CEH Ethical Hacking Interview Questions and Answers
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Best Ethical Hacking Interview Questions and Answers
Here you will find a list of top 50 Ethical Hacking Interview Questions and Answers. These Ethical Hacking Interview Questions and Answers can be utilized by both beginners and experienced to upgrade their career path. These top 50 Ethical Hacking Interview Questions and Answers are prepared in consultation with top interviewers in the industry. All these questions are frequently asked by the interviewers and so when an aspirant prepare these questions before attending a Ethical Hacking interview, then it is certain that he/she will crack the interview and get placed in their dream company.
Ethical hackers are highly preferred in most of the top organizations and they are paid more too. As there is a demand for certified ethical hackers, the professionals of this field are paid more. So do not miss further Ethical Hacking interviews. These top 50 Ethical Hacking Interview Questions and Answers will certainly brush up your ethical hacking skills and will allow you attend the interviews at ease. We wish you all success in your interview preparation and excellent career.
Top Ethical Hacking Interview Questions and Answers
Ethical hacking also known as penetration testing, intrusion testing or red teaming is the process where a person tries to intrude or penetrate into an application, computer system or network systematically with the product owner’s consent to detect the vulnerabilities or threat and fix it later when required.
The primary objective of ethical hacking is to detect vulnerabilities and threat during the process of testing and to improve overall system security.
An Ethical hacker is someone who tries to elevate the security of the system and who attempts to find out the threat and vulnerabilities associated with the system or network which can be easily exploited by potential hackers.
The unauthorized intrusion into any system or network is known as hacking and the person who attempts to perform hacking can be called as a hacker. A hacker can steal personal or confidential data, intrude privacy essentials and more.
Pros | Cons |
It prevents data theft | It can be used to steal personal and confidential data |
It can avoid malicious attack | Hacking violates almost every regulations in line with privacy |
It can detect vulnerabilities or bugs | It can access a system without legal authorization |
IP Address – An address allocated to a particular device so that it can be found easily on a specified network is known as the IP Address.
MAC Address – A distinct serial number that is being allocated to the interface of a network associated with a device is known as a MAC Address.
Listed below are some of the popular tools used by the Ethical hackers:
- Metasploit
- Wire Shark
- NMAP
- John the Ripper
- Maltego
Symmetrical Encryption | Asymmetrical Encryption |
Same keys are used for encryption and decryption | Different keys are used for encryption and decryption |
It is quick but it has to transfer the keys over a channel that is unencrypted | It is very slow but highly secure and so in asymmetrical encryption, hybrid approach is highly favored |
The types of hacking are as follows:
- Website Hacking
- Network Hacking
- Ethical Hacking
- Email Hacking
- Password Hacking
- Online Banking Hacking
- Computer Hacking
Hacking can be successfully performed in five different stages and they are:
- Reconnaissance
- Scanning
- Gaining access
- Maintaining access
- Covering tracks
The types of Ethical hackers available are Grey box hackers or cyberwarrior, Black box penetration testers, White box penetration testers and certified Ethical hackers.
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A Firewall which is located in both the boundaries of trusted and untrusted network is nothing but a network security system which actually allows or neglects certain network traffic in line with a set of predefined network security rules.
Encryption | Hacking |
It is used to maximize the confidentiality and security of any data | The process that is used to validate the content integrity is known as hacking |
It is actually a two-way function where both encryption and decryption is involved | It is an one-way function which converts a plain text into an irreversible format |
Footprinting is the process of gathering more valid and useful information about a network before intruding into that particular network. The different techniques involved in footprinting are as follows:
- Open source footprinting
- Network enumeration
- Scanning
- Stack fingerprinting
There are several password cracking techniques while some are listed below:
- Dictionary attack
- Brute force attack
- Man in the middle attack
- Traffic interception
- Keylogger attack
The technique that is used to hack a password in order to gain the overall access of any network or system is known as brute force hack. It is highly complex and requires Javascript skill and the tool used in this technique is “Hydra”.
Keystroke logging, a type of surveillance software can also be termed as keyboard capturing or key logging. It can be used to record all the keystrokes performed on a keyboard. The keyboard activity is monitored to the whole and with the help of the logging program, all the data can be accessed or retrieved at ease through keystroke logging.
Listed below are some of the commonly used programming languages in hacking:
- Python
- C/C++
- Java
- Perl
- LISP
Python has several essential highlights, intense functionalities and pre-assembled libraries which make it crucial for hacking.
Trojan is a malware developed by attackers or hackers to gain the overall access of the target device at ease. The types of Trojan are as follows:
- Trojan Downloader
- Ransomware
- Trojan Droppers
- Trojan Rootkits
- Trojan Banker
- Trojan Backdoor
Cowpatty is a technique that utilizes PSK-based authentication (example: WPA Personal) to implement an offline dictionary attack against WPA/WPA2 networks.
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ARP Poisoning is similar to network attacks which can be avoided with the below mentioned techniques:
- Using packet filtering
- Using ARP spoofing software
- Maintaining distance from the trust relationships
The technique that is used to exploit vulnerabilities present in DNS and that diverts internet traffic away from the legitimate servers and towards the false one is known as DNS cache poisoning or DNS spoofing.
