Cyber Security Interview Questions in Ahmedabad

Show answer

Define scope, such as all users with write or admin rights. Pull entitlements and last-login data from the app, and route each item to the user's manager and the app owner. Give clear choices of keep or revoke with a deadline, and revoke automatically if not reviewed. Capture evidence for auditors, and review exceptions with security. Run it quarterly for privileged access.

What are the phases of incident response?

Incident Response and ForensicsEasy

Show answer

NIST SP 800-61 describes preparation; detection and analysis; containment, eradication and recovery; and post-incident activity. The 2025 revision aligns these with the NIST CSF 2.0 functions of Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover. Preparation includes playbooks, contacts and tools. Containment limits spread, eradication removes the attacker, recovery restores operations, and lessons learned improve controls and detections.

How would you roll out MFA to 5000 employees?

Show answer

Start with admins and remote access, then high-risk groups like finance. Pick methods, preferring authenticator app number matching and passkeys or FIDO2 keys for admins. Pilot with one department, prepare helpdesk scripts and self-service registration, and communicate clearly with deadlines. Use conditional access in report-only mode to find gaps, then enforce. Block legacy authentication and track registration rates weekly.

A developer has hardcoded database passwords in a public code repository. What do you do?

Show answer

Treat the secret as compromised immediately, even if the commit is removed, because public repos are scraped within minutes. Rotate the password and any related keys, check database logs for unknown logins since the commit time, and remove the secret from git history. Then fix the root cause by moving secrets to a vault or cloud secret manager and adding secret scanning to pre-commit hooks and the CI pipeline.

How do you create a forensic disk image and verify it?

Incident Response and ForensicsMedium

Show answer

Use a write blocker or a forensic tool, image the whole disk, and hash both source and image. sudo dc3dd if=/dev/sdb of=/evidence/case12.img hash=sha256 log=/evidence/case12.log sha256sum /evidence/case12.img Record the hashes, time, examiner and device details in the chain of custody form. Analyse a working copy, never the original.

How do you build a risk register?

GRC and ComplianceEasy

Show answer

Create a table where each risk has an ID, description written as cause, event and impact, asset, owner, inherent likelihood and impact, existing controls, residual rating, treatment decision, action plan, due date and review date. Gather risks through workshops, audits, incidents and threat intelligence. Review the register monthly with owners and report top risks to leadership quarterly.

Leadership wants to block all USB drives tomorrow. How would you handle this request?

Show answer

I would support the goal but plan the rollout to avoid breaking business work. First, find who genuinely needs USB, such as field engineers, using endpoint logs. Then apply a device control policy through EDR or Intune that blocks mass storage by default, allows approved encrypted devices by serial number, and logs exceptions. Communicate the change, pilot it with one department, then enforce company wide.

A developer wants to write their own encryption algorithm for customer data. How do you respond?

Cryptography and PKIEasy

Show answer

I would advise against it. Custom cryptography almost always has flaws that experts would find, and it fails audits. Instead, use well-reviewed libraries such as libsodium, platform crypto APIs, or the cloud KMS with AES-GCM and envelope encryption. I would offer to help choose the right library and key management design, and include a security review in the feature's pull request.

How do you handle a network team that refuses a security change you recommended?

Show answer

Situation: the network team rejected my request to block outbound SMB at the firewall, fearing outages. Task: reduce the risk without damaging the relationship. Action: I shared flow data showing only two servers needed it, proposed an allowlist for them and a one-week monitor-only phase. Result: the team agreed, the rule went live with zero incidents, and we now review rules together monthly.

An audit finds 200 active accounts belonging to employees who left. How do you fix it?

Show answer

Disable the accounts immediately after confirming with HR, then check each for recent logins, since any use after the exit date is a potential incident. Find the root cause, usually manual offboarding or apps not connected to SSO. Integrate the HR system with the identity platform for automatic disabling, connect apps to SSO and SCIM provisioning, and run monthly orphan account reports.

How do you check a server's TLS configuration?

Show answer

Check supported protocol versions, ciphers and certificate details. OpenSSL gives a quick view, and tools like testssl.sh give a full report. openssl s_client -connect example.com:443 -tls1_2 openssl s_client -connect example.com:443 -servername example.com | openssl x509 -noout -dates -issuer ./testssl.sh example.com Disable TLS 1.0 and 1.1, weak ciphers like RC4 and 3DES, and fix expiring certificates.

What is MITRE ATT&CK and how is it used?

Show answer

MITRE ATT&CK is a public knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques observed in real attacks, organised in matrices for Enterprise, Mobile and ICS. Tactics are the goal, such as Persistence, and techniques are the method, such as T1053 Scheduled Task. Teams use it to map detection coverage, write threat-informed detections, plan red and purple team exercises, and describe incidents in a common language.

