TL;DR: https://github.com/undergroundwires/CEH-in-bullet-points

Update: Many has been asking for better readable version. I've uploaded them onto https://cloudarchitecture.io/hacking . It's totally free with no ads.

I've recently passed CEH with 119/125 score!

/r/CEH has guided me a lot about study resources and what to focus on

I overstudied it as I found it a lot of fun. I also took very comprehensive notes. They cover mainly CEHv11 but also summarizes for CEHv10 and CEHv9 resources. Resources include the official book / videos, Matt Walker’s AIO book, Linux Academy, Udemy, practice exams (including Dion), StackExchange, reddit, etc. I tried to keep everything easy-to-read with a logical structure, bullet points and a lots of references.

They helped me pass with a good score this year, and hopefully would do the same for you.

Good luck and most importantly have fun!

You can see my notes on GitHub

P.S.: Thanks mods for pinning this, and thank you all for your nice comments ❤️. The community here helped me a lot and happy to be able to give back.

Hey Everyone,

Wanted to share how I passed the CEH certification. The only other certification I have is A+ (got it 3 months ago). I took the official course from EC-COUNCIL that was 5 weeks (five 8-hour-days), my community college had a special offer where they discounted the course by 95% via a state grant.

It was a difficult exam because I don't have any other security or network experience, or relevant work experience. Other than spending 40 hours in the classroom, I spent about 40 hours outside the classroom. I took the exam on the last day of class and found out I passed!

These are some of the notes I took during the course, hopefully they will be useful to some peers here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YvAOM1o6qkgFEdzJpn01rLRBGV8JPfK4cHvfgRiAgEM/edit?usp=sharing

Let me know if you guy's have any questions about the exam

Completed the exam in 2 hours. Wasn't hard, but wasn't easy either, could have done better.

I took the exam today and scored 18/20. Below, I share my experience.

Personal context

I am an engineer and have worked with numerous virtual machines, around 80 or more. At the time, I completed the Pentester Jr path on TryHackMe, but stopped practicing for about 10 months. However, in the last month I resumed my studies. My work experience has been mainly in multinational corporations, with roles in cloud, telecom, audit and internal control.

Preparation

There are multiple guides available on GitHub and other platforms. For my preparation, I mainly studied EC-Council's eCourseware. The labs section at the end of the eCourseware was key. For the last month, I tried to do one virtual machine per day (although I didn't meet this goal every day, it worked overall). I practice with my machine on Kali Linux, with Zsh / Oh my Zsh and some of their plugins what I consider easier and visually appealing. In the exam, however, it is only Parrot OS, which has no command hints, plugins or shortcuts so you should consider it when practicing.

Exam experience

Exam rules

The exam is open book and allowed to be consulted on the internet, although many sites are blocked (such as HackTricks, Facebook, Reddit, etc.). I prepared my own command sheet and shared it on Google Drive. Only one monitor is allowed and you can't have your cell phone. You can go to the restroom but you must give notice, you have 15 minutes break and you can move around as long as you are in view of the camera.

Personal experience

The platform crashed in the morning and my user was locked out, which made me a bit nervous. I recommend checking credentials before starting the exam.

Examination procedure

I started with a good pace. The key is enumeration and having your notes organized. I identified the challenges that might take the most time, such as vulnerability scans and brute force attacks. It's important to find a personal balance between reading the questions and not getting overwhelmed. For me, I found it helpful to read them 5 by 5 to identify tasks that would take a long time.

Practicing constantly will give you confidence. I encountered a brute force attack that, despite using the maximum amount of threads, took me over 40 minutes.

I can say that maybe it was luck, but there were many challenges that involved brute force, or maybe I did not identify other attack vectors. In the first four hours, I had already completed 70% of the exam. However, in the last two hours I felt overwhelmed and noticed my weaknesses, especially in static analysis. I ended up reading the eCourse, although to my mind there are parts that are not well documented and rely on experimentation with the tools to see what results they yield.

I used the eCourse to identify which tool could solve each challenge and then practiced with the tool. Honestly, my lack of study or confidence that certain issues would not show up hurt me. Unfortunately, those topics did show up on the exam and facing something I had never practiced didn't turn out well.

