Fortify Your Cyber Fortress: Conquer the 2025 NDE Practice Exam! 🚀🔐

The component that protects data during transmission is encryption and protocols. This is because encryption transforms the data into a format that is unreadable to unauthorized users, thereby safeguarding its confidentiality and integrity as it travels across networks. Protocols, on the other hand, establish the rules for how the data is transmitted, ensuring that it follows secure practices. Various encryption methods (such as TLS/SSL for web traffic) and secure protocols play a critical role in protecting sensitive data from eavesdropping, tampering, or interception.

Access control focuses more on permissions and securing access to systems and resources rather than securing data during its transit. Firewalls primarily act as barriers between trusted and untrusted networks, filtering traffic but not encrypting data. Audit logs are valuable for tracking and monitoring activities within a system but do not contribute to the protection of data in transit. Therefore, encryption and protocols are the essential components specifically designed to secure data as it is communicated over a network.