Skip to main content

CEH v10 Write-up | Certified Ethical Hacker | 2020

On July 10th I passed the CEH with 105/125 questions right and this is the write up to the exam and certification.

I got really interested in the CEH because it was a well known certification and the syllabus really interested me.

I also had a ton of recommendations online and from people in this industry saying that the CEH was a really good beginner level security certification.



Details about the exam and course:

I bought the course from the EC-Council website. There are certain requirements if you want to take this certification.

You should either have 2 years experience or buy their online iClass to attempt the exam. As I did not have the required experience I bought the online course.

The EC-Council website and how everything works with them is very confusing and I got very confused at times. But thankfully, the customer support answered all my questions and guided me through the buying process and the registration.

The course costs $1100 USD in India but I bought the course during the Black Friday sale in November of 2019 for $700.

I did not use the iClass material and used the materials suggested by Reddit (r/CEH).

Materials:

1. Matt Walker All-in-One Exam Guide

This was such a good book. It is well written with everything you need for the exam. This book also keeps you interested with lots of real life experiences and stories that doesn't bore you too much.

Matt Walker has done a great job in giving only what was needed for the exam. This book alone wont help you pass, but it is a huge factor in it.

It took me around 2.5 months to read the book completely. I read the book completely twice as I didn't want to miss anything. I took lots of notes with a pencil and a note taking app. I didn't end up using notes a lot because I found better notes online (linked below).

2. Boson Practice Exams

Boson practice exams are probably the best resource I used. They are a bit expensive, with the exams costing $100 but, in my opinion, they are totally worth it. It was very useful.

There are 4 practice exams, that totals to 600 questions. These are really helpful because it tells you why the right answers are right and the wrong answers are wrong. The exams also gives you enough practice you need.

I started taking the Boson exams 10 days before the main exam and scored 78%,80%,82% and 80% on the 4 exams. The real exam was quite similar in difficulty.


3. CyberQ - EC Council

I received these with the iLearn package I bought. I kept this questions and exams for last and took them 3-4 days before the main exam because I had read online that these exams were quite close to the the real deal.

The CyberQ dashboard has questions based topic wise in each chapter and has over 600 questions to practice. You have to get 80% in each topic of each chapter to pass that topic. In the first time taking all the topics, I passed 55 out of 67 topics and had to retake the 12 so that I could get a passing score on those.

The CyberQ portal also has 2 real time practice exams to test you and I received passing score on both those exams. My scores on the CyberQ exams were 94% and 90%.

Around 30-40% of the questions I saw on the real exam were very similar to these.

4. Practicing with a CTF machine(VulnHub)

I wanted to practice using the tools which I had studied about in the book so I downloaded the machines from VulnHub and practiced with tools like Nmap, Nessus, hping, Metasploit etc.

This really helped me as instead of memorizing the switches, I had used the tools so much that I knew the switches and how the worked really well. This helped a lot for understanding how the tools work.

Applying the knowledge practically was really useful and I enjoy doing boxes at HackTheBox and TryHackMe now.

Main Exam:

I had bought the course with the in-home proctor based voucher but decided to change to PearsonVUE test center. The EC Council website has an upgrade for this which will cost you $100.

On exam day, I felt pretty confident but I was still nervous because the CEH is an expensive exam and I didn't want to end up wasting all that money.

The test went pretty smoothly. As questions went on, I felt more and more confident about it. There were 2-3 questions where I had absolutely no clue what the answer was and just took the best guess.

I finished the exam in about 1.5 hours and went through all 125 questions again. I had reviewed all the questions and was ready to submit. I called the person in-charge and hit submit.

PASSED!

I was so happy, I had studied for 4 months and it was totally worth it in the end.

I received the certification in my email around 3 days later.



I have learnt a lot from this certification and can't wait to apply this knowledge and get better.

Whats next?

Now that I'm done with the CEH, I will have to catch up with my university portions and study for the online finals I have coming up.

I will continue to do boxes on TryHackMe as I really enjoy the interactive learning I can do. As soon as I'm done with TryHackMe I will start doing HackTheBox to further expand my skills.

I am also looking into learning more about web app hacking so I can get started with bug bounty.

Useful links:






Happy Hacking!

Thanks for reading!

AZID
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Most Viewed Content:

Final Year Project

I'm in the final semester of my degree and my project is something I've been thinking about for a while. I want to solve a problem, so I formed a team and now the project we are planning on creating is "DDoS Detection". We want to create an app which detects DDoS attacks and stop them live. I haven't really started doing much, but first thing I want to do is get datasets. I will search online for datasets on DDoS attacks. My mentor mentioned that I could create a virtual network in VirtualBox and simulate different types of attacks with some programs I can find online. That sounds pretty interesting and I'm going to do some research and find out if thats something I can do.   2 of my teammates are also helping me write code, we plan on using Python and a machine learning library, mostly Keras, to train the model and learn patterns. Lets see how it goes.
Post a Comment
Read more

I gave my first talk at a Security Conference

Last month I gave a fun little talk called "Plenty of Phish in the Sea" in my local security conference. It was a fun presentation on how I phished my friends in high school.  I used to make music back in high school and sent a phishing link to 3 of my best friends to my "Soundcloud" and asked them to sign in through their email. I had created a fake domain that copied the Soundcloud login page but the form to submit username and password had a php script that sent the credentials to a txt file I had on the server.  My friends had weird passwords of course, one guy had his girlfriends name, another had his favourite sport mentioned, and another friend literally had his whole phone number as his password.  I made jokes about it and kept the whole tone of the presentation humorous.   This talk wasn't very technical, but it was my first time and this was an actual experience. Hopefully, next time my talk is a technical one, where I teach the audience something I le...
Post a Comment
Read more

I got a Job as a Security Engineer!

Long time since I wrote a blog post, but things happened. I graduated from University with a degree in Information Science. I interned in 3 different companies since getting certified in CEH and CCNA. I also did huge projects in the final year of college. I had around 200 applications over 2 months and 7 interviews. After being rejected and ghosted numerous times I got a few interviews. 5 of which didn't go so well. Either I wasn't qualified or they didn't think I had enough experience. Fortunately,  the last 2 interviews went extremely well and I got a job offer from BOTH companies! Company 1 is a big Networking company where I where the job was being a part of the Incident Response team and Company 2 is mid-size education software provider. Company 2 had 1 other security person, and I would be person 2, which would have been a great opportunity to learn and grow with. I took a few days and talked to a bunch of people in my family and even posted on Reddit to get advice on...
Post a Comment
Read more