eJPT Review
I’ve been doing ctf challenges for quite some time and I decided to take my first cybersecurity certification which is the eJPT.
Preparation
I went over the course thrice. The first time was a basic overview, I took notes throughout this process.
The second time involved an in depth review of all the slides, videos, as well as labs. During this time, I refined my notes to ensure that they are detailed.
The last time was me going through everything I was not familiar with as well as re-doing labs that I was not too confident on.
In addition to this, I did the wreath lab on tryhackme as I saw a ton of people mentioning pivoting in the exam. It helped me learn pivoting but it was not needed for the exam.
The Exam
I started the exam at 6pm on a Friday night. I started the exam by looking at what ELS had provided. I took notes on everything that they provided after analyzing what they had sent.
Recon and enumeration was conducted on the given scope and information was gained. I overthought certain bits of the exam because of previous CTF experience, this led me down a phase of various attempts of different exploits and payloads being tested to help with achieving my goal. In the end, the simple and straight forward way turned out to be correct.
Once this was done, and questions were answered, I focused on a section where I had been stuck on for quite some time. For this section, I went back to enumerating the network to check on whether I missed out on anything but the answer was right in front of my eyes. Again, take the the simple and straightforward path!
Once this was done and I obtained what I needed to, I had finished the exam. The exam did not take too long. It took around 6 hours to finish up. I did take a two hour break for dinner after finding a route since that opened up quite a bit.
Conclusion
The exam was fun and pretty straightforward, if you go through the course material well and thoroughly you shouldn’t face any issues. No external resources are needed to pass the exam.
Don’t get frustrated if everyone says that “all the material needed to pass is in the course” because it actually is. Just go over the course content. Go over the videos and labs. Ensure that you understand that has been taught and you’ll do fine!