401 vs 501

TkMumbles

I took the Sec+ 401 about 3 years ago and it has expired since then. I noticed there is a lot of new material covered on the 501 revision. My question, to anyone who has taken both: has the difficulty of this exam increased? I do remember this being a pretty tough test, mainly with the wording.

JDMurray

I passed the Sec+ rev 1 exam in 2004 and have never been asked to take the most recent exam--even though I have taught Sec+ prep courses.

There is no harm in reading the updated Sec+ material, but there no reason to pass the newer Sec+ exam. If you want to stay with CompTIA, I'd look at CASP and CySA+ next.

TkMumbles

In my area most of the govt contract jobs require an active DoD IAT II certification. While I have just secured my CCNA and it will be some time before I can get a CCNA: Security under my belt to supplement those DoD requirements. So, to satisfy this requirement, I was wanting to just retake the Sec+ in the interim and find out the difficulty/difference between the two test versions.