This is specific to the Knoxville office of Cisco which has a separate interview process. There is a phone interview, a webex interview and then an in person interview with actual coding and problem solving. The phone interview question include what is deadlock, what are race conditions, what is thrashing? In C how do you divide by two without using the /. The webex interview has a lot of C code where you have to say what is wrong with it. Understanding pointers is a large part of these questions. There is also some coding in the webex interview such as in C how to reverse a linked list O(n) time. The in person interview has actual coding and security problems. Certain levels in the exploit-exercises.com VMs were used for some of this as well as other coding questions.