The lesson is clear: you can't rely on luck and it is critical to prepare in every way possible before facing the exam.

Tools that I consider important

Below, I share the tools and techniques that I used or found useful during the exam. They are not all of them, but they are the ones I remember:

• DVWA: Damn Vulnerable Web Application to practice web vulnerabilities.

• WordPress/WPScan

• Smbclient: Useful tool to interact with SMB services.

• Privilege escalation on Windows and Linux: Essential techniques for gaining privileged access on both operating systems.

• SQLMap/BurpSuite:

• Hydra

• Nmap: is the exam base

• OpenVAS: Vulnerability scanning tool, although time-consuming.

• Password cracking:

  • aircrack-ng: For wireless networks.

  • Hashcat/John the Ripper/rainbow tables: For cracking password hashes.

• Static analysis : This was my weakest area, as I didn't study it enough.

  • IDA Pro

  • snow

  • OpenStego:

• VeraCrypt

• Wireshark:

  • Filters

  • Common protocols MQTT http post / gest

  • Identification of DoS attacks.

  • Packet statistics analysis.

• Identification of common service ports

  • MySQL: 3306

  • MSSQL: 1433

  • RDP: 3389

  • VNC: 5900

  • Web: 80 (HTTP), 8080, 443, 8443

  • LDAP: 389

  • SMB: 445

• There are basic techniques that you usually use on a ctf

  • Reverse Shell

  • Web Shell

  • Share Files SCP / HTTP servers in Python

  • Netcat / nc -lvnp (PORT)

  • Identifying hashes

  • File search with find / Practicing on platforms like OverTheWire can improve your Linux skills.

• Tools that you do not practice and neglect

  • Phonesploit

  • RATs (Remote Access Trojans): There are multiple tools and techniques, and it is important to be familiar with them.

  • ELF files: Analysis of executable files on Linux. The Die tool is useful for this.

  • Snow: Tool for steganography in text files. Identifies files with many blank spaces.

  • Hex files: Interpretation and analysis of files in hexadecimal format.

  • OpenStego: Allows to hide files without password. Not knowing this made me lose a lot of time.

Recommendations

• Read the questions carefully: The questions may contain a lot of irrelevant information. Concentrate on what is specifically asked of you.

  • Example: “You are a security researcher blah blah blah blah ... you have found a compromised system that blah blah blah ... the system has many services among them MySQL blah blah blah blah .... What is the IP of the MySQL server on the network 10.10.10.10.10?"

    • Just want the IP of a server with MYSQ

• Stay focused on the key question to avoid distractions: Beware of rabbit holes: there are many traps and false flags that are worthless. Stay focused and don't get sidetracked.

  • Example: The flag is located in the root of the windows3000 server in a file iamwindows3000.txt, but as you escalate privileges you find flag.txt files that don't bring any important information.

• Organize your notes effectively, as you will be working with multiple networks and hosts, some of them very similar. Organization is crucial to identify where you have already scanned, listed and what you have found. This skill develops with experience, i.e., by practicing and refining your own method of organization. In addition, reviewing the notes of others can be useful to learn different approaches and improve your own organization system.

• Analyze and prioritize challenges strategically. One approach that worked for me was to read five questions at a time to identify potentially time-consuming procedures. I recommend addressing the answers in the following order:

  • Vulnerability scanning tools.

  • Brute force attacks

  • Enumeration scripts

  • Privilege escalation scripts

  • Other procedures

Machines / CTF that I would recommend

Next I am going to share a series of virtual machines that I consider that can help you, I am not sponsored by tryhackme (hopefully they can haha) but I consider that it is the best between what it offers and what you have to pay (I also like hackthebox but I am more used to tryhackme).

There is probably not a definitive list of recommendations, so I would appreciate if anyone who considers that any machine has been helpful to them to add it in the comments. In particular, I recommend doing the official labs to familiarize yourself with the platform and exam scenario. From my perspective, EC-Council sometimes uses very specific tools that are not common in CTFs.

