Ethical Hacking Interview Questions and Answers

Ethical Hacking Interview Questions and Answers for beginners & Experienced candidates (New Updated).

Ethical hacking, also referred as penetration testing, intrusion testing, or red teaming, is the controversial act of locating weaknesses and vulnerabilities of computer and information systems by duplicating the intent and actions of malicious hackers

An ethical hacker (also known as a white hat hacker or simply a white hat) is the ultimate security professional. Ethical hackers know how to find and exploit vulnerabilities and weaknesses in various systems just like a malicious hacker (or a black hat hacker). In fact, they both use the same skills; however, an ethical hacker uses those skills in a legitimate, lawful manner to try to find vulnerabilities and fix them before the bad guys can get there and try to break in.

Ethical hacking refers to the act of locating weaknesses and vulnerabilities of computer and information systems by duplicating the intent/network and actions of malicious hackers. An ethical hacker is a security professional who applies their hacking skills for defensive purposes on behalf of the owners of information systems. By conducting penetration tests, an ethical hacker looks to answer the following four basic questions:

  1. What information/locations/systems can an attacker gain access?
  2. What can an attacker see on the target?
  3. What can an attacker do with available information?
  4. Does anyone at the target system notice the attempts?

An ethical hacker operates with the knowledge and permission of the organization for which they are trying to defend. In some cases, the organization will neglect to inform their information security team of the activities that will be carried out by an ethical hacker in an attempt to test the effectiveness of the information security team. This is referred to as a double-blind environment. In order to operate effectively and legally, an ethical hacker must be informed of the assets that should be protected, potential threat sources, and the extent to which the organization will support an ethical hacker’s efforts

Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) is a qualification obtained by assessing the security of computer systems, using penetration testing techniques.

Hackers gain reconnaissance of the target following a sequence of steps as:

 Open Source Footprinting: The first step a hacker takes is to visit the website of a potential target. He then looks for contact information of the administrators which may help in guessing the password or in Social Engineering.

Network Enumeration: This is the next step in gaining information where the hacker tries to identify the domain names and the network blocks of the target network.

Scanning: Once the network block is known, the next step is to spy for active IP addresses on the target network. The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is a good alternative for identifying active IP addresses.

Stack Fingerprinting: Once the hosts and port have been mapped by scanning the target network, the final foot printing step can be performed. This step is called stack fingerprinting. This is the process of determining the operating system and different version of services running on target hosts.

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