Short Intro

Hello All , so finaly i obtained the Certified Red Team Professional certification AKA CRTP from Pentester Acadmey, so after my exam i thought i would like to share my exam and overoll experience to everyone.

This certification is mainly focusing for the beginners to kick start on Active Directory Security Testing. seriously it a steal for this price range . because now days all companies are mostly have this AD environment on their network.

About Course

The course is taught by Nikhil Mittal, After purchasing the course and lab time. You will get access to the entire course materials consists of video lectures, lab manual and yes you will also get hands-on lab experience. The lab is well designed and was stable for me during both exam and practice time. The lab is mainly focuses on exploiting Active Directory Misconfiguration not relay on any 0days and CVE’s.

Additonaly the course is heavily focuses on Powershell scripts and mimikatz, you don’t need to install any kali linux the windows machine is itself enough to cover everything. once you are comfortable by going through all the video materials . you can share a mail to the lab team, so they will setup an remote machine which is near to your region. You can use both VPN or browser (gucamole) to access the student VM. once you accessed the student VM as a low privileged user then you need to find the way to privilege escate to local administrator , from there you can jump into the AD domain . don’t need to worry everything you can learn from the course material itself.

You will get a chance to understand differnent concepts such as

• Domain Enumeration
• Windows Based Privilege Escation
• MS-SQL Exploatiton
• ASREP & Kerberosting etc

Also you will get an hands one chance to use tools such as

• Mimikatz
• PowerUp and PowerView
• Rubeus

On Practice Lab , you need to submit a total of 40 flags , that will make you prepared for the Exam. but sometime it was confusing for me, but i tried to manage it.

The Exam Day.

The one thing which i liked on them was you don’t need to schedule the exam , you can directly start at any time from their portal. The enviroment will get started up may be it will take a 15 to 20 mins to start up . once it started you will get a 24 Hrs to compete the exam and additional 24 hour to share the exam report.

The exam will consists of 5 Target Machine including the Domain Controller. Im order to pass the exam you need to get Code Execution on the all machine.

I started to setup the exam environment on 9:00 AM IST . personaly i spent roughly around 24 hours without sleeping to crack the exam , because i was able to crack 4 machines within 7 hours but i was completely stucked on the getting foothold on last machine, because on 4th machine i entered via an unintened method. so i reset the entire enviroment and started from the beginning but due to bad luck i still stucked on getting access on 5th machine. but just before ending the exam ( ~30 mins) before my last try was worked and i was able to access the machine and finally i finished.

Before closeing the exam VPN , i quickly ran through my entire screenshots and notes to double check wether i missed something or not. once verified i disconnected from exam environment and took a long sleep before editing my report.

After submitting the report i got a mail from the Lab team , that i had passed the exam and my certificate will be provided in few days.

And after 2 days , i saw a shineing certificate on my Accredible Account

Conclusion

The overoll experience was good for me . because i was a beginner to AD when i started this course . it will allow you to brush up your active directory skillset. Prepare well go through the course material twice before taking the exam Take breaks don’t go for the long run without taking preprations ( This was the thing which i missed ). Make proper notes and don’t skip any part of the course materail this will make chaos. make sure to keepy our report clean with all necessary screenshots.

Until next time , byee..