eLearnSecurity PTSv3 Review

Hi everyone, longtime lurker here.
I recently completed the PTSv3 course and obtained the certification so I thought I'd share my experiences.

Initially, I was going to do the Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) certification first but after reading through many reviews I decided against it as my first certification. I stumbled on the eJPT certification training and reading through their syllabus; it looked like a promising start to my journey in cyber security so I immediately purchased a package.

Training Material
I purchased their "FULL" training package which came with the training materials (slides, videos), a lab to practice in (30 hours) and a voucher to do the exam (with 1 free retake). My only problem with the training material was the slides being presented using Adobe Flash (you have to pay extra for the HTML5 and PDF versions). This meant that the initial loading of the slides was extremely slow (and Flash in 2017 really?!?!?). The videos were clear and was a great supplement to each section of the slides. eLearnSecurity uses something called HERA which was pretty nice to use. Each time you want to enter a lab, you click the START button and it fires up your machine for you. When you are done, you simply stop your lab environment by clicking the STOP button. Each lab exercise came with clear instructions and answers in-case you got stuck.

Shortcuts
I skipped the programming section of the slides as they were not included in the labs or the final exam. I also skipped the labs that were an introduction to Wireshark as I have had a fair bit of experience using it already.

Exam
You are given 3 days to complete the exam. There are several machines you have to exploit and answer a few questions from your findings. It took me 5 hours (which included a lunch and a break) to complete the exam with a 95% (you need 75% to pass). Other reviews that I've read mention completion time from roughly 2 hours to 12 hours. The exam was fairly difficult and it had me scratching my head a few times but with 3 days to complete it, it is very manageable

Timeline
1st March 2017

Purchase PTSv3

4th March 2017

Read through all the training slides
Watch all the training videos

5th March 2017

Completed Scanning and OS Fingerprinting Lab

9th March 2017

Completed Nessus Lab
Completed Dirbuster Lab
Completed Cross-Site Scripting Lab

10th March 2017

Completed Burp Suite Lab
Completed SQL Injection Lab

12th March 2017

Completed Bruteforce and Password Cracking Lab

17th March 2017

Completed Null Session Lab
Completed ARP Poisoning Lab
Completed Metasploit Lab

18th March 2017

Completed the final exam.

Overall, I fairly enjoyed studying for this certification. The virtual labs were fun and introduced me to a wide variety of concepts in penetration testing. After completing this certification and working on some vulnerable machines, I feel decently prepared for the OSCP (hopefully starting around April 2017!).

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Comments

p@r0tuXus

Very nice write-up. Thanks for that. I hope you will give us another successful pass-post on the OSCP in June. Congratulations!

TheFORCE

I'm at the metasploit lab right now, i do the labs on the weekends so I try to keep notes to refresh my memory.
Since you completed everything within a month can you tell us if you kept any notes on the labs and if you had to use those notes in other labs or at the final exam? What is your experience going to this certification, you said you had experience with wireshark but do you have any other type of experience? That will help us gauge the level of preparedness one should have.

Nice job by the way.

baegmon

p@r0tuXus wrote: »

Very nice write-up. Thanks for that. I hope you will give us another successful pass-post on the OSCP in June. Congratulations!

Thanks for the kind words, first time writing up a post like this! I will definitely keep this forum updated on my OSCP journey

TheFORCE wrote: »

I'm at the metasploit lab right now, i do the labs on the weekends so I try to keep notes to refresh my memory.
Since you completed everything within a month can you tell us if you kept any notes on the labs and if you had to use those notes in other labs or at the final exam? What is your experience going to this certification, you said you had experience with wireshark but do you have any other type of experience? That will help us gauge the level of preparedness one should have.

Nice job by the way.

I have pretty much 0 experience coming into this. I just finished my Bachelors in CS where I took a subject in my final year where it delved into networking and had a few labs using Wireshark (it was essentially the CCNA without the CISCO sections). I did not keep any notes because I felt that the lab pdf's were more than enough to use as notes. My general approach during the labs was repeating and also mucking around with various commands and the different options to see what was different (which is how I learn best!). That being said, if you do forget something during the exam you can always re-watch the videos since 3 days will be plenty of time to complete the exam! Seems like you are very close to finishing as well, good luck!

airzero

Any plans on going for the eCPPT?

baegmon

airzero wrote: »

Any plans on going for the eCPPT?

Not at the moment. I have read that many people have completed the eCPPT exam just using the OSCP notes so I figured I will just do the OSCP instead. Looking at the price, eCPPT Elite Package costs $1199 while the OSCP 90 day package costs $1150. OSCP is also much more recognized in the industry than eCPPT so that was also one of the reasons I decided to go with OSCP.