Hi,
as there are not so much reviews ATM about this course and certification, though I could as well add one as I believe it deserves some attention.
I was a total noob on pentesting to be honest. Let's say I knew the basics of networking and stuff, but had no idea on how to use the "tools" properly.
I'd looked into the CEH, but then eLS came along and the reviews on the eCCPT proved eLS offered a better package than EC in this matter. So why bother a theory if you can go for the practice.
But as stated before, I was kind of new in this. So yes, I already had the CEH AIO and read that one through and even managed to learn something from it. But, I believed it to be rather expensive. Nevertheless, I did tag parts for future use, so I'm not saying it was totally lost.
Now I can compare at least the theory of CEH with the entry-level of eLS and guess what: PTSv3 is actually FUN to do.
If you're that type of person that really likes to try things out and feel that childish thrill when it actually works out, then I believe PTSv3 is something for you. After all, I have a full-time job and a family and some more hobbies. Just saying that I couldn't stay for days behind a screen testing things out either.
That said, the level of enjoyment was probably due to the excellent slides and videos.
I went through all of them, tried everything out in the videos and made mindmap-sheets on every topic.
IMVHO eLS attacks the issue in a structured manner, although you might find out later on that you need to add some more for yourself. Guess that's absolutely normal.
Ok, so I had the slides, went to the videos and did the labs. I then found securitytube's metasploit course to be an excellent add-on for the metasploit part in PTSv3, although, and I have to be honest, you do not need to have that add-on. It only helps to deal with metasploit and recognise when you have to reset the lab (which I had to do a couple of times during the exam as well).
Now back to the labs: really interesting and good for practice. I also had plenty of time left to go through all the labs without the manuals for a second time and rely on my mindmap-sheets to find out if I lacked some more knowledge or had gaps. (there were some
).
I quickly found out, however, that I ran into issues with my Kali VM and the VPN connection and found the labs not so stable (I cursed them more than once as well).
So I decided to install Kali on an 'older' laptop and work from there. Tadaam, everything ran smoothly. So smoothly I decided to add a couple VMs on that machine to practice some more in another environment than the HERA Labs. Conclusion: the reason to curse was probably my own setup and not due to the Labs.
I can also comment on the support and was pretty pleased with the reaction-time and the quality of the answer. Some others may just say 'try harder', but here I got a clear answer. (had to do with metasploit btw). Only needed support once, so cannot comment further on that.
I believe you'd be able to manage the course and the exam without the labs and videos, if you already know what all this is about. For me, it was no waste of money.
The exam directives are a nice push in the right direction. However, at first, I almost got a heart attack when I started to dive in, luckily after reading the questions and knowing where to start. Once that first obstacle was covered, I was good to go.
Had to redo some steps due to connection-losses and crashed services. But it's also a good thing to learn recognizing these situations I think.
Started this morning with the exam and rounded this evening. Wasn't expecting to wrap things up that fast, but then again: this is much better for my health. I felt like I was going to go through all of it in one rush. Even started to eat less at noon and kept thinking about how to handle this or that issue while doing other things (cooking, shopping, recovering kids ...)
Enjoyable feeling to have it passed
