed from an external connection.
• D. The site displayed a maintenance banner during external access

Answer: (C)

The key idea here is that the site behaves differently for internal versus external users, which points to an external-facing issue rather than a universal problem with the site itself. When Joseph browses from inside the network and sees a normal site, but from outside the site is defaced, it suggests the external path is serving different content than the internal path. This can happen due to split-horizon DNS (internal and external DNS resolving to different servers), a compromised external server or CDN edge that serves defaced content, or a misconfiguration that redirects external traffic to a tampered copy.

So the external-facing surface is the problem, while the internal surface is healthy, which makes this the most fitting description of what Joseph encountered. The other scenarios—both paths being down, or maintenance banners appearing externally, or a generic outage—don’t align with the observed split view where internal looks normal and external is defaced.