The Ultimate Guide to Acing Ethical Hacker Job Interviews

Landing a job as an ethical hacker is no easy feat. You’re competing against the best and brightest in cybersecurity for highly coveted roles at leading organizations. While technical skills are critical nailing the interview is just as important.

This comprehensive guide will equip you with insider tips sample answers and everything you need to confidently tackle the toughest ethical hacking interview questions.

Why Interviewers Ask Certain Questions

It’s important to know why interviewers ask certain questions before you answer them. Each question provides insight into your qualifications.

Technical Expertise

These questions evaluate your hands-on skills and knowledge. They talk about things like penetration testing, programming languages, tools, finding security holes, and ways to fix them. The goal is to see how well you understand basic ideas and whether you have the technical skills to do well in the job.

Be ready to talk through real-life examples and scenarios. Demonstrate not just what you know, but how you apply your expertise.

Problem-Solving Skills

You’ll be tasked with assessing complex systems, anticipating risks, and proposing solutions. Interviewers want to understand your analytical approach and decision-making process.

Questions on handling unexpected discoveries, prioritizing vulnerabilities, and responding to incidents aim to uncover this. Share your thought process and highlight analytical thinking over definitive answers.

Communication Abilities

An ethical hacker needs to convey technical issues and solutions to diverse stakeholders. Your capacity for clear communication and relationship-building is key.

Expect questions about reporting findings, training employees, and persuading reticent clients. Use these opportunities to showcase communication skills just as you would your technical abilities.

Ethics and Integrity

This field comes with huge responsibility. Interviewers need to know you’ll safeguard systems, maintain confidentiality, respect privacy rights, and resist unethical demands.

Questions on ethics determine your understanding of principles and professional boundaries. Be clear on your commitment to ethical conduct above all else.

With this context, let’s get into the top ethical hacker interview questions and answers.

Technical Questions

Explain how you can stop your website getting hacked?

There are several key measures I would take to protect a website from hacking:

• Keep software like CMS, plugins, and databases updated and patched to eliminate vulnerabilities.

• Install and regularly update antivirus and anti-malware programs. Conduct scans to detect threats.

• Enable firewalls and DDoS mitigation to prevent attacks.

• Use strong encryption protocols like TLS 1.3 and HTTPS across the site.

• Implement multifactor authentication for admin access.

• Restrict user roles and permissions to prevent unauthorized access.

• Sanitize user inputs through validation and encoding to prevent injection attacks.

• Set up intrusion detection and monitoring systems to quickly spot suspicious activity.

• Establish backup and disaster recovery systems in case of a successful breach.

• Conduct regular security audits and penetration testing to identify and address vulnerabilities proactively.

• Educate employees on security best practices through training and awareness programs.

What is Burp Suite?

Burp Suite is a popular web application security testing tool used by ethical hackers and penetration testers. Key features include:

• An intercepting proxy that lets you inspect and modify web traffic.

• Tools like intruder and repeater to perform penetration tests by manipulating requests.

• A web crawler for automatic discovery of links, content and functionality.

• Ability to collaborate with teammates through a shared scope.

• Powerful scanning capabilities to identify vulnerabilities like XSS, SQLi etc.

• Extensibility via plugins and integrations with other testing tools.

• Useful utilities like decoder, comparer and sequencer.

• Detailed logging and reporting of issues discovered during testing.

It’s an all-in-one platform that covers a wide range of security testing needs, which makes it invaluable for web app penetration testing.

What is SQL injection and its types?

SQL injection is a common web application security vulnerability that allows attackers to interfere with SQL queries executed on the database layer of an application. It allows unauthorized access to and manipulation of sensitive data.

The main types of SQL injection attacks include:

• Error-based: Errors in the application’s response reveal info about the database structure.

• Union-based: Malicious SQL UNION statements are appended to the original query to get data from other tables.

• Blind: Database content is exfiltrated by asking true/false questions through conditional responses.

