Top 20 Ethical Hacking Interview Questions and Answers

Hello guys, if you are preparing for Ethical hacker job interview or want to become a Cyber Security expert and looking for common Ethical hacking interview questions then you have come to the right place. Earlier, I have shared Cyber Security Interview Questions and in this article, I am going to share popular Ethical Hacking Interview Questions with answers. If you have worked in the field of Ethical Hacking and Cyber Security then most likely you can answer all of these questions but if you struggle to answer any of these questions then you can always go back and join any of these best Ethical Hacking online courses to learn and revise key concepts, tooling, and techniques. 

If you have an ethical hacking interview waiting for you then you have come to the right place where you will be able to find all the necessary details to help you pass your interview. It’s not just details but the right questions that are commonly asked in ethical hacking interviews. You can take a look at the following questions.

20 Ethical Hacking Interview Questions and Answers

Without wasting anymore of your time, here is a list of 20 Ethical Hacking interview questions with Answers. If you have worked as Ethical Hacker or Cyber Security expert then most likely you will know the answers of these questions. 

I have also tried to cover as many concepts as possible but if you think any important topic is missing then feel free to suggest in comments. You can also share questions asked to you during interviews. 

1. What is Ethical Hacking?
Answer: Ethical Hacking refers to when a certain individual is allowed to hack a system with the permission of the person who owns a product to find weakness in a system and thereafter fix them.

 

2. What are the types of ethical hackers?
Answer:

• White Box penetration Testers
• Grey Box hackers
• Certified Ethical hacker
• Black Box penetration Testers

 

3. What are the common tools used by ethical hackers?
Answer:

• John The Ripper
• Wire Shark
• Meta Spoit
• Maltego
• NMAP
• Nikto
• Netsparker
• OpenVAS

 

4. What are the advantages of hacking?
Answer:

• Prevents malicious attacks
• Helps in foiling security attacks
• Facilitates prevention of data theft

 

5. What are the disadvantages of hacking?
Answer:

• Theft of private information
• Violation of privacy regulations
• A lot of security issues

 

6. What are the different types of hacking?
Answer:

• Network hacking
• Password hacking
• Website hacking
• Email hacking
• Computer hacking

 

7. What is Trojan? What are the types of Trojan?
Answer: Trojan is a type of malware that is often developed by hackers or attackers to gain access to target systems. The following are types of Trojan:

• Ransomware
• Trojan-Downloader
• Trojan-Banker
• Trojan-Rootkits
• Trojan-Droppers

 

8. What is sniffing?
Answer: sniffing is a process of monitoring and capturing the data packets passing through a given network. There are two types of sniffing:

• Active sniffing – here traffic is locked and can be altered.
• Passive sniffing – traffic is locked and cannot be altered.

 

9. How you can avoid or prevent ARP poisoning?
Answer: ARP poisoning can be prevented by following methods:

• Packet Filtering: Packet filters are capable for filtering out and blocking packets with conflicting source address information
• Avoid trust relationship: Organization should develop a protocol that relies on trust relationship as little as possible
• Use ARP spoofing detection software: There are programs that inspect and certify data before it is transmitted and blocks data that is spoofed
• Use cryptographic network protocols: By using secure communications protocols like TLS, SSH, and HTTP secure prevent ARP spoofing attacks by encrypting data prior to transmission and authenticating data when it is received.

 

10. Explain what is Pharming and Defacement?
Answer:

• Pharming: In this technique, the attacker compromises the DNS ( Domain Name System) servers or on the user’s computer so that traffic is directed to a malicious site.
• Defacement: In this technique, the attacker replaces the organization’s website with a different page. It contains the hacker’s name, and images and may even include messages and background music.

 

11. What is foot printing, and what are the techniques used in it?
Answer: Footprinting is the accumulation and discovery of so much information on the target network prior to accessing a network. It is the approach of hackers before hacking the target network.

• Open Source Footprinting: It will search for the contact details of the admin, which can help the hackers to guess the password in Social Engineering.
• Scanning: When the network is known, the next step consists of spying on the active IP addresses on the network. To identify active IP addresses, the Internet Control Message Protocol is an active IP address.
• Network Enumeration: Here, the hacker attempts to identify the target network's domain names and network blocks.
• Stack Fingerprinting: After the port and the hosts are mapped by scanning the network, then the final footprinting step can be carried out.

 

12. What is a Denial of Service attack? What are the common DOS attacks?
Answer: DOS attacks involve the flooding of servers, networks, or systems with traffic to cause overconsumption of resources of victims. As a result, legitimate users have difficulty accessing or using targeted sites. DOS attacks include the following:

• SYN flood
• ICMP flood
• Smurf attack
• Teardrop attack
• Buffer overflow attacks

 

13. Can you protect yourself from being hacked? How?
Answer: Yes, a personal computer system or network can be protected from getting hacked by:

• Updating the operating systems for security updates
• Formatting any device intended to sell
• Securing the Wi-Fi with a password
• Using memorable and tough security answers
• Emailing via a trusted source
• Not storing any sensitive information on cloud

 

14. What is CIA Triangle?
Answer: CIA Triangle is a model for guiding information security policies in any organization. It stands for:

• Confidentiality – Maintaining the secrecy of the information.
• Integrity – Keeping the information unchanged.
• Availability – Ensuring an all-time availability of the information to the authorized.

 

15. What is MIB?
Answer: MIB is the short form of Management Information Base. It is a hierarchical virtual database of a network having all the information about network objects. It is used by SNMP and Remote MONitoring 1 (RMON1).

 

16. What is Brute Force Hack?
Answer: The brute force hack is a technique that uses trial and error to guess the login details and get access to the system and network resources. Hackers guess all possible combinations of a targeted password until they discover the correct password.


17. What is Cross-site Scripting?
Answer: It is a kind of security vulnerability present on the web. This allows attackers to inject client-side scripts into web pages that are being viewed by other users.

 

18. What does reconnaissance mean in ethical hacking?
Answer: This is the phase where all the information is gathered to know the system better. The information varies from determining network range to discovering open ports and access points.

 

19. What happens when defacement is executed?
Answer: Once the query is executed, the website may reflect defaced data thus impacting the visual appearance of the website. It is generally conducted by hacktivist groups.

 

20. What information is collected while footprinting?
Answer: The kind of information that is generally collected is IP address, VPN, URL, email id, password, and server configurations.

 

That's all about the 20 common Ethical Hacking Interview Questions with answers. To finish with, I would like to encourage you to practice more and more and you will be able to find that these are just easy questions that cannot give you any bit of a problem. Believing in yourself is the main thing that you should focus on and in the end, you will see things working out the way you want. I hope you have gathered all that is required for you to pass. 

Wish you good luck.