Does a cert make you a hacker? Depends on who you ask. Among the hacker community, a cert doesn’t get you much cred unless it’s the OSCP, which at 24 hours is the most badass test I’ve ever seen. Among recruiters and government entities, the game changes – a lot. EC-Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) doesn’t qualify you as 1337, but it’ll get you a job. You’ll have to go further to prove real skillz.
Which is probably why EC-C created the CEH Practical, a 6-hour online hacking test that’s based on tasks, rather than questions. Getting it along with the basic CEH earns you the CEH Master credential. See https://www.eccouncil.org/programs/certified-ethical-hacker-ceh-master/
It’s new enough that searching for “ceh master” on the LinkedIn Job page doesn’t immediately return specific hits. But seaching for “ceh” as a job keyword gave me over 7300 job openings in the US this morning. (Try it at https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search/.) And a whole lot of those listings also asked for a CISSP and/or a OSCP.
So leveling up seems to be a good idea.
Okay, where to start? There isn’t a formal course for the Practical, though it supposedly covers the same material as the regular CEH course. I used a small handful of books getting my CEHv9, and ran a prep course at UNM using the (sadly awful) Sean-Philip Oryano CEH v10 book, which isn’t even available any more.
Fortunately an author I know and like, Matt Walker, recently released a pair of great texts. See this: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=CEH+v10+matt+walker&ref=nb_sb_noss. Get the bundle! The price is cheap ($45) and includes both practice tests and access to an online VM lab similar to what you’ll be using for the Practical test. I’ve ordered it, and I’ll keep you posted on how I like it.
Next: who is saying what about this? I started with:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=reddit+%22ceh+practical%22&t=ffnt&ia=web
Which quickly let me to a guy who failed once but passed it the second time:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CEH/comments/crasuq/my_second_attempt_at_the_ceh_and_i_passed_90/
And another thread with a great detailed writeup:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CEH/comments/c69fou/passed_ceh_practicalpost_exam_writeup/
In the mean time I’ll be back to HackTheBox and Root-me, practicing up on everything I can find. Sign up for this site and give me suggestions or let me know what you think in the Comments below. (I share no information with anyone, period.)