Cyber-Security Interview Questions

Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting systems, networks, and programs from digital attacks aimed at accessing, modifying, or destroying sensitive data.

It is essential for safeguarding personal, corporate, and governmental data from breaches, ransomware, phishing, and insider threats.

With increasing cyber threats and regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, cybersecurity is a critical aspect of modern technology.

It involves network security, application security, information security, and operational security.

A firewall is a network security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predefined security rules.

It acts as a barrier between trusted internal networks and untrusted external networks like the internet.

Firewalls can be software-based (like Windows Firewall) or hardware-based (like Cisco ASA) and can filter packets by IP, port, protocol, and application-layer rules.

Firewalls are the first line of defense against unauthorized access and network-based attacks.

A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack floods a system with traffic to overwhelm resources and make it unavailable to legitimate users.

Attack vectors include UDP, TCP, and HTTP flood attacks from botnets or amplification techniques.

Mitigation strategies involve rate limiting, blacklisting, CDNs, and cloud-based DDoS protection services like AWS Shield, Cloudflare, and Akamai Prolexic.

Redundancy, auto-scaling, and load balancing also help absorb and distribute traffic during attacks.