Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Razorpay hiring for Cyber Security roles
Razorpay is an Indian fintech company providing payment gateway, payment links, payroll, business banking through RazorpayX and other tools for businesses. Its engineering and analytics teams work on payment success rates, risk, reconciliation and merchant products. It hires for software engineers, SDETs, data analysts and data scientists.
For Cyber Security roles, this Razorpay practice set focuses most on Network Security (7), Cloud Security (6), Cryptography and PKI (4), SOC Operations and SIEM (4). It has 4 easy, 16 medium, 10 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
Fintech
Headquarters
Bengaluru, India
Main India offices
Bengaluru, Mumbai
Razorpay Cyber Security interview process
Online assessment or assignment
Machine coding or technical round
Design or problem solving round
Hiring manager round
Culture fit round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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01
What is a salt and why is it used in password hashing?
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 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.
IaC scanning checks Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep or Kubernetes manifests for misconfigurations before deployment, such as public buckets or unencrypted databases. Tools include Checkov, tfsec in Trivy, and KICS. It shifts security left, so issues are fixed in a pull request rather than in production. Combine it with policy as code, like OPA, and drift detection to catch manual changes made in the console.
04
What are the data residency rules relevant to cloud in India?
The DPDP Act 2023 allows cross-border transfer of personal data except to countries the government restricts, though sector rules can be stricter. RBI requires payment system data to be stored only in India. CERT-In requires ICT logs to be kept in India for 180 days. SEBI and IRDAI have their own requirements for regulated entities. Cloud architects choose Indian regions such as Mumbai or Hyderabad for compliance.
05
How do you analyse a suspicious email reported by a user?
Get the original email with full headers. Check SPF, DKIM and DMARC results, the real sender and Reply-To, and the received path. Extract URLs and attachments without clicking, check them in a sandbox and reputation services, and compare the sender domain for lookalikes. If malicious, search for the same message across mailboxes, purge it, block indicators and check whether anyone clicked or entered credentials.
06
Tell me about a time you worked with developers to fix a security finding.
Situation: a scan found a critical vulnerability in a library used by five microservices just before a release. Task: fix it without delaying the launch. Action: I paired with the lead developer, confirmed which services were truly exploitable, prepared tested upgrade pull requests and added a WAF rule as a temporary safeguard. Result: all services were patched in two days and release stayed on schedule.
07
Your SOC sees heavy DNS traffic with long random subdomains from one workstation. Which DNS attacks should you consider and what defences apply?
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.
08
What is social engineering and what are its common forms?
Social engineering manipulates people rather than technology to gain access or information. Common forms are phishing emails, spear phishing aimed at specific staff, vishing over phone calls, smishing over SMS or WhatsApp, pretexting with a fake story, baiting with infected USB drives and tailgating into offices. Defences include awareness training, phishing simulations, call-back verification for payment changes, and technical controls such as MFA and email authentication.
09
Your company is moving a banking application to the cloud. What security controls would you require?
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.
10
How do you write basic Linux host firewall rules with nftables?
Certificate Transparency requires publicly trusted CAs to log every issued certificate in public append-only logs. Browsers require proof of logging before trusting a certificate. Domain owners can monitor these logs to detect certificates issued for their domains without permission, for example by a compromised CA or a phishing actor. Security teams also use CT logs for subdomain discovery and asset inventory.
12
Your company website is under an application layer DDoS attack. What actions do you take?
Confirm it is an attack and not a traffic spike by checking request patterns, user agents and source spread. Enable or tighten the CDN or WAF bot protection and rate limits on targeted URLs, add challenge pages for suspicious clients, and cache heavy pages. Inform the ISP or DDoS provider and management. After the attack, review logs, tune rules and update the runbook.
13
What is threat intelligence and what are IOCs and TTPs?
Threat intelligence is analysed information about adversaries, their tools and behaviour. Indicators of Compromise are artefacts like malicious IPs, domains and file hashes; they are easy to use but change quickly. TTPs, tactics, techniques and procedures, describe how attackers operate, and are harder for attackers to change. The Pyramid of Pain shows that detecting TTPs causes attackers more cost than blocking hashes.
14
A private key for an internal code-signing certificate was found on a shared drive. What actions do you take?
Treat it as compromised. Revoke the certificate with the CA, issue a new one with the key generated and stored in an HSM or cloud key service, and restrict signing to the build pipeline. Search for any binaries signed with the old key after the exposure time and investigate them. Remove the file, check drive access logs to see who opened it, and update the key handling policy.
15
How do you generate a strong random secret or password from the command line?
Use a cryptographically secure source, never a simple random function. OpenSSL and Python's secrets module both use the operating system CSPRNG.
openssl rand -base64 32
python3 -c "import secrets; print(secrets.token_urlsafe(32))"
Store the output in a password manager or secret vault, not in a text file or chat message.
16
You are asked to prepare the company for its first ISO 27001 certification in nine months. How do you plan it?
