The next interview - the look of the employer
In response to how hard it is to find a job as a pentester .
Also on the topic: a response from chipik .
UPDATE response from the person who took the interview directly, which clarifies a lot.
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This post reflects my personal point of view.
Dear applicants, it is not so important to us who you are - a woman, a man, a humanoid, a person with an unconventional orientation, eukaryotes or Toxoplasma - the main thing is that you should be sensible. This is to the fact that the applicant for some reason suggested that it was the biological floor that was the decisive factor, for that was her will. And girls work for us and, by the way, will give odds to many young people. I hoped that it was so obvious that it was not worth writing about it, but still ...
Now more: unfortunately, the world has been flooded with people who, it seems, have recently been dreaming a little, having read the Internet and happy stories of startups, and who want everything at once, really not knowing how. And it would be fine if knowledge is a business that can be acquired, but the general understanding and ability to think not according to a pattern, which is extremely important for a pentester and is a priority requirement, unfortunately, is completely absent for many.
Chipik already wrote the main things on the interview, although he did not disclose the most important "pearls". So I will not repeat and tell you better for an example, as it was with me, so that everyone would take off their rose-colored glasses and, oh God, realize what a difficult fate you are.
In 2006, I could say I asked for an interview at Digital Security. By the way, I had been preparing for the interview for a long time, because I knew that it would not be easy. And after a while I finally hit him.
At the interview, I was methodically thrown into the dirt for more than 2 hours, and in many respects not ordinary questions about what pentest is and how it is conducted, but questions from the category: “why so and what, if you think?”, “ and what if the vulnerable IIS is in the internal grid, and is accessible outside through a proxy gateway, and the bind-shellcode that is in the public layer, naturally, does not roll? ”and so on ...
If before that I thought I knew something, then they let me know that it was not quite so. And the questions were not about SQL injection, but about how to bypass the limitations in particularly sophisticated situations like Order by or something like that (I already forgot), and moreover, as I learned later, on that moment of public methods did not exist, and they checked me on how developed non-standard thinking, and not how I jagged the names of vulnerabilities.
In general, after the interview, I was given 2 test tasks - like, on, suffer, if you really want to work. The first is to find a buffer overflow vulnerability in a binary application and write an exploit, the second is the same but with the ASLR bypass. I remind once again: this is 2006, this is not for you now with a bunch of information for dummies and an abundance of literature, Korelan courses and so on. Only after successfully completing the assignment and a considerable number of letters and calls with the questions “well, how do you have chances?” I was still accepted as an intern and worked for the first month for free, picking up, as I remember, the safety of McAfee EPO.
Why free? Yes, because I was engaged in research and trained before I was given access to real projects, because the company at that moment was spending more on me than it received in return, teaching me and bringing me up to date. But then, with the passage of time, when I could manifest myself many times with real actions, I became who I am now and have no regrets.
And yes, I did not go to work as a programmer, like 90% of my colleagues in the university, and yes, the first time they received significantly more than me, significantly. But I knew that I was doing what I was really interested in, I got a buzz from work and I get it now, and I knew that sooner or later everything will be super. And I was not mistaken, if only because next week I was going to speak at BlackHat in Vegas for the third time, and once I was just trying to figure out the presentations that I downloaded and read in the evenings ...
Now the requirements for interns are softer, and training with an introduction to the course is much better, and the growth of salary for those who manifest themselves is much faster, so you, of course, were more fortunate.
Well, about the free remote work - well, so you misunderstood, you are remotely learning, and not working, and we help what we can and how we can. And as soon as you start to bring some benefit, you will undoubtedly receive a reward. And if you don’t understand any belmes in principle, how is it then incomprehensible to allow you to be allowed to use real pentest?
And finally. Honestly, I am shocked by the current level of knowledge of students on information security. For that matter, gentlemen, it's so much easier for you! You have a huge amount of literature on all topics, a lot of training materials almost on the video that flooded the Internet, including Russian, a lot of distributions on which you can train to look for vulnerabilities, while earlier it could only be done on live systems. You are already taught in the basics of pentest at the university, whereas earlier it was all collected bit by bit, and what’s really going to continue, the same virtualization systems are another huge plus for training, and even security conferences appeared in Russia for two!
And what is the result? At the interview, in principle, people do not cut into banal things, and if they answer at least somehow the question of what XSS is, then the question: “what to do so that XSS does not exist?” Is already beyond our strength, this was not written in Hacker (forgive me] [my favorite magazine] ...
And most importantly: in those glorious times, even before DSec, when I was not taken to Agnitum, although I did a test task, I didn’t rubbing saliva and did not spend precious time on offended posts, but continued to learn.
