Interview Tips

An interview is an opportunity for someone to chase something better for his career. It is the time that he needs to shine and demonstrate that he has the professional behaviour. Being professional it means two things: responsibility and maturity.

There are some generic rules that every interviewee should follow in order to impress and increase his possibilities to have a job offer. Except of the technical knowledge a good candidate should focus on the below:

  • Think before you answer any question
  • Know your CV fully and be ready to respond about it
  • Wear professional clothes
  • Arrive at least 10-15 minutes before the interview
  • Perform a background check on the company
  • Perform a background check on the interviewer
  • Give clear answers and concise
  • If you don’t know an answer admit it
  • If you don’t understand a question ask for clarifications
  • Be ready to ask questions about the role and the company
  • Be polite and enthusiastic
  • Thank the interviewer for his time at the end of the interview

Common Windows Commands for Pentesters

Every penetration tester should be fluent with the Windows command prompt since various commands could be used in different stages of a penetration test like domain recon and post exploitation.

Of course there are plenty of windows commands to use and the purpose of this post is not to cover all of them but only those that are needed during an exam certification, interview or a basic penetration test.

The following commands are considered the most common:

  • whoami – List the current user
  • net share – View current network shares
  • net use X: \\IP_Address\c$ – Mount a remote network share
  • net localgroup – Retrieve the local groups
  • net localgroup Administrators – Retrieve local administrators
  • net user pentestuser pentestpass /add – Add a new user to the current host
  • net localgroup Administrators pentestuser /add – Add pentestuser to the local administrators group
  • net user pentestuser /domain – View information about a domain user
  • net group “Domain Admins” /domain – Retrieve domain administrators
  • net config server/workstation – View the domain name of current host
  • net view – List all hosts in the current workgroup or domain
  • net view /domain – List all domains available
  • net user /domain – List all the domain users

Practical Skills for Technical Interviews

If your job interview requires a practical component then you need to prepare in certain areas. Obviously due to time constraints it is not possible for a candidate to cover everything in his preparation and future employers doesn’t expect that as well. However candidates need to demonstrate that they know how to perform basic penetration testing activities up to level and are confident.

Employers usually they are looking for candidates that they know already how to perform the basics as it will take less working time to train them and they can be billable faster.

The following skills are required for almost any technical interview:

Infrastructure

  • Scan a Subnet Network to Identify Hosts
  • Nmap – TCP/UDP scan and Service and Version Detection
  • Metasploit – Search and Configure Modules
  • Meterpreter – Dump hashes and Privilege Escalation
  • Unix – NFS Export, Connect to a Share Folder, Telnet Authentication Bypass
  • Windows – Netapi vulnerability
  • Database – xp_cmdshell

Web Application

  • Authentication Bypass
  • Modify Cookie Values
  • Reflected and Stored Cross Site Scripting
  • SQL Injection
  • Command Execution
  • File Inclusion (RFI and LFI)