You receive an alert for 300 failed logins on one account followed by a success. How do you triage it?

Show answer

This pattern suggests brute force or password spraying that succeeded. Check source IPs, location and logon type, and whether MFA was used for the success. Review what the account did after login, such as mailbox rules, file access or new tokens. If suspicious, disable the account or revoke sessions, reset the password, block source IPs and check whether the same IPs targeted other accounts.

A US customer asks your Indian SaaS company for a SOC 2 report. What is it and which type should you aim for?

GRC and ComplianceMedium

Show answer

SOC 2 is an attestation report by an independent auditor on a service organisation's controls against the AICPA Trust Services Criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy. A Type I report checks control design at a point in time; a Type II checks operating effectiveness over a period, typically 6 to 12 months. Indian SaaS companies selling to US customers commonly need SOC 2 Type II.

Your company is moving a banking application to the cloud. What security controls would you require?

Cloud SecurityHard

Show answer

I would require a landing zone with separate accounts, Indian region hosting for data residency, private networking with no public database endpoints, WAF and DDoS protection, customer managed KMS keys, PAM for admin access, central immutable logging to the SIEM, CSPM against CIS benchmarks, vulnerability scanning in CI, and a tested backup and disaster recovery plan. All mapped to RBI and audit requirements.

What is PCI DSS?

GRC and ComplianceMedium

Show answer

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard applies to any organisation that stores, processes or transmits cardholder data. Version 4.0.1 is current, and its future-dated requirements became mandatory from March 2025. It has 12 requirement areas, including network security controls, protecting stored data, encryption in transit, vulnerability management, access control, logging and testing. Reducing scope through tokenisation and segmentation lowers compliance effort.

How do you decode and check a JWT during troubleshooting?

Show answer

A JWT has header, payload and signature separated by dots. Decode the first two parts to read claims, but never trust them without verifying the signature. echo $TOKEN | cut -d. -f2 | base64 -d 2>/dev/null Check iss, aud, exp and nbf claims. In code, verify with a library using the expected algorithm and issuer keys, and reject alg none.

What is TLS and what does the handshake achieve?

Show answer

TLS secures data in transit. In the TLS 1.3 handshake the client and server agree on cipher suites, perform an ephemeral key exchange such as X25519 for forward secrecy, and the server proves its identity with a certificate signed by a trusted CA. Both derive session keys, then traffic is encrypted with an AEAD cipher like AES-GCM. TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are deprecated and should be disabled.

How do you replace static cloud keys in CI/CD pipelines?

Cloud SecurityHard

Show answer

Use workload identity federation with OIDC. The CI system issues a short-lived signed token for each job, and the cloud provider trusts that issuer and exchanges the token for temporary credentials of a narrow role. Restrict the trust policy to a specific repository and branch. This removes long-lived secrets from pipeline settings, so a leaked log or variable no longer gives permanent access.

Tell me about a time you had to say no to a senior person's access request.

Show answer

Situation: a senior manager asked for permanent admin rights on production to speed up reports. Task: protect production without blocking the work. Action: I explained the audit and breach risk, then offered a read-only reporting role and a scheduled export within a day. Result: the manager got the data faster than before, and the audit later had no finding on that system.

What is threat hunting?

Show answer

Threat hunting is proactive searching for attackers who evaded existing detections. Hunters start from a hypothesis, for example that attackers use scheduled tasks for persistence, then query EDR and SIEM data to confirm or reject it. Findings become new detection rules. Hunting requires good data retention, knowledge of normal behaviour and frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to guide hypotheses.

Users complain that a new firewall rule broke an application. How do you troubleshoot?

Show answer

First check the firewall logs for denied traffic from the affected users or servers around the change time. Compare the change ticket with actual app requirements, since apps often use extra ports or dependencies. Use packet capture or a test connection to confirm. Then add a narrow rule for the real need, not an any-any rule, and update documentation so the next change does not repeat the problem.

What is a false positive and a false negative in SOC alerts?

SOC Operations and SIEMEasy

Show answer

A false positive is an alert on benign activity, such as an admin running a legitimate script flagged as malicious. A false negative is a real attack that produced no alert, which is more dangerous. Too many false positives cause alert fatigue and missed real incidents. Analysts tune rules with allowlists, thresholds and context, and test detections against simulated attacks to find false negatives.

Describe a time you dealt with a user who was upset about losing access.

Show answer

Situation: after an access review removed a sales manager's export rights, he escalated angrily before a client deadline. Task: solve his need while keeping the control. Action: I listened, explained why bulk exports were restricted, and arranged a time-bound approved export through his manager within an hour. Result: he met the deadline, and we added a documented request path for such cases.

