OSCE Passed

TeKniques · January 2018

Hi all,

Just received my email from Offensive Security that I passed the OSCE exam! This was my second attempt as I was not ready to complete what I would consider "the hardest challenge" in the exam on the first attempt. This was by far the most challenging certification I've attempted. I started preparing in June 2017 and signed up for the 60-day course in October 2017. In my opinion, 30-days is better, but you'll need to put quite a bit of effort outside the course material to have a chance in the exam. Unless you have a significant amount of exploit development experience prior to attempting the course/exam it will be a strong learning curve to grasp the material. At least that was the case for me, I had no prior exploit development experience other than what was taught in the OSCP, but I do have a decent programming background which helped with the final challenge.

To prepare, I did the SLAEx86 course from June-September including all the certification assignments in that course. This course (particularly the assignments) is vital to surviving and having success in the exam. I followed JollyFrogs thread on these forums prior to attempting the course. I would highly recommend everyone read that prior to signing up.

I don't think I need to do a review of the OSCE course as there are a lot of those online

. However, this course requires a lot of dedication and late nights. After a while you start to wonder what you can do further to prepare because the material you're provided by Offsec is very deceptive in that you make it through it fairly quickly. The problem is, you'll feel confident and tell yourself "well that wasn't so bad" only to find out that under the hood of each topic there's a never ending amount of details you'll need to know.

As for what's next, I do not plan on taking any other certifications this year. I will be continuing down the exploit development path, but after this course I see just how much I don't know (haha) and will need to refocus my efforts on quite a few topics.

Mooseboost · January 2018

Congrats on your pass!

If you could go back to the beginning and do anything different in your approach, what would you change? I always find myself wishing I had done things different at the end, especially when it is something this daunting.

TeKniques · January 2018

Thanks!

If there was anything I could do differently it would of been more preparation on the ASM side of the fence. I think the SLAEx86 course is enough but its important to be very comfortable with the material. It's always easy to say those things now though