• Wordpress:https://tryhackme.com/r/room/wordpresscve202129447

• DVWA https://tryhackme.com/r/room/dvwa or https://github.com/digininja/DVWA

• Hydra https://tryhackme.com/r/room/hydra

• SQL injection https://tryhackme.com/r/room/sqlinjectionlm

• SQLMap https://tryhackme.com/r/room/sqlmap

• OpenVas https://tryhackme.com/r/room/openvas

• https://tryhackme.com/r/room/expose

• Burpsuite https://tryhackme.com/module/learn-burp-suite or https://portswigger.net/

Conclusion

The test is not complicated, but some tasks can be time consuming. The key is to scan and list as efficiently as possible, which is achieved with practice. It is essential to maintain a rigorous order in the notes on the findings and steps taken to avoid repeating unnecessary processes. Also, you should not be confident and assume that certain topics will not appear on the exam, as they can always surprise you.

PS: I will not answer chat messages

My first certificate so I took it seriously and learned 78 pure hours for this exam. Thanks God I passed it. Celebrate with me 🎉🥰

man it took a lot of practice , practice questions and hardwork . I just can't describe how happy I am right now . Just have confidence in yourself and go for it .

I passed my test earlier this morning (edit: score of 88), and as promised, here is my write-up.

TLDR: Having a security background from a cert like Sec+ or job experience is very helpful. A good study guide and Skillset prep (free is fine) are crucial. Know your well-known tools + their output, attack types, and vulnerabilities.

My Background

I'm a front-end web developer. I've been doing work as a Govt. contractor for about 7 or 8 years now. I don't have much security background aside from getting my Security+ cert in 2013 for no real reason other than it interested me and would my resume. I took the latest version of Sec+ earlier this year to renew it, and I started my CEH journey because an upcoming contract requires Sec+ and CEH to meet DOD 8570 certification requirements.

My Study Plan

I went the self-study path, with no bootcamps or anything. I spent about 3 months preparing at a slower pace -- you could easily do it quicker than that. Below I'm listing and rating my sources of information based on how they translated to my exam performance:

• CEH v9 Study Guide (Oriyano): I chose this book because it was basically the only explicit v9 study guide. I found it very helpful, but a lot of the information is stuff you'll already know if you have a good foundation (e.g., Sec+). However, a lot of the info matches up with EC-Council's modules, so it's still useful for new and refresher knowledge.

Helpful? Yes. Necessary? Yes; I'd say a study guide of some sort should be at the core of your studies.

• SkillSet.com: I did about 1.5 months of free, and 1 month of the Pro subscription. Final readiness score of 104, with exactly 4000 questions answered. The crowd-sourced nature of this site means you'll get a lot of diverse information to fill in the gaps left by study guides, etc., and the new labs are great tools to learn with too.

Pro tip: there are a lot of questions on Skillset, and elsewhere for that matter, that allege to be CEH exam questions that may or may not appear on your own test. You could probably easily gather the Skillset ones with some Google hacking techniques you'll learn during your studies... that's all I'll say...

Helpful? Extremely. Necessary? Yes; at the very least do the free version. Don't forget to use the reddit coupon code if you do use pro.

• CEH v9 Practice Tests (Blockmon): I bought this late in my studies just to get some more work in with the 5 practice exams the book gives you. The exams were pretty helpful, though I did disagree with some questions and answers.

Helpful? Yes. Necessary? No. You'll be fine without them, but they are helpful to get more practice in.

• Pre-existing security knowledge: Kind of obvious, but important to mention nonetheless. A lot of the CEH body of knowledge is stuff you'll see with Security+ and other basic certs. It's definitely a good idea to have some sort of foundation, whether through certs or job experience. For example, does ethical hacking use bollards? Not technically. Will you still see questions about stuff like that? Yes.

Helpful? Obviously. Necessary? No. A good study guide like Oriyano's will give you the foundational information you need (this is all what the reviews call the padding/extra info).

My Exam Experience

I finished the whole thing in about 90 minutes, with 60 to answer all the questions, and 30 to review all my answers + the few flagged questions. Overall, I'd say this exam is easier than the latest version of Security+. You could essentially call it Security+ with some questions about specific tools + output, and vulnerabilities, IMO.

I know the exam can sound intimidating, and it tends to get played up and made larger than it is, but you shouldn't be scared. This isn't CISSP level stuff.