Defacement – The attacker who uses defacement actually implements an alternate page against the originate site of the organization which holds all information like hacker’s picture, name, and it can also consist of messages and background music.
Pharming – It is a technique where the attackers or hackers actually compromises the user’s PC or the DNS (Domain Name System) servers by assuring that the traffic is shared with the malicious site.
Phishing attack is a technique that is used to steal highly sensitive information like credit card number, user data and more. This attack comes into act while using social media sites, personal email accounts or online transactions.
It is one of the fraudulent services where a communication from an unauthorized source is replicated in form of a known source and sent to the receiver. It acquires all the personal information of the target and caters malware. It can also redistribute the traffic which can create a specialized attack known as DOS or Denial of service attack. The spoofing attack types are as follows:
- Email spoofing
- Website spoofing
- Caller ID spoofing
- ARP spoofing
- DNS server spoofing
DOS or Denial of service is one of the malicious network attacks that flood a particular network with a several useless or unwanted traffic. The common types of DOS attack are as follows:
- Buffer Overflow Attacks
- SYN Attack
- Teardrop Attack
- Smurf Attack
- Viruses
Listed below are some of the types of hacking techniques implemented to hack or steal the personal information using an unauthorized methodology:
- Keylogger
- Denial of Service (DoS\DDoS)
- Waterhole attacks
- Fake WAP
- Eavesdropping (Passive Attacks)
- Phishing
- Virus, Trojan etc
- ClickJacking attacks
DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) is also similar to DOS attack where various compromised systems are infected with a Trojan which can be used to target a single system that causes the DOS or Denial of Service attack.
Listed below are some of the DDOS attacks:
- Volume-based attacks
- Protocol attack
- Application layer attack
The best operating systems for hacking are as follows:
- Kali Linux
- Parrot Security OS
- BackBox
- Samurai Web Testing Framework
- Pentoo Linux
- DEFT Linux
- Caine
- Network Security Toolkit (NST)
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Enumeration is nothing but the process of extracting essential information like users/machine name, network resources, services and shares from a particular system.
Network enumeration is used to analyze any specific devices/hosts present in a network which uses obvious protocols like ICMP and SNMP to collect information and also to detect several ports found in the remote hosts which can be used further to examine the remote host’s functionality.
Listed below are some of the enumeration types found in Ethical hacking:
- DNS enumeration
- NTP enumeration
- SNMP enumeration
- Linux/Windows enumeration
- SMB enumeration
Hashing | Encryption |
It is irreversible | It is reversible |
It supports integrity | It supports confidentiality |
The CIA Triangle in Ethical Hacking is defined as below:
- C stand for Confidentiality; it maintains secret and credential information
- I stand for Integrity; it maintains unaltered information
- A stand for Availability; it ensures that information is made available round the clock for the authorized parties
Data leakage is referred to sharing credential data of an organization in an unauthorized manner to other third parties. This data leakage can be of many ways, the data knowledge can be leaked out of an organization in the form of email, removable drives, lost laptops, prints, pictures, transforming data in an unauthorized manner to any of the public portals and more.
Listed below are some of the measures which can be taken by an organization to prevent data leakage:
- Limiting the uploads on social websites
- Ensuring the usage internal encryption techniques
- Restricting emails to an internal network
- Restricting the prints of confidential organizational data
Penetration Testing (PT) | Vulnerability Assessment (VA) |
It actually detects the exploitable vulnerabilities like a real attacker | It is actually an approach or methodology which can be used to detect defects in any of the network/application |
Listed below are some of the types of penetration testing:
- Black box
- External penetration testing
- Internal penetration testing
- White box
- Grey box
Exploitation is nothing but a programmed software or script that ensures the hackers to gain overall access of the targeted network/system and exploits all the vulnerabilities. To find the vulnerabilities at ease, hackers use some of the scanners like Nessus, Open VAS and more.
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The process of monitoring and capturing the data packets that passes through the specific network is known as sniffing. This process is actually used to monitor and troubleshoot the network traffic and is used by the system/network administrator. It can be used to monitor all the sorts of protected and unprotected traffic.
Some of the sniffing tools used in Ethical Hacking are as follows:
- Tcpdump
- Wireshark
- Fiddler
- EtherApe
- Packet Capture
- NetworkMiner
- WinDump
- EtterCap
- dSniff
An injection attack that implements SQL statements and that controls the server of the database behind a web application is known as the SQL injection.
Some of the SQL injection types are listed below:
- Error-based SQL injection
- Blind SQL injection
- Time-based SQL injection
The technique used by the hacker to make people perform such of the tasks the benefits the hacker and that assists in hacking the data is known as social engineering attack.
Listed below are some of the types of social engineering attack:
- Phishing
- Vishing
- Pretexting
- Quid pro quo
- Tailgating
- Spear phishing
- Baiting
The technique used to attack web applications is known as burp suite.
Burp suite consists of the following tools:
- Proxy
- Spider
- Scanner
- Intruder
- Repeater
- Decoder
- Comparer
- Sequencer
To prevent websites from hackers, we can implement the below mentioned techniques:
- Sanitizing and validating users parameters
- Using firewall
- Encrypting the cookies
- Validating and verifying user input
- Validating and sanitizing headers
A type of DHCP server that is build by the attacker on a specific network which does not comes under the control of network administrations is known as the rogue DHCP server.
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