Yesterday I passed my Certified Ethical Hacker test making me a CEH. I really don't put much personal information in this blog but since I wish I'd found more information about the possibility of self studying for the CEH before I took the exam, I'm going to write this entry in the hopes that someone else will find it before they take their's.

CEH's Perception

The Certified Ethical Hacker certification came around years ago but I first heard about it at Defcon 15. You can go look at what the CEH is and read why you need to get it but I'm more interested in writing about how I personally have seen it perceived.

One of the Goons at Defcon was making fun of the certification saying that he was going to start his own test to be a CEH - Certified Ethical Harpoonist and that the CEH cert was less than desirable. He used more colorful adjectives. Goons are at least two steps up from the "Humans" at Defcon so their opinion has some sway (especially among n3wbs and scene whores) no matter how beer fueled it is.

None of the people that I know or are friends with have the CEH cert and I've never really had a conversation with anyone saying how they're going to work towards it. Most look at the CISSP to be a manager or some of the SANS certs if you want to actually know how to hack. The best example of how CEH is not widely known or desired was I told a techie friend that I'd passed my CEH exam and his response was, "Congratulations. What's that?"

Why get the CEH?

So if it's been planted in my mind that the CEH is really not that big of deal and most people don't even know what the CEH is, why even go for it right? More than anything else it added a structure to the security projects I had been working on. Up til now, I was working on 15 different projects using all kinds of different technology from encryption games and anonymity utilities to programming projects and improving my soldering skills. I found the CEH study guide and looking through the table of contents, it seemed like something that could teach me new skills to wrap into my projects. So it just really put everything I had been studying into a specific achievable goal.

I would say to anyone expecting the CEH cert to open doors or make it easier for you to get a job, don't waste your time. In my opinion, CEH is the A+ of security.

Is Self Study an Option?

The short answer is a big maybe.

I'm lucky enough to work for a company that pays for my training. That being said, I really didn't want to take a week of to do the CEH training course knowing that the CEH really wouldn't do much for anyone. Since I'm on sabbatical for a few months, what better time to study towards something like this.

I bought the CEH review guide which in one of the first paragraphs of the books states something to the affect of

"This book does not contain all the information you need to pass the test."

Ok, I understand. I'll look at the information it's talking about and apply some real world examples. The review guide was missing a LOT of information. In fact, if I had no previous experience in security and was starting from scratch, the review guide wouldn't have even touched upon half of the subjects in the test.

I know what you're going to say, it's called a _REVIEW_ guide but in fact, there is no official book of information for the CEH which means that the only book to study from is this review guide. Maybe this is normal but for all the other certifications I have, there's always been a gigantic book that you studied from. So it was like having the cliff notes instead of the original novel and then trying to pass a 150 question exam. It wasn't like that, it WAS that.

The alternative to the review guide is that you hook up with the EC Council training and they tell you the secret subjects that you should study for in one of their week long training classes. Lets just say that thanks to the openness of the Internet, I was able to track down some more information to study.

Subjects not covered

I looked up as much information as I could and I talked to people in some forums and IRC channels that I frequent and they all basically said the same thing. "Nothing really surprising. Few gotcha questions. Pretty straight forward." And in response to did you self-study - "No." In fact out of the 5 or 6 people I directly talked to that had passed the CEH, they all shelled out the more than $1000 for the week training and then took the test.

The biggest item that I didn't study for was programming. They don't expect you to write any exploits or anything like that but you need to be able to debug C to point out locations for buffer overflows. I don't know C or C++ but can hack my way through so it was a stretch and not in any thing that I was studying. Luckily there were only two of these questions.

Conclusion

My major conclusion is the test material is really good for security professionals but if you're going to be able to pass the exam with the review guide, you are probably already in the security industry and this test will do nothing for you. If not, you'll end up spending the same amount of money re-taking the test that you would have if you did the week long training. The reason that I was successful was because of all the extra study materials I found and generally because I am a geek.