Tell me about a time you made a mistake at work and how you handled it.

Show answer

Situation: as a Tier 1 analyst I closed an alert as false positive without checking the user's later activity. Task: my lead found it was a real phishing compromise. Action: I owned the mistake, helped contain it, and proposed a checklist for credential alerts that includes reviewing activity after login. Result: the checklist was adopted by the shift and similar misses stopped.

How do you set up a break-glass account safely?

Identity and Access ManagementHard

Show answer

Create two cloud-only emergency accounts excluded from normal conditional access but protected by FIDO2 keys stored in a safe. Use long random passwords, store them split between two senior people or in a sealed vault, and give them the minimum emergency role. Alert the SOC on any sign-in, and test them every quarter. They exist for identity provider outages or misconfigured policies.

A user reports a pop-up saying their files are encrypted. What are your first steps?

Show answer

First, isolate the device from the network, ideally through EDR network containment, without powering it off so memory evidence is kept. Inform the incident lead and start a timeline. Check for the same indicators on other hosts, disable the user's sessions and reset credentials if needed, and identify the ransomware family from the note. Then confirm backups are intact and offline before any recovery begins.

Your SOC sees heavy DNS traffic with long random subdomains from one workstation. Which DNS attacks should you consider and what defences apply?

Show answer

Key DNS attacks are cache poisoning, which inserts false records; DNS tunnelling, which hides data or command traffic inside queries; domain hijacking through registrar account takeover; and DNS amplification DDoS. Defences include DNSSEC to sign records, protective DNS resolvers that block malicious domains, monitoring for long or high-entropy subdomains, registrar lock with MFA, and rate limiting open resolvers.

Your manager asks why the company needs security when it already has antivirus on every laptop. How do you explain?

Show answer

I would explain that antivirus mainly blocks known malicious files, while most modern attacks use stolen credentials, phishing links, living-off-the-land tools like PowerShell, or cloud misconfigurations that antivirus never sees. I would map our top risks to missing controls, such as MFA, EDR, logging and backups, and use a recent real incident pattern to show business impact in downtime and regulatory reporting cost.

What is a DDoS attack and how is it mitigated?

Show answer

A Distributed Denial of Service attack floods a target from many sources to exhaust bandwidth, connection tables or application resources. Types are volumetric floods, protocol attacks like SYN floods, and application layer floods hitting costly pages. Mitigation uses upstream scrubbing services or CDN providers, anycast networks, rate limiting, SYN cookies, autoscaling, and a tested runbook agreed with the ISP before an attack.

What is a salt and why is it used in password hashing?

Cryptography and PKIEasy

Show answer

A salt is a unique random value stored with each password hash. It makes identical passwords produce different hashes, so precomputed rainbow tables are useless and attackers must crack each hash separately. Salts are not secret. A pepper is an additional secret kept outside the database. Combined with slow algorithms like Argon2id, bcrypt or scrypt, salting makes offline cracking much more expensive.

A TLS certificate expired on the main customer portal and caused an outage. How do you prevent this in future?

Cryptography and PKIMedium

Show answer

First renew and deploy the certificate to restore service. For prevention, build a certificate inventory from scanning and CT logs, automate issuance and renewal with ACME where possible, and set alerts at 30, 14 and 7 days before expiry to a team mailbox, not an individual. Assign an owner per certificate and add expiry checks to monitoring dashboards, since shorter lifetimes are coming.

An auditor finds that access reviews were not done for two quarters. What do you do?

GRC and ComplianceMedium

Show answer

Acknowledge the finding and agree a remediation plan. Immediately run the overdue reviews for in-scope systems, prioritising privileged access, and revoke unneeded access. Find the cause, such as no owner or a manual process, and fix it by assigning owners, automating campaigns in the IGA tool and adding reminders and escalations. Provide evidence of completed reviews to close the finding.

How do you write a Splunk search to find brute-force attempts on Windows?

Show answer

Search failed logon events, count per account and source, and filter high counts. index=wineventlog EventCode=4625 | stats count AS failures dc(TargetUserName) AS users BY IpAddress | where failures > 50 | sort - failures A high distinct user count from one IP points to password spraying rather than a single account brute force.

What are the four risk treatment options?

GRC and ComplianceEasy

Show answer

Mitigate by adding controls to reduce likelihood or impact, such as MFA. Transfer by shifting financial impact to others, like cyber insurance or contracts. Avoid by stopping the risky activity, for example retiring an old system. Accept when the risk is within appetite and formally documented with an owner and review date. Risk acceptance should be signed by a business owner, not just the security team.

What is RBAC and ABAC?