Top 25 Cybersecurity and Ethical Hacking Interview Questions With Answers
Top 25 Cybersecurity Interview Questions With Answers
Cyber Security Interview Question And Answers
Here are some of the top questions with answers that have been asked in a cybersecurity job interview
Q1) What are IP address and Mac address?
IP address: To every device to an IP address is assigned so that the device can be located on the network.
MAC (Machine Access Control) address: A MAC address is the unique serial number assigned to every network interface on every device.
Q2) List out some of the common tools used by Ethical hackers?
Metasploit
WireShark
NMAP
John The Ripper
Maltego
Q3 What are the types of ethical hackers?
The types of ethical hackers :
Grey Box hackers
Black Box penetration Testers
White BoxpenetrationTesters
Q4) Explain what is Brute Force Hack?
Brute force hack is a technique for the hacking password and gets access to the system and network resources,
it takes a lot of time, it needs toa hacker to learn about JavaScript. For this purpose, one can use of tool name is “Hydra”.
Q5) What are the common forms of the DOS attack?
Buffer Overflow Attacks
SYN Attacks
Teardrop Attacks
Smurf Attacks
Viruses
Q6) What are the types of computers based on social engineering attacks?
Computer-based social engineering attacks is,
Phishing
Baiting
Online scams
Q7) what is Phishing?
Phishing technique involves sending of false emails, chats or website to the impersonate
the real system with aim of stealing information from the original website.
Q8) Explain what is the Network Sniffing?
Underground sniffers are malicious programs used by hackers to capture information over a network. when an underground sniffer is installed on the router,
it can breach the security of any network that passes through the router. It can capture Confidential messages like email.
Q10) What is an ARP poisoning attack and how does it work?
An ARP spoofing, also known as ARP poisoning, is a Man in the Middle (MitM) attack that allows attackers to intercept communication between network devices.
The attack works as follows: The attacker must have access to the network. … The attacker is now secretly in the middle of all communications.
Q11)What is the Mac Flooding?
Mac Flooding is a technique where the security given to the network switch is compromised. In Mac flooding the hacker or attacker floods to the switch with a large number of frames,
then what a switch can handle. This makes the switch to behaving as a hub and transmits all the packets at all the ports. Taking the advantage of this attacker will try to send his packet inside the network to steal the sensitive information.
Q12) Explain what is the DHCP Rogue Server?
A Rogue DHCP server is a DHCP server on the network which is not under the control of the administration of the network staff. Rogue DHCP Server can be router or modem. It will offer users IP addresses, default gateway, WINS servers as soon as the user’s logged in.
The rogue server can be sniff into all the traffic sent by a client to all other networks.
Q13) Explain what is the Burp Suite?
Burp Suite is an integrated platform used for attacking web applications. It consists of all the Burp tools required for attacking an application. Burp Suite tool has to the same approach for the attacking web applications like a framework for handling HTTP requests,
upstream proxies, alerting, logging, and so on.
Q14) Explain how you can stop your website from getting hacked?
By adopting the following method you can stop your website from getting hacked, Sanitizing and Validating users parameters: By Sanitizing and Validating user the parameters before submitting them to the database can reduce the chances of being attacked by SQL injection
Using Firewall: Firewall can be used to drop traffic from a suspicious IP address if the attack is the simple DOS
Encrypting the Cookies: Cookie or Session poisoning can be prevented by encrypting the content of cookies, associating cookies with a client IP address, and timing out the cookies after some time
Validating and Verifying user input: This approach is ready to prevent tampering by verifying and validating the user input before processing it.
Validating and Sanitizing headers: These techniques is useful against cross-site scripting or XSS, this technique includes validating and sanitizing headers, parameters passed via to URL, form parameters, and hidden values to the reduce XSS attacks
Q15) Explain what is the NTP?
To synchronize clocks of the networked computers, NTP (Network Time Protocol) is used. For its primary means of communication UDP port, 123 is used. Over the public, in internet NTP can maintain time to within 10 milliseconds.
Q16) Explain what is the MIB?
MIB ( Management Information Base ) is the virtual database. It contains all the formal descriptions of the network objects that can be managed using the SNMP. The MIB database is hierarchical and in MIB each managed object is addressed through object identifiers (OID).
Bind and reverse shell are two different payloads that are used in Metasploit.
The basic difference between bind and reverse shell is, Bind shell uses when the payload is sent in the intranet, for example, If an attacker is there in the same network, can send a payload to anyone who has connected to the same network and get access to their system, but Reverse shell payload used to access the system which has public IP and is there on the internet and it is used to bypass firewall, get entered into any network and access the systems inside the particular network.
Heartbleed is the vulnerability in the OpenSSL library, Heartbeat is a component of TSL/SSL protocol when any system sends an encrypted piece of data is called heartbeat request to other systems, the other system will also send an exact same encrypted piece of data to maintain the connection. Now the system which receives the data never checked the size of data that was claimed, so the attacker increases the size of data lets say 64kb but the actual size of data is 40kb, now the receiving system will send back the data of 64kb in which 24kb is plus-size taking form memory buffer whatever happens in next 24kb memory. This extra 24kb data an attacker can extract from a web server. So this is the way we can exploit heartbleed attacks.
Cross-site scripting (XSS) attack is a type of client-side injection attack in which an attacker tries to inject malicious scripts to the legitimate web application. This attack will lead to disclosing cookie information, website defacement, etc.
There are 3 types of Cross-site scripting:
- Reflected XSS – In this type of XSS, the request with malicious scripts send to the server and reflected on the client-side.
- Stored XSS – In this type of XSS, malicious scripts stored permanently in the server, and whenever any user accesses that particular application, the malicious script executes.
- DOM-based XSS – In this type of XSS, the request of the malicious script does not send to the server, it executes in the client sideitself.
It’s a cybercrime where the exploit is performed for demanding money. For example- Ransomware.
- Black hat- One who performing hacking(penetration or exploitation) without authority and with malicious intent.
- White hat- Authorised penetration tester.
- Grey hat- One who performing hacking(penetration or exploitation) without authority but without malicious intent. They perform the activity for bounty programs or security testing without getting authorized to do so.
The cyber kill chain is a process which defines primary steps of a cyber attack. Below are the 7 stages of the cyber kill chain.
- Reconnaissance- Passively( searching information on various search engines like google dork, shodan etc) gathering information about target.
- Weaponization – Preparing remote access malware with an exploit into a deliverable payload.
- Delivery – Transferring payload(any malicious application or script) to victims’ device by social engineering or by some other method.
- Exploitation – Exploit vulnerable applications to make use of the delivered payload.
- Installation – Installation of backdoor using payload for remote access.
- Command & Control – After the successful installation of a backdoor device can be controlled remotely and various actions can be performed.( DDOS is the most common attack performed using CnC servers).
- Actions on Objective – Attacker will work to achieve the objective for which attack is performed, which can include data exfiltration or destruction of data or attacking some other device.
It’s a way to copy someone’s identity and sent an email from copied ID. The receiver won’t be able to understand whether this is coming from the right source or the wrong source.
This is the fraud attempt usually made via SMS, calls, emails, etc, just to collect the credentials of the users.
To force the site to run in only HTTPS