My Experience with eLearnSecurity's PTS course and the eJPT Certification Exam

Introduction

I've been home-schooling myself in penetration testing skills and exercises for the last several months, but I only started thinking about going out for certifications in the last few weeks or so.  I'd done a bit of research on different beginner certifications from YouTube videos and various blogs, and it seemed like the eLearnSecurity courses were pretty well regarded and reviewed from a learning standpoint, but lacked a bit in recognition from HR hiring managers.  I picked up the PTSv4 (Penetration Testing Student version 4) course from eLearnSecurity in September when I saw that their courses were on sale with big discounts, so I took that as the sign to finally go for my first certification.

Thoughts on the Course

The PTSv4 is a really great course for new students looking to get into the industry, because it covers a lot of pre-requisite skills required for penetration testing, such as networking concepts, html requests, navigating in a Linux environment, programming basics, and more.  As a home-schooled learner, reviewing these basic concepts let me spot gaps in my knowledge and patch a few of those gaps.

Fundamental skills, such as scanning and enumeration, vulnerability scanning, and common attacks such as SQL injection and XSS are also included in the course, and although I'd covered all of these topics in previous training, it was good to see the different approach the course took to each of these topics, as opposed to my self-taught methods.

The interactive lab environment, Hera, was adequate for performing the course exercises, but felt a bit clunky when compared to other VPN lab environments from services such as HackTheBox and TryHackMe, because the Hera VPN keys must be individually downloaded are tied to specific machines in the network as opposed to a single key that lets you access the entire Hera network.  I understand the desire for this compartmentalization from a security standpoint, but it's still a hit as far as user experience is concerned.  

Takeaways from the Exam

This was the first time I had encountered a multi-system environment, as the exam environment contains multiple networks with that must be routed and mapped in order to be accessed properly.  Extensive routing in particular was something I wasn't used to, and it's a crucial task to getting anywhere in the exam.  Being unfamiliar with engagements with multiple systems, it was very important for me to do as much network mapping as possible in order to organize all of the target systems, then do methodical scanning of each system to enumerate all of the potential services for attack.  Nmap was the MVP tool during the exam, able to ping systems, scan ports and run vulnerability testing scripts.  Scoring in the exam is done by answering 20 questions with multiple-choice answers, and an old enemy of mine revealed itself after looking closely at the multiple-choice answers, and that was questions that required more than one of the answers to be selected from the options

e.g.  Which of the following are Countries:
A) Canada 
B) South Korea
C) New York
D) Europe

The answer would be A and B.

Overall, I think that the tasks that the exam had me perform felt relatively realistic as to what I imagine a penetration tester might do during an engagement for a client.  None of the exam questions were obscure or open to interpretation, but required extensive enumeration and different degrees of access to machines contained in the exam environment.

Conclusion

Although my experience with the PTS course was not perfect, I'm very glad that I decided to purchase the course, and I feel like I learned a lot from it, especially the challenge of taking the certification exam at the end. I would definitely recommend the course to other beginner students with pentester aspirations (especially when the sales roll around), both as an excellent learning opportunity and as a stepping stone to tackling other certifications and courses.

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