Today I started taking the training courses for the Certified Ethical Hacker training. Until today, I’ve been working on reading through the manuals and other books. I wanted to write about it, just to lock some of the training to a point in time for my memory. The online training is a little kludgy on how they approach things. You have to sign up for four accounts – your video training account, your transcender account (which doesn’t work on OSX/Chrome combo, so I’ll need to troubleshoot that), a site for your courseware to download (I’m still downloading, about 30GB or more), and the virtual labs account.
In theory, I don’t need to download all the lab tools, since I have access to their VM portal. However, I figured it was easier to grab them all now instead of hunting for them at a later date. I was also annoyed that the PDFs for the courseware are DRM locked and require an actual copy of Adobe Acrobat to read. I moved away from Adobe due to the constant patching it requires – but here we are again.
Getting all this stuff together wasn’t fun, and a constant sign-up and configure that took up half the day. Since this certification has been around for years, I figured everything would be more streamlined with ease of use and a focus on open-source software. The open-source side is important since most of the tools they are training you on are open-source packages. However, requiring close-sourced software to read the PDFs – that’s just annoying compared to everything else.
The streaming solution isn’t optimal, but so far it works well enough. I didn’t notice at first, but when you mark a module complete it auto-starts the next module. That is slightly annoying especially since they didn’t warn you. The instructor in the videos is good. He explains things in a well-thought-out manner. I’ve made it through three videos – finishing the introduction to the ethical hacking module.
In this module, they explained the types of hackers, different types of pen testing, the big hacking incidents of 2014, the steps in a pen test, and international hacking laws. All in all, it was a good day. Most of the items covered I was already aware of, but it was a good refresher.