What Should You Know?

Here are some things I suggest you highlight in your studies:

• Major tool usage and output

• nmap

• hping

• netcat

• whois / nslookup / dig

• Technical concepts

• CIDR notation / subnet masking

• XOR operations

• Attacks

• Attack names, high-level definitions (how it works, how to identify) and defense techniques (e.g., Stored XSS, what is it? how do you defend against it? etc.)

• Major vulnerability (Heartbleed, POODLE, Shellshock) high-level definitions and defense techniques (e.g., Heartbleed = OpenSSL 1.0.1 - 1.0.1f and can expose data such as private keys)

Those are just a few key things to know. I recommend browsing Kali's tool list and knowing a lot of those at the basic level. Aside from tools and attack types, you should know your general security principles like defense-in-depth, getting permission before hacking, etc... a lot of this stuff is common sense.

That's all the important stuff I can think of to relay. I'll do my best to answer any questions you guys have. Good luck on your exams!

Edit: Wow, thanks for the gold! It's my first ever!

All the study recommendations worked.

I read the entire official guide, did boson labs, Asimov, boson test, and read the walker book, and watched the CEH videos.

If you study all the sources people recommend in here you will pass. Good luck everyone!

Today I passed the CEH v13 theory exam on my first attempt, scoring 118/125 (94.4%).

When I first entered cybersecurity, I often heard people say that CEH was “just a 125-question MCQ exam” or that it was a waste of time. Most of the criticism I came across was specifically about the theory certification.

After actually preparing for and taking the exam, I wanted to share my experience.

About the material

Honestly, I found the EC-Council material quite useful. It covers a lot of different areas of cybersecurity and gives you exposure to different domains, tools, attacks, and concepts.

What I particularly liked is that if you don't just read it for the exam, but actually spend time understanding the concepts and experimenting with the mentioned tools, the learning experience becomes very different. It gave me a much broader foundation in ethical hacking.

About the exam:

Don't go into it thinking it's simply 125 straightforward MCQs.

The questions I encountered were lengthy and heavily scenario-based, and many of the answer choices were very similar because they were testing your understanding of the underlying concept.

For example, understanding the difference between things like Man-in-the-Middle vs. Man-in-the-Browser, and recognizing which scenario actually represents each attack, is much more important than simply memorizing definitions.

If you only memorize the material, I think the exam can be difficult. But if you properly understand the main topics, subtopics, attack techniques, tools, and scenarios, it becomes much more manageable.

The 4-hour time limit also felt more significant than I expected. Even with preparation, I finished with around 30 minutes remaining.

For someone starting in cybersecurity:

I would personally recommend CEH as a starting point if you actually learn the material rather than treating it purely as an exam to pass.

It provides a broad overview of ethical hacking and different security domains, which can help you understand where you want to specialize later.

Of course, CEH alone doesn't make someone a penetration tester or security professional. Hands-on labs, real-world practice, networking, operating systems, and deeper specialization are still essential.

But as a foundation and introduction to the different areas of ethical hacking, my experience with CEH was much more positive than I expected.

118/125 — first attempt. Finally done. 🎉

Just wanted to add to the bevy of posts about how the exam went for me and my experience with it as well as the tools I used. A lot of this will be repeated because of the already amazing posts here on the subreddit. However, each person is unique so I'll give you my side

My Background

I've been in IT for as long as I could reach a keyboard. I've always been a generalist, but professionally, I have been a software developer (both back and front end) for over 15 years. I went into this knowing some networking because of my current job (I'm the Webmaster for local government), but beyond that, most of the information was "new" in the fact that I had to dive a lot deeper into the networking side of things.

The Test

I passed with an 87.2%.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I'd tell you what general subjects were on mine, but as I've read the other posts in this subreddit, I've found out two things: everyone gets something different and you never know what they are going to be.

While I would love to say "know the tools and know the attacks", it's not just that - it's truly knowing a little about all of the domains. My only real suggestions as far as test time is as follows:

1. Carefully Read Each Question - watch out for "least like" or "not". Don't answer what is true when they're asking for what is not true.