Also on the topic: a response from chipik .
UPDATE response from the person who took the interview directly, which clarifies a lot.
')
This post reflects my personal point of view.
Dear applicants, it is not so important to us who you are - a woman, a man, a humanoid, a person with an unconventional orientation, eukaryotes or Toxoplasma - the main thing is that you should be sensible. This is to the fact that the applicant for some reason suggested that it was the biological floor that was the decisive factor, for that was her will. And girls work for us and, by the way, will give odds to many young people. I hoped that it was so obvious that it was not worth writing about it, but still ...
Now more: unfortunately, the world has been flooded with people who, it seems, have recently been dreaming a little, having read the Internet and happy stories of startups, and who want everything at once, really not knowing how. And it would be fine if knowledge is a business that can be acquired, but the general understanding and ability to think not according to a pattern, which is extremely important for a pentester and is a priority requirement, unfortunately, is completely absent for many.
Chipik already wrote the main things on the interview, although he did not disclose the most important "pearls". So I will not repeat and tell you better for an example, as it was with me, so that everyone would take off their rose-colored glasses and, oh God, realize what a difficult fate you are.
In 2006, I could say I asked for an interview at Digital Security. By the way, I had been preparing for the interview for a long time, because I knew that it would not be easy. And after a while I finally hit him.
At the interview, I was methodically thrown into the dirt for more than 2 hours, and in many respects not ordinary questions about what pentest is and how it is conducted, but questions from the category: “why so and what, if you think?”, “ and what if the vulnerable IIS is in the internal grid, and is accessible outside through a proxy gateway, and the bind-shellcode that is in the public layer, naturally, does not roll? ”and so on ...
If before that I thought I knew something, then they let me know that it was not quite so. And the questions were not about SQL injection, but about how to bypass the limitations in particularly sophisticated situations like Order by or something like that (I already forgot), and moreover, as I learned later, on that moment of public methods did not exist, and they checked me on how developed non-standard thinking, and not how I jagged the names of vulnerabilities.
In general, after the interview, I was given 2 test tasks - like, on, suffer, if you really want to work. The first is to find a buffer overflow vulnerability in a binary application and write an exploit, the second is the same but with the ASLR bypass. I remind once again: this is 2006, this is not for you now with a bunch of information for dummies and an abundance of literature, Korelan courses and so on. Only after successfully completing the assignment and a considerable number of letters and calls with the questions “well, how do you have chances?” I was still accepted as an intern and worked for the first month for free, picking up, as I remember, the safety of McAfee EPO.
Why free? Yes, because I was engaged in research and trained before I was given access to real projects, because the company at that moment was spending more on me than it received in return, teaching me and bringing me up to date. But then, with the passage of time, when I could manifest myself many times with real actions, I became who I am now and have no regrets.
And yes, I did not go to work as a programmer, like 90% of my colleagues in the university, and yes, the first time they received significantly more than me, significantly. But I knew that I was doing what I was really interested in, I got a buzz from work and I get it now, and I knew that sooner or later everything will be super. And I was not mistaken, if only because next week I was going to speak at BlackHat in Vegas for the third time, and once I was just trying to figure out the presentations that I downloaded and read in the evenings ...
Now the requirements for interns are softer, and training with an introduction to the course is much better, and the growth of salary for those who manifest themselves is much faster, so you, of course, were more fortunate.
Well, about the free remote work - well, so you misunderstood, you are remotely learning, and not working, and we help what we can and how we can. And as soon as you start to bring some benefit, you will undoubtedly receive a reward. And if you don’t understand any belmes in principle, how is it then incomprehensible to allow you to be allowed to use real pentest?
And finally. Honestly, I am shocked by the current level of knowledge of students on information security. For that matter, gentlemen, it's so much easier for you! You have a huge amount of literature on all topics, a lot of training materials almost on the video that flooded the Internet, including Russian, a lot of distributions on which you can train to look for vulnerabilities, while earlier it could only be done on live systems. You are already taught in the basics of pentest at the university, whereas earlier it was all collected bit by bit, and what’s really going to continue, the same virtualization systems are another huge plus for training, and even security conferences appeared in Russia for two!
And what is the result? At the interview, in principle, people do not cut into banal things, and if they answer at least somehow the question of what XSS is, then the question: “what to do so that XSS does not exist?” Is already beyond our strength, this was not written in Hacker (forgive me] [my favorite magazine] ...
And most importantly: in those glorious times, even before DSec, when I was not taken to Agnitum, although I did a test task, I didn’t rubbing saliva and did not spend precious time on offended posts, but continued to learn.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/147971/
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