Doing CEH with Firebrand

So here I am sitting in a Firebrand classroom in the middle of my Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) course. It’s been a long time coming; I’ve been wanting to do this course for a couple of years now. As you know, I quit Intelligence a few months ago to set up Future Tech and one of the benefits of being your own boss is that it’s a tad easier to get time off (and funding) to go off and do a course when you have a good relationship with the person who has to sign it off. So here I am!

I must say, the pace of this course is INSANE! I got here Sunday afternoon for an induction at 6:00pm, and before I knew it, we had our introduction, grabbed a bite for dinner and dove right into the course! Our instructor is kind enough to let us start the day a bit later than others ( 9:00pm ), but then he expected our classes to run till 11:00pm in the evening. Oh, and after that we had to go back to our rooms to read the chapters we had covered in class. I don’t think I’ve ever been in anything even half as brutal as that!

We’ve covered an immense amount of material. The CEH syllabus includes 20 core modules designed to teach you the basics of hacking and penetration testing. These include:

• Footprinting and Reconnaissance
• Scanning Networks
• Enumeration
• System Hacking
• Trojans and Backdoors
• Viruses and Worms
• Sniffing
• Social Engineering
• Denial of Service
• Session Hijacking
• Hacking Webservers
• Hacking Web Applications
• SQL Injection
• Hacking Wireless Networks
• Hacking Mobile Platforms
• Evading IDS, Firewalls and Honeypots
• Buffer Overflows
• Cryptography
• Penetration Testing

What’s awesome about the course is that we don’t just get to read about these things, but also get to try to break things, practice with the tools; and get to take the tools home with us 🙂 Firebrand have provided us with machines with a number of virtual boxes on them, so everything is set up ready for us to get our hands dirty.

The reality though is that we’re cramming a huge syllabus into a week-long bootcamp, so the pressure is to be expected. I’ve learnt loads and am still learning more, so feel relatively prepared for my exam tomorrow morning. The proof will be in the pudding, so I’ll let you know how I get on in that!