ECCouncil Certified Ethical Hacker Exam (CEHv13) Sample Questions:

1. An energy infrastructure company in Tulsa, Oklahoma initiated a controlled phishing simulation targeting multiple operational departments. The test email claimed to originate from the corporate compliance office and instructed employees to "complete a mandatory regulatory update within the next 30 minutes to avoid account suspension." The message used a broad salutation instead of employee names and lacked the standard corporate signature footer normally appended to official communications. Additionally, security analysts observed that the embedded hyperlink displayed the organization ' s domain in the message body; however, when examined more closely, the actual destination resolved to a shortened external URL redirecting to an unrelated host. From a defensive analysis standpoint, which indicator provides the strongest technical validation that the message is malicious?

A) Use of generic greetings rather than individualized addressing
B) AThe strongest technical indicator is the hover mismatch URL. CEH social engineering and email- phishing guidance treats deceptive links as one of the clearest validation points because the visible text shown to the user can be made to look trustworthy while the actual hyperlink target leads somewhere completely different. In this scenario, the email imitates an internal compliance notice and uses urgency, generic greetings, and a missing corporate signature, all of which are suspicious. However, those signals are still contextual and behavioral. The most technically reliable evidence is that the displayed organization domain does not match the true destination, which resolves through a shortened external URL to an unrelated host. CEH materials consistently explain that phishing messages frequently redirect victims to fake login pages or malicious sites through disguised links, and verifying the real destination is a core defensive step. This is more conclusive than style-based clues because branding mistakes or greetings alone may vary in legitimate communications. A mismatch between displayed and actual URL directly shows intentional deception in message construction, making it the best technical validation that the message is malicious.
C) Absence of a formal corporate signature
D) Presence of aggressive urgency language
E) Identification of Hover Mismatch URLs in the embedded link

2. You are a security analyst at Sentinel Cyber Group, monitoring the web portal of Aspen Valley Bank in Salt Lake City, Utah. During log review, you notice repeated attempts by attackers to inject malicious strings into the login fields. However, despite these attempts, the application executes queries safely without altering their logic, since user inputs are kept separate from the SQL statements and bound as fixed values before execution.
Based on the observed defense mechanism, which SQL injection countermeasure is the application employing?

A) Perform user input validation
B) Encoding the single quote
C) Use parameterized queries or prepared statements
D) Restrict database access

3. While performing a SYN (half-open) scan using Nmap, you send a SYN packet to a target IP address and receive a SYN/ACK response. How should this result be interpreted?

A) The port is filtered by a firewall
B) The port is closed but acknowledged
C) The scanned port is open and ready to establish a connection
D) The target IP is unreachable

4. At a Chicago-based healthcare provider, security engineer Emily reviews the migration of critical applications to a cloud service. During her evaluation, she notes that administrators can provision new servers, increase storage, and expand compute power instantly through a web dashboard without any manual involvement from the cloud provider. Which NIST-defined characteristic of cloud computing best explains this capability?

A) On-demand self-service
B) Resource pooling
C) Broad network access
D) Measured service

5. A fintech startup in Austin, Texas deploys several virtual machines within a public cloud environment.
During an authorized cloud security assessment, a tester uploads a small script to one of the instances through a web application vulnerability.
After executing the script locally on the instance, the tester retrieves temporary access credentials associated with the instance's assigned role. These credentials are then used to enumerate storage resources and access additional cloud services within the same account.
Which cloud attack technique best corresponds to this activity?

A) CPDoS Attack
B) Cloud Snooper Attack
C) IMDS Attack
D) Wrapping Attack

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