Penetration Testing Interview Questions
General
• What are the phases in the penetration testing lifecycle? (recon,scan,..)
• What types of penetration testing assessments are there? (Internal/External Infrastructure
Penetration Testing / Wireless/Web/mobile)
• Difference between active and passive reconnaissance ?
• How are penetration tests classified?
• What types of penetration testing teams are there and what are their responsibilities?
• What are some of the types of attackers? (Script kiddie/ APT/ Malicious insider)
• What are the most common types of malware?
• What are some of the most common vulnerability databases? (NVD/CVE/exploit
db/packetstorm/vulnhub)
• What is the Common Vulnerability Scoring System?
• How would you rate vulnerabilities during a penetration test? (risk matrix)
• At what point of an assessment would you start performing testing?
• What are some of the most common vulnerabilities?
• What is the principle of least privilege?
Infrastructure/Operating Systems
• What is the OSI model and what are its layers?
• What is the difference between TCP and UDP?
• What are some of the most common services and what ports do they run on?
• What is DNS?
• What is ARP?
• What is RDP?
• What is a MAC address?
• What is a firewall and how does it work?
• What is the difference between an IDS and an IPS?
• What are honeypots?
• What is the difference between encoding, hashing and encrypting?
• Name a few type of encoding, hash and encryption
• What is salting and what is it used for
• What is the fastest way to crack hashes?
• Difference between symmetric and asymmetric encryption
• In what format are Windows and Linux hashes stored
• Where are Windows and Linux hashes stored, how can you retrieve them?
• What are cron jobs/scheduled tasks?
• Where are cron jobs stored in Windows and Linux?
• What are the different package managers used in Linux and where are they used?
• Describe the permission system used in Linux file systems
• What are SUID and sudo?
• What is Kerberos and how does it perform authentication?
• What is the difference between WEP, WPA and WPA2
• What is WPS? Why is it insecure?
Common Techniques & Attacks
• How can DNS and ARP be exploited by attackers?
• What is DDoS?
• What is buffer overflow?
• What is packet inspection?
• What is privilege escalation? Provide a few examples
• What is the difference between bruteforce and dictionary attacks?
• What is a golden ticket attack?
• What is a common misconfiguration of FTP and SMB? (anonymous login/ null session)
Web Application Vulnerabilities & Attacks
• what is XSS, what types of XSS are there, what are the consequences of a successful attack
and how do you prevent XSS?
• What is SQL Injection, different types and examples, how to prevent ?
• Secure and HTTPOnly flags
• What is CSRF, what does it entail and how can it be prevented?
• What is IDOR, what are its consequences and how can you prevent it?
• What are LFI and RFI and what are the consequences of these attacks? How can they be
prevented?
• How can you secure data in transit?
Penetration Testing Tools
• What tool would you use to perform a port scan?
• What tools would you use to inspect network packets?
• What tool would you use to bruteforce passwords, online and offline?
• What tool would you use to automate SQL injection attacks?
• What tool would you use to perform an ARP spoofing attack? (Ettercap)
• What tools would you use to perform testing against WiFi networks
• What tool can help generate malicious executables?
• What tools would you use to scan a network for known vulnerabilities?
• What tool would you use to inspect the route between a host and a destination?
Scenario-Based
• How would you remotely access a service that can only be accessed from within an internal
network?
• How would you allow regular users to run bash scripts as root and which way is most
secure? (cron jobs)
• If you were able to obtain an NTLM hash but could not decrypt it, how would you use this
knowledge to obtain access to the target host? (pHT)
• What measures would you put in place to prevent brute forcing?
refrences
• Penetration Testing Interview
