How I got CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) Master Certified. (Resources included)
Hello Infosec Family. I am Shubham Ghosh, an Information Security Analyst with an experience of 2+ years from Jharkhand, India. This writeup is all about I was able to crack both the CEH V11 and CEH Practical Certification from EC Council. I have also included the resources which I had personally used while preparing for these exams.
Let’s start.
It all started with the scholarship program from EC Council for CEH Practical which I applied and got selected. I will not get into much detail about the scholarship program, visit the link below to know more details about it. Also, keep an eye on the social media handles of the EC Council for the scholarship during the months of October and November. If you get selected, you will need to pay a processing fee of 99$ for getting the exam voucher.
CEH Practical
Now I had the voucher with me, but without any official study materials as that was not a part of the scholarship and hence I had no other option apart from self-study. I connected with different people on Linkedin to get insights about the exam and to understand the difficulty level. At that time, I already had pentesting experience of around 2 years and almost everyone recommended me to solve some basic labs from TryHackMe and watch some youtube videos on some tools which will be listed below in detail.
Resources Used:
- The complete EC Council labs are in recorded format. Follow the youtube playlist.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrrgFyE6PtlaCixUxJPM0Y9Peye6iCewH - Notes from the official EC Council Study Material labs.
https://blog.adithyanak.com/ceh-practical-notes - A GitHub repo containing the complete syllabus with resources included. Resources for labs and CTFs included in this repo.
https://github.com/sampritdas8/Ec-Council-CEH-Practical--Guide-For-Exam/blob/main/CEH(Practical).md
Please Note: This is an open book 6-hour proctored exam. You are allowed a break of 15 minutes. You can google anything, watch youtube videos, read blogs, and refer to your digital notes but you can’t talk to anyone during the exam. If you have pentesting experience it will be an easy one for you to crack. You will be given two machines — Kali Linux and Windows 10 machine to hack from and 5 machines will be there on the same network which would be a combination of windows and Linux machines that needs to be hacked for solving the exam questions. There will be 20 questions that need to be answered on the basis of 5 machines out of which you need to answer at least 14 correctly to pass the exam. I can’t share more as there is an NDA in place.
I had prepared for around a week’s time using the resources shared above and then scheduled the exam. I was damn nervous before my exam as I haven’t appeared for a proctored exam before this. I was already halfway through the exam in 2 hours and I was confident even if I submitted it at that time I would have passed it.
I took a break for 15 minutes and then came back with a fresh mind to solve the rest questions. After about 1.5 hours I was completely exhausted with 19 questions answered out of 20. I decided to submit the exam now and after submitting and waiting for a couple of seconds the score was in front of me.
Yes, I passed with a score of 17/20. Below is my credential.
CEH V11
Now the story starts with CEH V11 which is a completely theoretical exam with 125 MCQs to be answered and you need to have a score between 70% to 80% (the exact cut-off depends on the difficulty of the exam). This exam was a sponsored one from my employer so I had a chance to go through a live training of 2 months which was conducted on weekends by https://www.hackerschool.in/.
Along with that, we had access to the EC Council official study material which is a 3000+ pages book that has so much unnecessary content which is not even required in real-life engagements (personal opinion). After the live training got completed I started to go through the official material as the live training was completely practical and not much of use for CEH V11.
Resources:
1. I would highly recommend this series of practice tests as the exam was so similar to what it was on the Udemy course. I got this reference from Reddit.
https://www.udemy.com/course/ec-council-ceh/
2. If you have ample time and patience to read books, you can refer to the book below. If you are good at google dorking you can get a pdf copy for free.
3. Once you are done with your preparation you can go through this short course on youtube. It will help you revise the concepts.
4. One of the best free resources is examtopics.com for any certification exam. Go through all 400 questions from examtopics and you are good for attaining CEH V11.
After dedicating a month's time to the above resources, I scheduled my exam and again I was damn nervous because I’m very bad a remembering theory. But once the exam started I could relate almost 90% of the questions from what I had studied from the above resources. I would like to mention my main focus during the preparation was on the udemy course and examtopics questions which really helped me a very good score of 121/125.
You might be aware, but still, I would mention that on completing CEH V11 and CEH Practical from Ec Council, you would be CEH Master.
That's it for today. Hope you like it and find it useful for your preparation. Until next time. Peace.
