eJPT - eLearnSecurity Junior Penetration Tester Password Attacks and Cracking Questions and Answers

Question 1

A penetration tester has obtained a list of password hashes from a compromised Windows machine.
They want to recover the plaintext passwords as efficiently as possible by using a precomputed lookup table that maps hashes to passwords.
Which type of attack is this?

Accepted Answer

Rainbow table attack

Answer

Brute-force attack

Answer

Dictionary attack

Answer

Pass-the-hash attack

Question 2

During a penetration test, an attacker gains access to a user's NTLM hash. Instead of spending time cracking the hash to reveal the plaintext password, the attacker uses the hash directly to authenticate to other network resources and move laterally. What is this technique called?

Accepted Answer

Pass-the-hash (PtH)

Answer

Credential stuffing

Answer

Reverse brute-force

Answer

Hybrid attack

Question 3

Which of the following password cracking tools is specifically designed to perform dictionary attacks, but can also be extended to perform brute-force and rainbow table attacks, making it a highly versatile offline password cracker?

Accepted Answer

John the Ripper

Answer

Metasploit

Answer

Wireshark

Answer

Nmap

Question 4

A junior penetration tester is attempting to crack a password for a web application login. They decide to use an automated tool that systematically tries every possible combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. Which attack method are they using?

Accepted Answer

Brute-Force Attack

Answer

Dictionary Attack

Answer

Password Spraying

Answer

Credential Stuffing

Question 5

In a scenario where an attacker has a list of common passwords (e.g., 'password123', 'qwerty', '123456') and wants to see if any of these passwords work for a large number of different user accounts on a single system, which attack is being performed?

Accepted Answer

Password Spraying

Answer

Reverse Brute-Force Attack

Answer

Pass-the-Hash Attack

Answer

Rainbow Table Attack

Question 6

A penetration tester is using a wordlist containing millions of previously breached passwords to try and gain access to an FTP server. This method is faster than a standard brute-force attack if the user has chosen a common password. What is this type of attack called?

Accepted Answer

Dictionary Attack

Answer

Mask Attack

Answer

Hybrid Attack

Answer

Brute-Force Attack