Hello TE,
I recently passed the eJPT with a perfect score! Just wanted to write my
personal opinion on it. I want to continue the tradition as I typically do this with all of my certs. Also, thank you TE for introducing me to this cert.
Payment/Package:
I paid $300 for the Full version of the PTS course. The PTS is the study material that will help you take the eJPT exam. This package includes study material in the form of outdated Flash slides, ~4 hours of video examples, 30 hours of lab time and an exam voucher to take the exam (they give you 2 attempts).
I felt the Full package is more then sufficient for anyone decent in IT. Decent being someone that can do desktop support type work. After completing the course I still have 25.5 hours left and that was with taking my time on the labs. I did however power off the labs once I had gotten the results, or did not need to use the network anymore such as for password cracking.
One nuisance was the payment system they use. I was required to email them a picture of my drivers license. This was a pain in the ass, and I blacked out some sensitive information to be safe. They accepted and then processed but it took 24-48 hours. I could not get access to the study material until after it was fully processed so wish I had planned ahead and paid for it few days before the weekend I was going to start my studies.
Course/Exam Review:
In terms of content, everything about the course was top notch! The slides were to the point with hardly any fluff. A rarity these days. Excellent and easy to follow videos that add extra concepts and then relevant labs where I actually LEARNED. I went through the course just once. I basically skimmed the slides pretty quickly since it is just a review for me from my other certs/experience. Then I would watch the video, and then the lab. Took detailed notes especially for certain commands/syntax.
My MAIN problem with the course/eLearnSecurity is that the Full version package gets the Flash version of the slides. This was REALLY annoying at times because of the following reasons:
1. Flash is not even supported by many main stream browsers anymore out of the box.
2. In fact, Adobe Flash is responsible for six of the top 10 bugs used by exploit kits in 2016.
LINK. After all, eLearnSecurity is a security company... they should be aware of this!
3. There were a few times where the training slides would not even load! I would have to refresh several times or restart my browser. There were even 1-2 nights where I gave up studying because it was so persistent. Mind you I tried several different computers and OS's and I have 150/150 Fiber hardwired connection with i7/Xeon CPU's and min 16GB on each machine.
4. Some training material took an entire minute or two to load. Mind you once loaded, you can see the entire chapter/section but still annoying and time is money.
5. I did make a complaint about replacing Flash with HTML5 in the forums but staff never followed up with me afterwards.
In short, Flash is utter crap, please get rid of it. It is so bad that I think it hurts the companies reputation.
Moving on, I really did enjoy the exam. Everything you need to know is in the study material and mainly from the labs. My complaints with the exam is that 2 questions in particular did not have clear English wording and typos. In fact I had to message staff to understand one question because it could easily have 2 interpretations and thus 2 answers. I was really surprised by this because the English in the study material and labs were near perfect. Must have been a different translator that made the exam questions. Also, the staff in the forums were really friendly, prompt and helpful when I had some odd issues/questions.
Anyone that is really focused can complete the course and take the exam in about ~1.5-2 weeks. Just do 2-4 hours per day on work days and then 8-12 hours on weekends. Granted that is with skipping the programming section because that is not on the exam.
Overall, in terms of learning and enjoyment the eJPT was my favorite. CISSP was my second favorite in terms of enjoyment/learning. If you do all of the labs, you will keep applying what you learn from prior exercises and thus actually LEARN through repetition. They say, to really internalize something you must go over it 2-3 times. The course applied that concept perfectly because first you read the material via slides, then you watch a video about it and then you actually apply it in the lab.
The eJPT was what I WISH the CEH would have been. My thirst now has been fulfilled for the time being anyway!
I do enjoy penetration testing and it was great to get a small sample of how an attacker thinks/works especially for a blue team guy like me. However, I am still not sure if I want to be a full time penetration tester so if I ever were to do the eCPPT or OSCP, it would be more for fun. Also, I have been on many job interviews lately including 2 of the Big4's and honestly many have not even heard of the OSCP let alone the eJPT. At least it was a good conversational piece in the interview. It basically tells a story that you are passionate about security and trying to learn/grow which is essential for this particular industry. Do this strictly for learning and to help see if pen testing is for you. Great value overall for $300.
What's next? Honestly, I think I am going to take a break from certifications for a while. I want to start doing more real-world lab simulations with my VMware boxes. I want to configure business grade firewalls instead of my pfSense, setup Splunk and send logs to it from my various devices and also create dashboards, analyze traffic on my network etc. I also want to just read some of the top security books per
dfir.
Edit: The course is not that difficult. I personally had to slow down and pay special attention to the Burpe/XSS/SQLi/Metasploit sections due to not having much experience with them so I really wanted to understand/learn them. I actually had a really bad flu during the last week when I took the exam. Even had fever during exam. It took me about 8 hours to complete and that is with taking bathroom/food breaks. I highly recommend going for a little walk around the house when you are stuck. You will be surprised how things just come in to place soon after. Also, had my Kali VM not gotten corrupt somehow and me having to re-install VMware Tools... I'm sure I could have completed the exam in 6.5-7 hours.