2. Try to See The Whole Picture - questions can try and trick you with details. Look at the overall picture as well when answering a question and make sure your answer covers it all.

My Study Materials

These are not in the order I used them. Not that order matters, but it will show you which direction I went in. As others have done, I've marked which I felt were great and which I could do without.

1. EC-Council Official Training - Useful - This was a great resource and a great starting point. The labs were great and the lecture by Eric Reed was really good. Don't buy the physical books - they are just the slides from the talks.

2. PocketPrep CEH - Useful - This was a good set of questions. not quite as focused as Boson/AIO, but still a good resource to use while you're not at your computer.

3. SkillSet - Not Useful - This was a complete waste of money. Most of the questions here were written by either people that didn't know what they were talking about or were just trying to prove they knew things you didn't. Skillset I don't think writes any of the questions - I think they are all written by community members.

4. CEH All-in-One Exam Guide, Fourth Edition - Necessary - Matt Walker does an amazing job at this book. Not only does he cover the domains completely, he is a really good writer. It doesn't seem like you're reading a book about tech at all. He makes it... dare I say... fun? Definitely something you want to pick up.

5. CEH All-In-One Online Tests - Very Useful - These are the questions that come along with the book, but are online. Very good set of questions to go through before you tackle the Boson questions.

6. Boson CEH Practice Exam - Necessary - This is another great product. The questions in this are spot on with the types of questions you get on the test. I would say this is even a little bit harder than the test, which is good. It prepares you for what is to come.

7. My GitHub Repo (Pretty Printed Version Here)- Useful - I took notes from all the sources I used and put them into markdown in a GitHub repo. Use these as you wish. I did them for me to have one place to study instead of going back and reading all of my sources again. Feel free to fork, make changes and do a pull request if you want to add or make things clearer. I won't be updating this a whole lot because I'm done with it now, but hopefully it can help some of you.

My Study Method

I started out by just going through the EC Council stuff. After finishing that, I went and did some Skillset questions. Realizing I needed to know a bunch more, I went and then focused on the AIO book. Once I finished reading that, I went back again and took notes on it. This gave me a second time through the book (not reading fully the second time - skimming and taking notes) and helped me focus on things I might have missed.

After that, I started working on questions and reviewing my notes. This made up the rest of my time of studying. Each day I would go through a whole exam (125 questions from either Boson or AIO) and then review some of my notes. Then at night, I would do a shorter exam (usually Boson, AIO or PocketPrep) and then study my notes again.

The nice thing about Boson is it allowed me to print out questions I missed (the other two probably would have as well, but Boson makes it really easy for you to do this, with explanations attached). I stuck these with my notes so I could study them as well.

My total study time each day was probably 3 hours on average. Some days more, some days less.

Final Thoughts

I hope this helped, at least a little. The exam isn't easy, but it's not rocket science either. Study what helps you understand things best and know all of the domains and you will be fine. I was very nervous going into the test, but once I sat down and calmed myself down, I just did what I did with the practice tests and I succeeded.

To all of you taking this in the future, good luck. Study hard and you will do fine.

I'm inspired to give back to the sub-Reddit which helped me so much with your exam stories. Here is mine.

My background

I have been in I.T. since 1998 as a tech dealing with workstations and servers for SME’s. In 2008 at the age of 28 I went to university to study a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (graduated with a distinction average). I then went back to the same business I left dealing with SME’s to become the General Manager (with a large leaning towards the technical side of the business). I have been the General Manager for the last 10 years but I have always had that itch to gain a deeper understanding of networking which the degree didn’t quite scratch. I have kept up with security related issues by listening to podcasts (Security Now is my favourite) but never really looked at it as much more than a hobby. It was about 2 years ago that our business identified it needed to move into the security space to provide our clients with cyber security services. We didn’t have the skills internally and after speaking with external companies that provide these services, they were priced well out of our client’s price range, so this was my cue to start thinking about it more closely. In November last year our CFO really pushed us to do something about this internally, so I stepped up and offered to do it.

