Certified Ethical Hacker Domain 1: Background

About the Domain

The first domain of the Certified Ethical Hacker exam is designed to test a candidate’s knowledge of everything that you need to know to practice ethical hacking which isn’t specific to the information security domain. This includes the fundamentals of networking, how various Internet-enabled protocols and technologies work and some of the most common attack vectors and security solutions.

Due to the amount of information covered by this domain, it’s one of the largest of the seven domains on the exam (edged out by tools and security). Twenty-seven of the exam’s 125 questions are devoted to this topic.

What’s Covered

This domain of the exam is intended to test an applicant’s understanding of the fundamental knowledge necessary to practice ethical hacking. The domain is broken into three subdomains: network and communication technologies, information security threats and attack vectors and information security technologies.

Network and Communication Technologies

The first subdomain covers the basics of networking and communication technologies. The CEH exam is designed to have ten questions on this subject, or about 8 percent of the total exam.

By networking technologies, the EC-Council means networking hardware, infrastructure and so on. On the hardware side, understanding the purpose and function of a firewall is a must, as well as the differences between a hub, switch and gateway. A candidate should know what a router is, what it does and how it works.

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On the software side, a CEH candidate should have taken a networking course or had equivalent experience. It’s useful to know how the TCP and ARP protocol work, the basics of the OSI networking model, how IP addresses and subnetting work and the port numbers of important, common services (such as HTTP, DNS and SNMP).

The term “communication technologies” is used by the EC-Council as a catch-all (Read more...)