Passed the CEH V7 today!!! I would like to thank everyone on this forum for sharing their tips and experience. The information provided helped me TONS with preparing for this exam.
To put my exam experience in perspective I’ll give you a little run down on my background. The CEH exam was the FIRST and ONLY cert I have taken to date. I graduated with a B.S in information systems about 9 years ago. After graduating I started my own business which is non-IT related and have been doing it ever since. Although my profession is not IT related it is web based . So I do have experience with web design, web programming, and SQL. My networking experience has basically been limited to the small office environment (5-6 boxes).
Since I graduated I have been looking for something IT wise that I can sink me teeth into again. However I have kind of let myself fall prey to the ole..”if it’s not broke done fix it” deal, and the techie in me has been collecting some cobwebs .About 6-7 months ago I read about the CEH certification and it immediately sparked my interest. It was actually information security/hacking that got me interested in IT years ago. I have to be honest the idea of playing with Nmap, NESSUS and revisiting the ports #’s like 31337, 27374 etc got my blood flowing again
. So the reason I decided to pursue this thing was pretty much purely personal (although I do plan to incorporate it with my business eventually).
OK. Enough of the wind bagging. I’ll get down to the nitty gritty
I have been studying on and off for this exam on and off for the past 5 months. I decided to take my time to develop a stronger foundation with some of the fundamentals. It had been 9 years since I have even THOUGHT about the OSI model, packets-frames, binary-hex conversions etc. Even though that stuff isn’t that difficult (and this exam only really requires a basic knowledge of these) I just had to re familiarize myself with them. Once I got up to speed with this stuff my studying seemed to flow a lot better working into the rest of the domains.
I used the
ilearn package from Eccouncil. You can’t go wrong here. Although it is very expensive( being self employed I’m the one who had to flip the bill) . At first I was really skeptical about how much it was going to prepare me. It just didn’t seem to go into depth enough but for this exam it did the job! The course ware and videos were great, but the labs were useless IMO.
Matt Walker AIO,and the practice exam book were great.. The way he presented the material was excellent , easy to read, and concise. Although finding some mistakes in the editing made me a little nervous at first(especially since I was relearning a lot of this stuff) cross referencing with the eccouncil courseware I was able to get it sorted out just fine. I think if I had more experience going into the exam this book alone would have probably done the trick.
Steven Defino official review guide Ehh. To me it was basically an outline of the course ware. Which he does say its supposed to be. Pretty much a book to wet your lips to take the bootcamp or whatever, but as a study guide I didn’t find it useful.
Boson practice exam.. $99.00.. Money well spent!!!! Being my first cert I wanted to take as many practice questions as I could get my hands on to get a feel if I was absorbing the material. It also had questions that gave me more looks at the tools and in particular "switches(netcat,hping,tcpdump,ping etc) snort." that were lacking in the other material. 400 questions that I felt represented closest to the actual exam.
Know your nmap ,netcat, hping, tcpdump, wireshark switches. Snort rules. Virus types etc
I felt that the exam was easy however I only scored 83%. Don’t get me wrong. I’m stoked that I passed but I felt I was well prepared for this exam and thought I could score higher. Some of the questions were kind of oddly worded but nothing too crazy.. about 5 questions were just odd in general. I honestly don’t know what I could have done to score much higher . I may have made some concentration errors. I was super anxious/excited the night before and only got about 3 hours sleep.
Thanks again for all your help!