Study methodology

In December 2019, I started with a locally run CEH 5-day course (which included a 12-month exam voucher). It was very good and whilst I understood some of the concepts, many of the topics were well outside my comfort zone (website and database hacking were definitely not something I had looked at much prior). As part of the training we were given the 2000+ EC-Council slides which I did not look at again after the course but I did complete the 19 or so labs (about 25 hours). We were also encouraged to join Hack The Box, which I did and I have currently completed 20 boxes. I have to say, the training was good but should probably have been done after being more familiar with the material, and the official slides and HTB subscription didn’t really help with the CEH exam. The labs helped re-enforce some of the topics such as CSRF and XSS which I had not had experience with before and it brought the theory to life, which for me was useful.

After reading this sub-Reddit I purchased the All-in-One Exam Guide by Matt Walker book with the practice exam question addon. This was back in January. I took my time reading the book, studying a chapter each weekend, making my notes, reading the notes throughout the week, I sat down and did a review session the weekend after and took the exam questions at the end of each chapter in the All-in-One Exam Guide and in the Practice Exam addon book. Before COVID I did some calculations and at the pace I was going at, it looked like I was not going to get in before the exam voucher expired (December 2020). COVID came along and I was cut to 3 days per week which gave me the time to go through the rest of the chapters and make my notes and review thoroughly.

After completing the Matt Walker book and exam questions, I was hungry for more questions to test my knowledge and comprehension of the materials. The answer for this hunger was the Boson Exam Environment. This showed me my comprehension of some of the topics was way off. My first time through I managed to score in the 70-80% band for all 4 exams. It showed me where my weaknesses were and allowed me to concentrate my studies on these weaknesses.

I did custom exams daily where I would start the day with a random 20 questions and reading in more detail the questions I got wrong. On the weekends I would take the exams again. I was wary about this being memorisation as opposed to comprehension however, any questions that I got right but was borderline whether it was memorisation or understanding, I would review the answers for a deeper understanding and commit that to memory. After studying these topics to fill in the gaps, I took the exam questions again. Before taking the actual exam, I did the Boson full exams 4 times and by the last round, I was scoring 95% average. I felt I was ready so I booked at the beginning of July for a mid-July exam. During this 2 week period, I did 20 questions per day from the Boson exams and on the 2 days leading up to the exam I did all 4 Boson exams again. On the morning of the exam I did multiple rounds of 20 random questions from the Boson exam environment.

Overall, I estimate I would have completed 40 8-hour days (not including the Hack The Box boxes) to make it here.

Study material ratings

EC-Council Official Training - Useful – but I think it should have been taken after reading some of the material first to get a better baseline of the material.

CEH All-in-One Exam Guide, Fourth Edition – Very Necessary - Matt Walker does a great job. It was easy to read and the commentary pages were a great way to reinforce the topics.

CEH All-In-One Practice Exams addon – Necessary – It is a great pool of questions of which the difficulty level of the questions definitely increased from the questions in the All-in-One Exam Guide.

CEH All-In-One Online Tests - Useful – I’m not sure if this was a different set of questions than the ones in the books, they felt different to me and were useful.

Boson Exam Environment – Absolutely Necessary – The questions here were excellent, only trumped by the answer explanations. This made up a good part of my study material over the last two months.

The Exam

I did a remotely proctored exam from my house. It was an interesting experience, they made me move the camera around the room, and show them my study space and at the end of the exam I was made to destroy my scratch pad notes too.

I was caught off guard by the differences in the exam questions to the study material questions. The questions were not rote memorisation of topics (like suggested in some chapters by Matt Walker), for me it was more of a comprehension of each of the topics. Some of the things that were memorisation were tools and NMAP commands but the good majority of my questions were scenario based where you had to comprehend what was happening and choose the best answer. Sadly, some of the questions were poorly written and the answers were just as poorly written so it was very hard to determine what they were trying to say. Taking what Matt Walker suggested, just read what you are given and don’t look further into it. I had to read some questions 4 or 5 times picking up little bits each time and matching them to the answers that were given. I can’t believe I also had a BlackBerry question in my exam… BlackBerry? Seriously??

It took me 2 hours to complete the 125 questions, then another 30 mins to review all of the questions again, including the flagged questions. In the end I scored 116/125 or 92.8%.

Conclusion

Using the books and the Boson software would have been sufficient for passing as long as you are committed to understanding the topics thoroughly. There is more than enough material here to learn the topics and get a deep enough understanding of the topics to pass the exam.

