My eNDP experience:-
A few months ago, I had given my review on eJPT . Just a few hours ago I passed my eNDP exam and I felt like I should again do a review , more detailed because I did not find any reviews myself when I was searching for online. So here it goes:-
A quick background about me, I am a third year Computer Science engineering student from India. I am actually planning to take the OSCP labs anytime soon ,so eNDP was basically a little different than what I am supposed to be i.e. a red teamer. The eNDP course introduces you to the world of a blue teamer , i.e. it teaches you about firewall configuration for organizations and active directory configuration in an organization as well as hardening a network.
The exam consists of two parts :- First part is a MCQ based test where you are given 45 questions and you are supposed to answer 35 or more correct answers to clear this stage. I got 41 correct in this. The sad part is they do not reveal where you went wrong. You are given one and half hour to complete this task. Failure to pass this stage will result in loss of your voucher.
The second part is a completely practical exam where you are supposed to harden a network from attacks . Certain tasks would be given and in order to pass the second stage , you would have to complete all the tasks and document your doings in a professional report in order to pass the exam. You are given 96 hours access to lab and another additional 10 days to prepare the report. If the report you submit is deemed worthy , you are awarded the certificate .
Now lets talk about the material provided :- Pure class from eLearnSecurity ! Absolutely addictive and mesmerizing , exactly what I needed. Going into the course , I had no clue on how to configure a firewall nor anything about active directory and I atleast got a really good understanding of both. This course won’t make you an expert mind you, but you will certainly learn a lot if you are absoltely new to firewalls and active directory like me. The slides were very professional and well made, eleansecurity hardly put a foot wrong here. The course was worth every penny for me I felt. The labs were really spot on , I would recommend for learning sake to anyone who takes this certification to do al the labs, you would be astounded as to how much you would learn in the labs. I didn’t go through the videos , for me the slides and labs were more than enough to understand whats going on. Please go through the material with the mentality of learning and not just passing , that would be the best way to go about this course.
Now about the exams:- Nothing much to say over there, you are given an environment to harden with certain tasks to carry out . You are to document your doings and compile it into a professional report. Personally I felt the exam was more challenging than the labs, i.e. you would have to google a lot of things but I think that’s the best part of this exam, atleast you’re not spoon fed everything like in eJPT. I ran into many errors which I had a lot of fun in debugging. Overall it took me around 29 hours to complete the exam and I took a break and completed my report another 24 hours later. Make sure to take a lot of screenshots while performing the tasks and outline the steps really well, this will the least atleast improve your report making skills. I had to enlist the help of my friend Gaurav to make it look professional(Thanks Man!). It was around 29 pages long.
It only took 4 hours for elearnsecurity to respond to me that I was an eNDP. I was delighted to say the least, 10 days of sleepless nights was finally worth it. So here goes the timeline:-
21st November- Bought the course
27th -29th November- Was in Delhi and gave my phase 1 exam on 27 th
30th November-Spent the whole morning revising the labs and started my exam on afternoon around 1:00PM .
31st November — Done with the exam by 5:00PM , now taking screenshots for report.
1st December — Submitted my report around 8:00PM
2nd December — At around 12:30 AM , got my confirmation email that I passed the exam with my “shiny certificate”
Thanks a ton elearnsecurity!