Get leadership sponsorship and define the ISMS scope. Run a gap assessment against clauses and Annex A, then do the risk assessment and build the risk treatment plan and Statement of Applicability. Write core policies, implement missing controls, and train staff. Collect evidence for a few months, run an internal audit and management review, fix findings, then book stage 1 and stage 2 audits.
NIST CSF 2.0, released in 2024, organises cyber security outcomes into six functions: Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover. Govern was added to cover strategy, roles, policy and supply chain risk. Each function has categories and subcategories. Organisations create current and target profiles to find gaps and plan improvements. It is voluntary and widely used to report maturity to boards.
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.
19
How do you decode and check a JWT during troubleshooting?
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.
20
Users complain that a new firewall rule broke an application. How do you troubleshoot?
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.
Sigma is a generic YAML detection format that converts to SIEM queries.
title: Office Spawning PowerShell
logsource:
product: windows
category: process_creation
detection:
selection:
ParentImage|endswith: ['\winword.exe', '\excel.exe']
Image|endswith: '\powershell.exe'
condition: selection
level: high
tags: [attack.execution, attack.t1059.001]
22
A key log source stopped sending data to the SIEM two days ago. Why does it matter and what do you do?
Silent log gaps create blind spots where attacks go undetected, and they can also break compliance. Raise it as a priority issue, check the forwarder or agent health, network path, licence limits and parsing errors, and restore ingestion. Check whether the gap overlapped any suspicious activity. Then add log source health monitoring that alerts when expected volume drops, so gaps are found in hours, not days.
23
Leadership wants to block all USB drives tomorrow. How would you handle this request?
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.
24
What is a man-in-the-middle attack on TLS and how do certificates prevent it?
In a MITM attack, an attacker intercepts traffic and pretends to be the server. Certificates prevent this because the client checks that the server certificate chains to a trusted root, matches the hostname and is valid. An attacker cannot produce a valid certificate without the private key or a compromised CA. Certificate warnings that users click through, and apps that skip validation, break this protection.
25
What are key container and Kubernetes security practices?
Use minimal, scanned base images and sign them. Run containers as non-root with read-only filesystems and dropped capabilities. In Kubernetes, enforce Pod Security Standards, use RBAC with least privilege, network policies to restrict pod traffic, secrets from an external store, and keep the API server private. Enable audit logs and runtime detection such as Falco, and patch clusters regularly.
26
GuardDuty reports an EC2 instance communicating with a known crypto-mining pool. How do you respond?
Isolate the instance by changing its security group to a quarantine group with no traffic, and snapshot its volumes for analysis. Check how it was compromised: exposed SSH, vulnerable app or leaked key. Review CloudTrail for actions by its instance role. Terminate and rebuild from a clean image, rotate secrets the instance could access, and fix the root cause, such as closing public ports.
27
A developer has hardcoded database passwords in a public code repository. What do you do?
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.
28
What is the difference between OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect?
OAuth 2.0 is an authorisation framework; it lets an app get an access token to call an API on a user's behalf, without the user's password. It does not define who the user is. OpenID Connect adds an identity layer with an ID token, a signed JWT containing user claims, and a userinfo endpoint. Use OIDC for login, and OAuth access tokens for API authorisation.
Secure Access Service Edge combines networking, such as SD-WAN, with cloud-delivered security services: secure web gateway, CASB, ZTNA and firewall as a service. Users connect to the nearest provider point of presence, and policy follows them anywhere. It suits Indian companies with many branches and hybrid workers because traffic no longer has to backhaul to a head office data centre. Vendor lock-in and migration effort are the trade-offs.
30
How do you analyse a memory dump with Volatility 3?
Run plugins to list processes, network connections and injected code, then dig into suspicious items.
vol -f mem.raw windows.info
vol -f mem.raw windows.pstree
vol -f mem.raw windows.netscan
vol -f mem.raw windows.cmdline
vol -f mem.raw windows.malfind
Look for unusual parent-child processes, processes in odd paths and connections to unknown IPs.
Tips to crack the Razorpay Cyber Security interview
Learn how a payment gateway works end to end, including authorisation, settlement, refunds and chargebacks.
Practise API testing with tools like Postman and understand webhooks if you are applying for QA roles.
Read Razorpay's engineering blog to understand its scale challenges and use them in design discussions.
Keep a one-minute story ready for every project on your CV: problem, your part, tools, result.
Practise the hard questions on this page aloud; Razorpay interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Razorpay Cyber Security interview?
Candidates usually go through 5 stages: Online assessment or assignment; Machine coding or technical round; Design or problem solving round; Hiring manager round; Culture fit round. The exact rounds change with the role, team, location and your experience, so confirm the process with the recruiter.
Which topics should I prepare for the Razorpay Cyber Security interview?
This practice set leans on Network Security (7), Cloud Security (6), Cryptography and PKI (4), SOC Operations and SIEM (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Razorpay interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Razorpay?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in fintech interviews like Razorpay's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Razorpay hire Cyber Security professionals in India?
Razorpay has large teams in Bengaluru, Mumbai. Openings and locations change often, so check the Razorpay careers page and filter by city and experience.