• Out-of-band: Vulnerable parameters allow communications with an external server controlled by the attacker.

To prevent SQLi, user inputs must be sanitized properly through measures like prepared statements, input validation, parameterized queries etc.

What’s a denial of service (DOS) attack and what are the common forms?

A denial of service attack aims to overwhelm a system’s resources so that legitimate users cannot access its services. Common forms include:

• Buffer overflow attack – Overloads a system’s memory buffer capacity by sending more traffic than it can handle.

• Ping of Death – Sends malformed or oversized ping packets to lock up or crash the target system.

• SYN flood – Rapid succession of TCP SYN requests overwhelms the system’s connection queue.

• DNS amplification – Spoofs requests to DNS servers to flood a target with huge responses.

• Slowloris – Gradually exhausts connection pool via partial HTTP requests.

• NTP amplification – Abuses publicly accessible NTP servers to overwhelm the target with UDP traffic.

DOS attacks can be mitigated through bandwidth throttling, quality of service prioritization, firewalls, and other traffic monitoring systems.

Which programming language is used for hacking?

While any language can be used, some are more common for hacking purposes:

• Python – Extensive libraries useful for network programming, exploit development etc. High-level and easy to learn.

• C/C++ – Low level languages allowing finer control over memory management for finding vulnerabilities.

• Bash – Default shell on Linux systems with built-in tools helpful for enumeration and access.

• SQL – Helps identify and exploit injection vulnerabilities in web applications.

• Javascript – Client-side code execution on web apps makes it useful for XSS attacks.

• PHP – Underlying language for popular web apps like WordPress. Helpful for server-side attacks.

• Ruby – Provides loose typing and flexibility along with powerful frameworks like Metasploit.

However, a hacker’s choice depends on their goal. The key is being versatile across languages and selecting the right tool for each task.

What is meant by spoofing attack?

Spoofing is when an attacker impersonates another device or system to launch malicious activities against network hosts, spread malware, intercept data, or bypass access controls. Common forms of spoofing attacks include:

• IP Address Spoofing – Modifying packet headers to hide the attacker’s actual IP address.

• MAC Address Spoofing – Changing a device’s unique MAC address to bypass network access controls.

• ARP Spoofing – Poisoning the ARP cache to intercept data intended for other hosts on a LAN.

• DNS Spoofing – Tampering DNS records to divert traffic to malicious servers.

• Email Spoofing – Faking the sender address in emails for phishing and spamming.

Spoofing makes tracing attack origins difficult. Defenses involve encrypting network traffic, using authentication mechanisms, monitoring for anomalies etc.

Scenario-Based Questions

How would you approach a vulnerability assessment for a new client?

My approach to a vulnerability assessment involves several key steps:

First, I seek to understand the client’s business, industry and technology landscape. This provides the context for identifying high priority areas.

Next, I collaborate with the client to define the scope – which systems, networks, applications need to be tested. I also gather system and network architecture diagrams, IP ranges, and existing security policies.

With this information, I start vulnerability scanning using tools like Nessus, OpenVAS, Nmap etc. I analyze the results to identify security gaps.

For web applications, I use tools like Burp Suite and OWASP ZAP to uncover weaknesses like code injection, XSS etc. I also conduct manual tests based on OWASP Top 10 and other frameworks.

The findings are then compiled into a risk-rated report detailing vulnerability insights, remediation steps, and recommendations for improving overall security posture.

Throughout the process, I maintain close communication with the client to ensure transparency and address any concerns that arise proactively.

You discover an unknown zero day vulnerability during a test. How would you proceed?

Discovering a zero-day vulnerability during an assessment is a critical event that requires methodical handling:

• I would immediately suspend testing to prevent potential exploitation of the vulnerability.

• To determine the root cause, I would thoroughly examine traffic captures, forensic evidence, logs, and scans.

• Once confident about the details, I would disclose the vulnerability privately to the client as per responsible disclosure principles.

• I’d recommend temporary workarounds like firewall rules or patches while a fix is