ECCouncil CEH v13 312-50v13 New Questions

CEH training emphasizes that highly tailored social engineering attacks—those exploiting trust in internal workflows and perceived technical authority—are far more effective than generic or mass-distributed phishing attempts. A fake IT support portal that mirrors internal systems leverages procedural familiarity: IT departments commonly instruct employees to log into support portals for troubleshooting, credential verification, or ticket updates. When the attacker enhances the pretext with insider terminology and references to real internal systems, employees are more likely to trust the portal and enter credentials. CEH highlights that successful social engineering attacks mimic legitimate processes to avoid suspicion. Phone calls posing as executives often introduce risk due to real-time interaction and scrutiny. Generic phishing lacks personalization and is easily detected. Physical impersonation introduces operational risk and may not yield credentials. Therefore, a fake IT support portal aligned with IT workflows is the optimal method.

SHA-256 is a cryptographic hash function, and CEH v13 clearly states that hash functions alone provide data integrity, but not authenticity or non-repudiation. If attackers can modify data and recompute the hash, integrity checks will still pass.

The issue arises because SHA-256 does not prove who created or modified the data. To address this weakness, CEH v13 recommends using digital signatures, which combine hashing with asymmetric cryptography. A digital signature ensures:

Integrity (data has not changed)

Authentication (data was signed by a known entity)

Non-repudiation (the signer cannot deny the action)

Digital signatures work by hashing the data and encrypting the hash with the sender’s private key. Any modification to the data invalidates the signature.

Encryption alone (Options A and C) protects confidentiality, not integrity or authenticity. SSL/TLS (Option B) secures data in transit but does not protect stored data from tampering.

CEH v13 explicitly identifies digital signatures as the correct cryptographic control when integrity mechanisms alone are insufficient. Therefore, Option D is correct.

A stealth virus may be a sort of virus malware that contains sophisticated means of avoiding detection by antivirus software. After it manages to urge into the now-infected machine a stealth viruses hides itself by continually renaming and moving itself round the disc.

Like other viruses, a stealth virus can take hold of the many parts of one’s PC. When taking control of the PC and performing tasks, antivirus programs can detect it, but a stealth virus sees that coming and can rename then copy itself to a special drive or area on the disc, before the antivirus software. Once moved and renamed a stealth virus will usually replace the detected ‘infected’ file with a clean file that doesn’t trigger anti-virus detection. It’s a never-ending game of cat and mouse.

The intelligent architecture of this sort of virus about guarantees it’s impossible to completely rid oneself of it once infected. One would need to completely wipe the pc and rebuild it from scratch to completely eradicate the presence of a stealth virus. Using regularly-updated antivirus software can reduce risk, but, as we all know, antivirus software is additionally caught in an endless cycle of finding new threats and protecting against them.

CEH v13 highlights the Idle Scan as one of the stealthiest reconnaissance methods available, designed specifically to avoid detection by IDS and security monitoring tools. Idle scanning leverages a “zombie host”—a system with a predictable IPID sequence—to route all probe packets through it. Since no packets ever originate directly from the attacker’s IP, IDS systems are unable to attribute the port scan to the attacker. CEH emphasizes that this technique creates zero direct traffic between the attacker and the target, making it extremely evasive and ideal for highly monitored networks. FIN scans (Option A) are somewhat stealthy but still originate from the attacker and are detectable. TCP Connect scans (Option C) are the most detectable because they complete full connections. ICMP Echo scans (Option D) are easily logged and flagged by IDS. Idle scanning is uniquely suited for bypassing advanced detection systems while still identifying open ports and live hosts.