GIAC Certified Penetration Tester (GPEN)

I've just gotten access to the On-Demand portion of the training which i'll start on sunday. So i'm just making a thread to post my experience and thoughts on the course. I'll start from how to apply for facilitator to the week course november 23-28 and then writing and hopefully passing the exam before feburary 23rd 2010.

Stay tuned seems like alot of info.

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SephStorm

IR to Cyber Guardian: $20,195.

GAngel

I took the second practise exam and ended up with a 79% skipping the 5 hands on questions at the end again. Only used 2 hours this time so i'm feeling confident. I'll spend tomorrow night doing hands on stuff only and probably do nothing on friday.

GAngel

I'm GPEN certified. Will post details later on my way to go get trashed with my mates.

impelse

Congrats

veritas_libertas

Congratz! I look forward to hearing more!

dynamik

GAngel wrote: »

I'm GPEN certified. Will post details later on my way to go get trashed with my mates.

Mates? You're Canadian and talk like you're British? That's like the worst of both worlds*

Congratulations!

*Or is that being British and talking like you're Canadian...

JDMurray

dynamik wrote: »

Mates? You're Canadian and talk like you're British? That's like the worst of both worlds*

Nah. Living in Louisiana and sounding like you are from Minnesota is far worse!

dynamik

JDMurray wrote: »

Nah. Living in Louisiana and sounding like you are from Minnesota is far worse!

Yesterday, I was told that every time I open my mouth I sound like a syrup commercial

poguy

GAngel wrote: »

You apply for the SANS workstudy program under the training/workstudy section of the website. It asks about your goals for doing the program, where you are in your career currently and where you want your career to go.

Reasons for doing the workstudy are on the website so i won't go into them besides that it's $700 for a course including certification that normally costs $3500. You have to fill out an application for each event you'd like to facilitate at and in my case SANS got back to me within 10 days.

Acceptance into the course is through email. You must fax back the acceptance letter by a certain date and then follow the other instructions for signing up to facilitate.

You are expected to review all the information prior to the course as you are working to provide a better program not only for yourself but the other students as well. I won't go into detail what's all included in the training but by the quick overview there is plenty of hands on and a huge amount of information.

Seem interesting, do you have more info of how to get into the $700 program?
Thank you for helping

dynamik

poguy wrote: »

Seem interesting, do you have more info of how to get into the $700 program?
Thank you for helping

SANS: Work Study Program

I applied for the one near me in January, but they haven't gotten back to me. Regardless, I already got booked for travel though, so I won't be able to attend

GAngel

I use words like mate because I lived there for two years and have alot of family there

As for the exam It didn't start out well. I got to the site 20 mins early and so they got me all logged in and ready to go except the examine egine wouldn't launch. The proctor had to call SANS and it took about half an hour to ge tit all sorted out. I think it threw me off at the beginning because I was expecting I'd have to re-schedule it and I missed a good 5 of the first 10. 125 questions in I had 105 so I knew I had passed anyways so I slacked off a bit and was just answering from memory. When I got to the final 5 hands on questions I had 119 right and an hour to go. I had to click a link to launch a virtual machine to do the exercises to find the answers unfortunately the VM wouldn't launch. By that point I was fed up and didn't want to wait for a resolution so I just guessed the last 5 and finished with 80%.

The exam was alot harder than I thought it would be for open book. At about the two hour mark I thought I was going to fail even though I was doing well. Alot of very cleverly worded questions so that if you just look it up in the book you'd probably answer it wrong.

Overall I enjoyed the program alot and will do more of there courses if I get the chance. I may even write a gold paper if I can come up with a valid topic.

JDMurray

GAngel wrote: »

Overall I enjoyed the program alot and will do more of there courses if I get the chance. I may even write a gold paper if I can come up with a valid topic.

Look through the published gold papers in the SANS Reading Room and find a related topic that you know well but there are few papers on. I think it's worth going for the Gold cert; you can put your paper as a published work on your resume too.

GAngel

JDMurray wrote: »

Look through the published gold papers in the SANS Reading Room and find a related topic that you know well but there are few papers on. I think it's worth going for the Gold cert; you can put your paper as a published work on your resume too.

I was thinking of doing something with a lawyer friend who specializes in computer law. Like a do's and don'ts but i'm still up in the air if I can commit the time.

dynamik

Since it's such a new cert, there are only two golds thus far. The range of topics should be wide open

veritas_libertas

GAngel wrote: »

I was thinking of doing something with a lawyer friend who specializes in computer law. Like a do's and don'ts but i'm still up in the air if I can commit the time.

That would be a neat topic! Tell us what you decide on so we can watch the SANS Reading Room

GAngel

veritas_libertas wrote: »

That would be a neat topic! Tell us what you decide on so we can watch the SANS Reading Room

I've got to do the CISSP jan 9th as it's not on offer for atleast 3 mths after that and the new sec+ i've got to fit in sometime in january as well. I'll try to flesh out an outline and submit that over the holidays but i don't see this happening until febuaray.

dynamik

W00t! Got accepted to the 504 work study!

GAngel

dynamik wrote: »

W00t! Got accepted to the 504 work study!

Congrats! Here's hoping for extra copies

impelse

Congrats