Ethical Hacking Study Guide 2026
Everything you need to pass the Ethical Hacking exam in one place: the exam format, every topic to study, real practice questions with explanations, flashcards, and full-length practice tests. Free, no sign-up needed.
📋 Ethical Hacking Exam Format at a Glance
📚 Ethical Hacking Topics to Study (23)
✍️ Sample Ethical Hacking Questions & Answers
1. What is 'shoulder surfing' in social engineering?
Shoulder surfing involves physically observing a person entering credentials or sensitive information, typically in public places like coffee shops or airports.
2. What is Windows token impersonation, and why is it valuable in privilege escalation?
Token impersonation steals the security token of a higher-privileged process (e.g., SYSTEM) and uses it to execute malicious commands with those elevated privileges.
3. What type of attack exploits the statistical probability that two people in a group share a birthday to find hash collisions faster than brute force?
The birthday attack exploits the birthday paradox to find two inputs with the same hash significantly faster than expected, reducing the security of hash functions.
4. Which psychological principle does an attacker exploit when claiming 'Only 3 spots left — act now!' in a phishing email?
Scarcity exploits the fear of missing out (FOMO) by creating urgency, pressuring targets to act quickly without carefully evaluating the legitimacy of the request.
5. In the digital signature procedure, what algorithm is used?
Explanation: The MD5 message-digest technique, which produces a 128-bit hash value, is cryptographically broken yet nevertheless extensively used. Although MD5 was created with the intention of being used as a cryptographic hash function, it has been discovered to have numerous flaws.
6. What is process hollowing, and how does it differ from standard DLL injection?
Process hollowing creates a legitimate process in suspended state, unmaps its code from memory, and injects malicious code that runs under the trusted process's identity to evade detection.