Passed CISSP on 2nd
Passed CISSP last Saturday on a second try. I started studding back in January 2012 and fail my test in June 2012 with 698 after 6 mo of intensive studying. At that time I used only AIO by SH, and did no tests basically ( except in the last few weeks) - from CCCure.After the failure I was so disappointed that I basically gave up until I made a New Year resolution to pass CISSP. I started studying again on Jan 1 2015 using 4 hours /day during the week (working full time as a sec. architect- consultant), then taking 2 full 250 questions test Saturdays and Sundays. I used the available sources found in this great forum - I want to thank all members for the unbelievable effort put in sharing their experience and resources. I wanted to take no chance this time so I exhausted basically any possible resource:
Books read: AIO, Conrad, ICS2 guide, 11th hour, Microsoft Server Security, Corporate Security infrastructure, various IR risk books plus about 500 pages of hand written notes accumulated during my work as a consultant
Online resources: NIST -all 800 series, SANS write-ups, CCNP online trainings- found for $50 on Groupon, Hundreds of YouTube's, on different security topics, Kali linux (former backtrack) - all documentation etc
Tests: McGraw Hill, SH, Transcended, CCCure, Conrad online tests,
Also the latest SH test book that came out on March 2 2015. By the way this is a great resource with very similar questions to the actual exam.
Now, about the exam, there were no surprise questions as far as content. Is only just about twisting the words, I can say there were no notions that I had never heard off in all of the 250 questions. My only mistakes were probably because I could not figured out what the questions wanted from me. CISSP is good at asking a 2 word question in a twisted, complicated, ambiguous, long, confusing …phrase. In other words the whole key (besides mastering the subjects) is just interpreting the meaning of the question. I took me a little over 4 hour to finish then I had 45 questions flagged for review, which covered most of the last 2 hours. Towards the end I stopped reviewing them under the impression that I am loosing the clarity in interpretation-(started to doubt myself because of the intense concentration). At that moment I knew that I covered enough to pass.
Anyway that was it. Now follows the endorsement. About the endorsement: is it really necessary to supply the manager phone number and email inside my resume? I already provided that to my endorser to do the due diligence. (Actually my endorser is an executive within my current employer which already went through my credentials when I got hired).Besides that don’t know if the managers in cause are still there, one of the company I worked for it was just provided me with job assignments with their clients, they had no idea what my duties were.