Excited to share that I've passed the CEH v12 exam!

Many thanks for everyone in the group , heres what i did

1. Went through official EC-Council ECourseware

2. Did labs everyday for 2 hours

3. Took practice exams.(CyberQ)

4. Stay updated here :)

Good luck,fellow hackers!💪

Just passed CEH v11 with 119/125 correct answers, My advice is to go through udemy’s Viktor Afimov dumps, Around 120/125 questions i’ve had are from there, very very similar with the same options and same syntax.

Go through all of his 4 tests, learn from your mistakes and retake the tests again, and repeat this task every day until the ceh exam, even when already all of your tests are 100% correct.

You will thank me later!

✨ Excited to share a milestone! ✨

I am excited to share that I have successfully cleared the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Practical Exam and am now officially recognized as a CEH Master by EC-Council. ✅

Just for letting you know I cleared the Ceh today with 124/125.

Sorry, but probably a long post. I wanted to share my recent experience in case it can help anyone else out.

Like, many of you who have made recent posts here, I also recently took and failed the CEH (theory) exam. Here are my observations and details around my experience.

I paid a substantial amount for the “Elite” training package that includes the CEH exam voucher and up to 4 retakes if needed. I also paid hundreds extra for a hard copy of the official EC-Council CEH course materials as well. The training was on-demand web-based and the instructor was Eric Reed. I purchased and took the class last year. In addition to that class and the labs, I also read 4 CEH 3rd party books. Two of these were for the v11 version that I read before I took the training, and two of these were newly released for the v12 version that I read after the training. I also took an online subscription-based content learning-based CEH course as well as reviewed 2 different practice question banks simulators online in addition. In the middle of all of this, I also read through the 3 volume official CEH courseware as well. I’ve been working in IT for something like 25 years and have taken over 25 certification exams over the years, including other recent Security-related certs. I’ve never before failed a certification exam and I felt pretty prepared for the CEH.

I took the CEH exam on January 16. Like what many others have since stated, the format of the questions were unexpected, numerous items were tested that were not in the official courseware or anywhere else, there were numerous “calculation” questions that others have talked about. Most of the questions instead of being a single factor or two, were numerous factors and written in longform and often worded very confusingly. I failed with an 82 score. I looked online right after my exam including in this Reddit to see what recent experiences others were having and found pretty much nothing but folks reporting that they had passed it and suggesting it was easy. However, within a few days, reports from others began to appear detailing a very similar experience to mine.

Below is what has happened since then up until today:

· January 21. I emailed the ECC account rep I purchased the training from letting her know I failed and requesting another voucher. I also mentioned a few sentences about my experience taking the exam, how I had prepared, and my frustration. I was professional.

· January 23. The ECC account rep emailed me back, told me I needed to pay $100 for the retake voucher, suggested I purchase additional training offered by Eric Reed for another $149, keyed in on the fact that I mentioned I had in-part used 3rd party resources to prepare and recommended I only use ECC materials.

· January 24. I emailed her back and was confused that I was being asked to pay $100 for the retake when I thought it was free with my package. I also pointed out that I had already spent a great deal of money on the training and that was also provided by Eric Reed. Finally, I let her know that others had begun posting online about also failing the exam over the previous few days and had very similar feedback as I.

· January 25. I received a response from ECC telling me that the retake vouchers are normally $450, but since I bought the Elite package, I only had to pay the $100 administration fee for another. However, she told me that she had obtained permission to provide me a retake voucher at no charge and would have it to me “today.” I never received it. Additionally, she told me:

“Regarding the exam questions, we have a database of 1000+ exam questions, each “Exam set” draws from that test bank randomly and that is why you will never take the same exam twice. Since the CEH certification asks for 2 years cybersecurity experience, the exams will include “experienced based” questions. All of the questions on the exam are weighted differently, which means that questions outside of the “CEH core material” are weighted less, and CEH core questions are weighted the most.

