New Release 312-50v13 CEH v13 Questions

Social engineering attacks that target business processes are especially effective when they mimic legitimate workflows. CEH learning materials emphasize that attackers often exploit trust relationships and organizational procedures rather than attempting broad or generic phishing methods. In the context of HR operations, onboarding portals are highly trusted and frequently accessed by new employees who expect to enter personal information, submit documents, and receive initial network credentials. By creating a fake onboarding portal that closely resembles the organization’s internal system, an attacker can collect credentials without triggering suspicion because the action being requested appears normal and expected. This method leverages procedural familiarity, brand consistency, and the implied authority of HR communications, making it far more effective than generic phishing emails or unsolicited social media messages. Phone calls, while sometimes useful, involve real-time interaction and increase the chance of detection. The fake portal, however, seamlessly integrates into existing processes, making it the most effective and lowest-profile approach for acquiring network credentials.

CEH explains that SQL injection testing should begin with controlled, intentional manipulation of SQL syntax to determine whether user input is improperly concatenated into backend queries. While destructive queries like DROP TABLE are not recommended in real-world ethical hacking engagements, CEH uses this example as a conceptual demonstration of how SQLi can influence database commands. In practice, a penetration tester would more safely use benign tautologies such as ' OR '1'='1 to test whether unauthorized data is returned. However, within CEH’s theoretical framing, injecting a clearly malicious SQL command demonstrates whether the input is executed at the database level. This validates improper sanitization, the use of dynamic SQL queries, and missing parameterized input handling. CEH stresses that SQLi is among the most critical vulnerabilities because it allows attackers to bypass authentication, exfiltrate data, or manipulate the database structure. XSS, brute-forcing, and directory traversal do not test SQL query manipulation and therefore do not confirm SQL injection.

DNS uses Ports 53 which is almost always open on systems, firewalls, and clients to transmit DNS queries. instead of the more familiar Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) these queries use User Datagram Protocol (UDP) due to its low-latency, bandwidth and resource usage compared TCP-equivalent queries. UDP has no error or flow-control capabilities, nor does it have any integrity checking to make sure the info arrived intact.

How is internet use (browsing, apps, chat etc) so reliable then? If the UDP DNS query fails (it’s a best-effort protocol after all) within the first instance, most systems will retry variety of times and only after multiple failures, potentially switch to TCP before trying again; TCP is additionally used if the DNS query exceeds the restrictions of the UDP datagram size – typically 512 bytes for DNS but can depend upon system settings.

Figure 1 below illustrates the essential process of how DNS operates: the client sends a question string (for example, mail.google[.]com during this case) with a particular type – typically A for a number address. I’ve skipped the part whereby intermediate DNS systems may need to establish where ‘.com’ exists, before checking out where ‘google[.]com’ are often found, and so on.

Many worms and scanners are created to seek out and exploit systems running telnet. Given these facts, it’s really no surprise that telnet is usually seen on the highest Ten Target Ports list. Several of the vulnerabilities of telnet are fixed. They require only an upgrade to the foremost current version of the telnet Daemon or OS upgrade. As is usually the case, this upgrade has not been performed on variety of devices. this might flow from to the very fact that a lot of systems administrators and users don’t fully understand the risks involved using telnet. Unfortunately, the sole solution for a few of telnets vulnerabilities is to completely discontinue its use. the well-liked method of mitigating all of telnets vulnerabilities is replacing it with alternate protocols like ssh. Ssh is capable of providing many of an equivalent functions as telnet and a number of other additional services typical handled by other protocols like FTP and Xwindows. Ssh does still have several drawbacks to beat before it can completely replace telnet. it’s typically only supported on newer equipment. It requires processor and memory resources to perform the info encryption and decryption. It also requires greater bandwidth than telnet thanks to the encryption of the info . This paper was written to assist clarify how dangerous the utilization of telnet are often and to supply solutions to alleviate the main known threats so as to enhance the general security of the web

Once a reputation is resolved to an IP caching also helps: the resolved name-to-IP is usually cached on the local system (and possibly on intermediate DNS servers) for a period of your time . Subsequent queries for an equivalent name from an equivalent client then don’t leave the local system until said cache expires. Of course, once the IP address of the remote service is understood , applications can use that information to enable other TCP-based protocols, like HTTP, to try to to their actual work, for instance ensuring internet cat GIFs are often reliably shared together with your colleagues.

So, beat all, a couple of dozen extra UDP DNS queries from an organization’s network would be fairly inconspicuous and will leave a malicious payload to beacon bent an adversary; commands could even be received to the requesting application for processing with little difficulty.

Zone transfers (AXFR) are DNS operations that replicate zone data from a primary server to a secondary server. These can be abused during DNS enumeration if improperly secured.

CEH v13 recommends using the following tools for attempting or testing zone transfers:

A. NSLookup – supports AXFR using set type=any or set type=AXFR

C. Dig – dig @ns.example.com example.com AXFR

D. Sam Spade – GUI tool capable of DNS zone transfer

E. Host – command-line tool used for DNS lookups and AXFR

Incorrect Tools:

B. Finger – used for user enumeration, not DNS

F. Netcat – general-purpose networking tool, not specific to DNS

G. Neotrace – used for traceroute/path tracing, not DNS