eCPPTv3 - Certified Professional Penetration Tester Exam Review
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Personal Experience
- Training and Preparation
- Effective Note-Taking Strategies
- Strengths
- Drawbacks
- eCPPT v3 vs. v2
- Useful Resources and References
- Conclusion
Introduction
Hello folks! I recently passed the new eLearnSecurity Professional Penetration Tester v3 certification and I wanted to share with you some valuable insights, tips and tricks as well as talking about the cert itself.
Personal Experience
Starting with my own exam experience, so I started the exam, which is 24 hours long, at around 1pm and managed to finish it the next day at 7am so around 19 hours and yeah it took me quite some time mainly because I wasn’t expecting what I got as an exam even though I made sure to well prepare for it, we’ll talk more in details later on about the pros and cons and what disappointed my awaits but overall I’m happy that I’ve achieved one of my goals and got the cert after acquiring the eJPTv2 as well as the eWPTv2.
Training and Preparation
For the training I made sure to complete the official course offered by INE but.. it wasn’t enough, after looking at some reviews over the net I saw that the course was not sufficient to pass the exam and still outdated (the current course is for the v2) but even though it was old I made sure to complete it for my own knowledge we’ll talk later on about what changed between the two versions. As well as the official course I enrolled in a Hack The Box Academy subscription and tackled the Active Directory module and made sure to finish it as i wanted to master Active Directory as well as a VIP sub in HTB Labs to practice on a more “realistic” environments.
You don’t have to follow me as it’s not that cheap to get all of that but I wanted to make sure I’m 100% ready. To sum up let me order things up for you to know what to prioritize first.
- HackTheBox Academy (Active Directory Enumeration & Attacks Module) <– Prioritize this
- Official Course Materials (Labs and Course)
- HackTheBox Labs - Retired Boxes
I highly recommand HTB Labs for those who can afford a VIP sub as they helped me a lot gaining more hands on AD otherwise you can simply go with the labs from HTB Academy Sub.
Effective Note-Taking Strategies
One of many reasons that made me succeed the exam was proper note taking, it is crutial to pass the exam and without that there is a big risk of failure! For me I chose CherryTree to keep my notes and decided to structure my notes as follow
- General Notes : This is where I stored the subnet in scope and wordlists (in order) to use, seasons.txt, months.txt, xato and then rockyou.txt
- Hosts : Table where I put the machine Node Number / Name / Domain / IP address you can add or remove columns as you like.
- Credentials : This is a table too where I stored every account I found as well as its password and if it’s a domain user account or not and some notes about the account.
- Node x [IP] [Machine_Name] : For every node/machine I find I create a CherryTree node where I have some sub-nodes (nmap scan, notes and shares found)
- Nmap Scan
- Important Notes
- Shares
I tried to be organized as much as possible to not get lost and save time but you can custom and organize your notes however you feel comfortable with just try to make everything in place and to keep a note on everything you do that seems important and might need later on throughout your enumeration / exploitation.
Strengths
Let’s now talk a bit about the certification itself. As for the pros, one of the most impactful aspects of the eCPPT was how it helped me discover what I’m truly capable of. It pushed me to explore my dedication, motivation, and ability to tackle challenges.
The certification also obliged me to prepare thoroughly and explore resources like Hack The Box Academy’s paths and modules. Among these, the Active Directory module was particularly valuable, as it provided the foundational knowledge and hands-on practice that were essential for tackling the AD-related part in the certification. This combination of structured preparation and practical learning was instrumental in my success.
The LAB environment was quite reliable contrary to some reports of instability, I didn’t encounter any issues. Everything ran smoothly, and the web-based Kali machine was responsive and fluid.
Drawbacks
For the drawbacks, I was really disappointed to experience the eCPPT with its current version, INE really messed it up so badly compared to older versions, first of all, the syllabus is still outdated as many topics have been removed or changed but we’ll talk about that in the next section.
One of the things that pissed me off as well was the waste of time on bruteforcing as if the main exam objectif was bruteforcing and that’s where INE lied about the “If it takes more than 30 minutes in bruteforce you’re doing something wrong” as some of the credentials gained throughout my enumeration took me more than that and most of the time spent on the exam was waiting for the bruteforce to end.
Another thing is that not every tool is on the box which makes it difficult for those that have been using some specific tools and more precisely specific scripts, as for the tools that are already on the box, I was shocked getting to know that Evil-WinRM does not work even after trying multiple fixes that I found on the web and for that I had to figure out another way around.
And last but not least, one of the major problems of the cert is its questions, yep its questions as some of them doesn’t make any single sense, asking about users that are not on any domain/host and it’s not even an MCQ so you can’t even choose one and let the chance play its role that’s the part that shocked me the most and made me lose much time trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong and doubting myself.
eCPPT v3 vs. v2
First of all, let me say that the v2 (with its drawbacks & unstable lab environment) was way better than the actual version in my opinion as it was covering many interesting things including
- Buffer/Stack Over Flow
- Pivoting & double pivoting
- Report writing
That’s the things that I was so hyped about at first but figuring out that they were removed made me sad and kinda disappointed.
Useful Resources and References
As for the ressources I recommand
- HackTheBox Active Directory Enumeration & Attacks
- HackTheBox Labs
- IPPSec Youtube Channel
- eJPT Official Course / Any eJPT Related Course
- eCPPTv3 Review by ElnurBDa
Conclusion
To conclude I highly advice those who are willing to take the cert to wait until they fix the labs and the questions related to each one of them or to persue another one such as HackTheBox CPTS or their new Active Directory cert, the CAPE.