Worth 35% of the CompTIA PenTest+ (PT0-003) exam. CertClue has 108 questions on this objective.
The Attacks and Exploits domain carries the largest exam weight, and most of its content is a long list of named techniques the exam expects you to recognize from a scenario description rather than from the name alone.
Exam tip. Read the scenario for the mechanism, not just the buzzword, several techniques share very similar setups but differ in exactly what gets exploited.
The current PT0-003 objectives expanded beyond the prior version to explicitly cover attacks against AI-integrated applications and a wider range of cloud and API exploitation, ground this bank previously had light coverage of.
Exam tip. Treat anything shipped in client-side code as fully exposed to the end user, and treat any AI-integrated feature as having its own distinct attack surface separate from the traditional application around it.
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1. An attacker sends an email impersonating a company's IT helpdesk, asking the recipient to click a link and enter their credentials to resolve a fake account issue. What social engineering technique category does this describe?
Phishing is a social engineering technique that uses deceptive electronic communication, typically email, to trick victims into revealing sensitive information or credentials. Tailgating involves following an authorized person through a physical access point, shoulder surfing involves observing a victim entering sensitive information in person, and dumpster diving involves searching discarded materials for useful information, none of which match a deceptive email requesting credentials.
2. A tester observes that a web application's login page accepts a specially crafted request that causes the application to grant access without validating the submitted password against any stored value. Which broad attack category does this technique belong to?
Authentication bypass describes any technique that allows an attacker to gain access without properly proving identity through normal credential validation. Privilege escalation involves gaining higher-level access after already having some access, denial of service disrupts availability rather than granting access, and session fixation targets an already-authenticated session rather than the login process itself.
3. An attacker floods a web application's login endpoint with an overwhelming volume of requests from many distributed hosts, exhausting server resources so legitimate users cannot authenticate. What category of attack is this?
Overwhelming a target with traffic from many distributed sources to exhaust resources and deny service to legitimate users is a distributed denial of service attack. The other options are injection or session-forgery attack classes unrelated to resource exhaustion via distributed traffic volume.
4. An attacker places phone calls to multiple employees, impersonating a vendor's support technician to extract configuration details useful for a later attack, relying entirely on voice communication rather than email or text. What is this specific social engineering technique called?
Vishing is voice-based social engineering conducted over phone calls. Phishing typically refers to email, smishing uses SMS text messages, and whaling is phishing specifically targeted at high-value executives, none of which match a voice-call-based approach.
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