How I Passed eCPPT within 3 months Without Losing My Mind

It’s been a while since I passed my eCPPTv3 exam, and now I’d like to publish the write-up. The eCPPT (Certified Professional Penetration Tester) exam is a practical, hands-on assessment that evaluates your real-world penetration testing skills.

In this article, I share 7 important tips to help you clear the exam easily and effectively. However, the blog will not include commands or screenshots.

Exam Structure and Cost

• 24-hour exam.
• 100% practical and hands-on penetration testing exam.
• The exam voucher was only ($399), but the new price is ($450) — Check the INE site.
• I purchased the one-year annual subscription, which included one free exam voucher, for $799.

Focus Areas

• Initial Access Vectors and Techniques
• Exploit Development
• AD Enumeration
• Exploitations and Post-Exploitations
• Active Directory Penetration Testing
• Web Application Penetration Testing

Exam Summary

In the exam, we had to begin with host discovery across the entire subnet to identify the live systems. I can’t reveal the exact number of active hosts, but there were more than two, including several domain controllers. The objective was clear, we ultimately needed to compromise a domain controller.

There was also an external network in scope. We first had to compromise the external targets and then pivot into the internal network to continue the attack path.

Key Points to Remember

1. Make sure to keep clear and well-organized notes of commands and each command's outputs throughout the process.

2. Carefully review each output and scroll through it slowly to ensure you don’t miss any important details.

3. Make sure to document all discovered hosts and compromised credentials in a table. Don’t forget to reuse the identified passwords where applicable and perform password spraying using the previously discovered credentials.

4. Do not save your result outputs on the exam VM. Instead, store them on your own machine or in cloud storage. I used Notion for note-taking.

5. Study common AD enumeration techniques and Active Directory initial access vectors. There are plenty of tools that can be used to enumerate Active Directory users, such as kerbrute.

6. Make sure you understand how to properly use the relevant tools and perform SMB enumeration and password spraying against AD users effectively. (e.g., Crackmapexec)

7. Learn Active Directory persistence techniques, such as extracting a Kerberos ticket for a pass-the-ticket (PtT) attack. Also study Golden Tickets and Silver Tickets and how they work for long-term persistence in Active Directory environments.

Thanks for reading this blog. Here’s what I got.😊

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