Another CISSP story

I thought I’d offer my own story of a successful venture in taking the CISSP exam. I won’t try to suggest I took the best route, but it worked for me. It took 4 months to self study for the exam. It was a spare time venture, mostly using commute time on the train.

I have the third edition of the CISSP CBK. I read every word of all ten domains over a period of a couple of months. I took the quizzes twice.

I picked up a copy of the 11th Hour CISSP. I read that one through three times (a little easier than the CBK) and took the chapter quizzes.

As a final review I used the ISC2 practice exam app to take eight of the tests. I used those results to decide on domains to review prior to the test.

I took the exam in November. It took four hours, including review time. I passed on the first try. That’s my story. Comments and questions are welcome.

Best,

—Bruce

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Comments

cyberguypr

Congrats on the pass!

cgrimaldo

Congrats!

dustervoice

congrats..well done

rbcarleton

Thanks guys. I appreciate it!

gorgon

Congrats. How did you deal with exam nerves?

rbcarleton

gorgon wrote: »

Congrats. How did you deal with exam nerves?

I had a morning test. I made sure to get a good night sleep. I also did a quick review of the quiz questions (with answers) in the back of the CBK, while riding the train to the test. That was my mental warm up. I felt like those things helped.

tkcomp

Congrats on the Pass. I was nervous for the exam but I had an idea to flag the first 2 questions for follow up. It seemed like on a practice test my first couple questions were the most difficult until I mentally set in. Started on question 3 and kept going

impelse

Congrats

Spin Lock

Well done! Congrats on passing!

In terms of your background, how much networking/security experience did you have when you began studying for the CISSP?
And did you find the ISC2 practice tests to be representative of the actual test?

rbcarleton

Spin Lock wrote: »

Well done! Congrats on passing!

In terms of your background, how much networking/security experience did you have when you began studying for the CISSP?
And did you find the ISC2 practice tests to be representative of the actual test?

I did some early INFOSEC work in the 90's. I ran a firewall for the Navy in 95, did TIS Gauntlet and Raptor Eagle installs for commercial clients and did another round of operations and maintenance work for the Air Force. That was a Digital Unix firewall of some kind and an early intrusion detection system called the ASIM.

It the years that followed, I did some database work and then moved into what private sector has taken to calling "DevOps" work. Most of the security work there has been deploying LDAP and Kerberos for single sign-on, with the associated PAM hacking for the Linux clients. I did get to be a configuration manager in the Navy civil service for a while. I also deployed SSO and lockdown automation to satisfy ISO 27000 requirements in the private sector. That helped.

There were only a few surprises (networking) on the test that I didn't recall studying for. It turned out that the questions were actually kind of easy, though I hadn't studied those particular network protocols for the CISSP. The policy and cryptography domains took more effort than other domains. I've been a hands-on kind of worker most of my career.

Spin Lock

Thanks for the feedback. Appreciate your response.