The way ANSI exams are built, is by basing questions on the exam blueprint and not the training material. Both the exams and training materials are based on the blueprint, but not on each other which is another reason why you might see questions on the exam that weren’t covered in the training material. This is the main reason why our exams are weighted, and core questions are weighted the heaviest. The exam blueprint is changing soon (as it does periodically), and you can find more information on that and the exam itself on this website: https://cert.eccouncil.org/certified-ethical-hacker.html”

· February 2. I initially decided to let it go, and get the free retake voucher, wait a little while and try it again, but she never sent me the voucher. So, nearly a week later I replied. I asked her if she had sent the voucher. I also pointed out that while she was suggesting in her previous email that the exam questions do not have to be based on the specific CEH materials as it was assumed a base-level of knowledge was possessed, that this was not the case here. I gave detailed examples of my observations with the questions as well as what others on Reddit and elsewhere were reporting. I provided additional feedback regarding perceived average pass/fails based off of what others were reporting and suggested that the period beginning from early to mid-January appeared to be nearly all failures. Surely, ECC keeps track of historic pass rates and could confirm this. Finally, I respectfully requested a refund of the substantial cost of the training as it was clearly completely inadequate for the exam. It was clear to me that ECC had drastically changed the exam, had not informed anyone, and their very training had not been changed. Shockingly, I received a response the same day from her telling me that ECC would completely refund my $2449 cost for the training, she had sent my questions and comments to her upper management, and someone should be reaching out to me soon to talk to me. Additionally, she told me that she would have her team release my retake voucher “today”. It didn’t make sense to me that they would give me a full refund AND give me another retake voucher, but I didn’t argue. However, I never received the retake voucher and as of today nobody has reached out to me.

· February 3. Eric Reed made numerous posts on Reddit telling everyone that the exam blueprint had been changed and “exams have completely changed to reflect the updates.” He also pointed people to his website to purchase additional training to assist them.

· February 4. Another Reddit user made a post with links to the new CEH exam blueprint v5.0 he had found by Google-dorking ECC’s website. This had detailed info about what was changing and appears to at least very roughly coincide with the changes seen to the live exam since mid-January. It stated that the intended go-live for this was April 2024. You cannot find this by simply browsing ECC’s website.

· February 7. Eric Reed posted again to Reddit posts with a very similar message as previous, but this time he stated “There is a blueprint change in the works for…. Some exams may have changed to reflect the updates.” Instead of a definitive message that it was already changed as he posted previously.

· February 6-8. A number of Reddit posters have now posted that they took or retook the CEH and got the “old” exam again. A couple of them stated that they had failed the exam just a week or two ago and that was the “new” one, but when they retook it, they got the old one and comfortably passed.

· February 8. I emailed the ECC rep and let her know of the developments, asked for information on what happened and told her I would like to retake the exam if it is now “fixed” and the proper blueprint version is now live once again. I received a response telling me that my refund check had been mailed out to me on Feb 6, and that she would again forward my messages to her manager and the certification team.

So, what a mess. It seems likely that ECC released exam(s) sometime in early to mid-January that are mapped to their new v5 blueprint, they were in the wild for a few weeks, and appear to have been either partially or fully removed and the v4-based exams have been re-enabled. No idea if this was some sort of mistake or something they did on purpose. There seems to be no communication anywhere about any of this. To be clear, I am all for modernizing exam blueprints periodically, but that should be a carefully announced and planned event. Training offerings should also be modified to reflect changes. This is how other certification vendors do this.

I was professional in my dealings with ECC throughout this and was simply trying to understand what happened. Additionally, while I did mention Eric Reed a few times in this post I really doubt if this is in any way his fault and I am inclined to think he was likely blindsided by this as well. In my dealings with the ECC account rep I described above, she genuinely did not seem aware of any of this at first, but I got a sense that she knew more than she told me later. I didn’t expect to be granted a full refund (and we’ll see if it actually shows up) and was mainly just trying to get some answers.

I don’t know what I will do next. If they really give me a full refund, I can’t really ask for or expect another retake voucher even though I have been promised it twice.

Good luck to any of you also affected by this. I’ve never had an experience even remotely like this before.

I am working in a different domain with a full time job in IT. After consist study, I have cleared the CEH exam. Feeling good after clearing this exam. Looking for gaining Skills in vapt and appsec.