Is the CEH exam difficult? Guide to pass it with a perfect score.
My score and the leader board
This post describes my journey with the CEH exam that I took a few months ago. My score was 95% on theory and 100% on practical which placed me in the third position in the world in Quarter 4 December 2022. It is satisfying to see my face on their leader board.
Reading the official materials and doing the labs.
First of all, my first thought was to read the entire book which is like 2000 pages in total, and do all the labs. And I did it. I believe that this is not an optimal way to achieve the goal but I am also not sure what my score would be without reading the book. I did it and do not regret it. I did some notes for areas that I did not fully understand and it took me like 6 weeks for 3 hours a day.
Additional sources of knowledge
It is quite easy to find blog posts and materials on the web. The first one that I strongly recommend is this GitHub repository.
Believe me or not but I read it many times and I absorbed this knowledge. It is well-built and edited.
Other pages to cram are located here in the CEH exam cheat sheet. You can find it on Scribd and many other places on the web. You must obtain this knowledge! If the link does not work, try to find images/pdf which look like the picture below.
Repeating practice tests.
In my opinion, the optimal way is to do as many practice tests as you can. I bought two courses on the Udemy and one set from skillcertpro.com.
I rate the Viktor Afimov course 4,5/5. Many questions from this set were repeated on my real exam. Jason Dion’s sets are not as good as Viktor but I enjoyed them because I learned new things and it helped me.
Skillcertpro has a huge set of questions but many of them repeat so the quality of the set is not as good as on the Udemy. However, I believe that doing these tests helped me to fully remember many real questions and I also do not regret purchasing this. Skillcertpro offers a money-back guarantee in case you do not pass the exam on the first attempt.
My last source of knowledge was Ric Messier’s book called “CEH v11: Certified Ethical Hacker Version 11 Practice Tests” and I did all the tests a couple of times.
Total time spent.
My entire learning time was 6 months long. I am almost sure that it is more than enough to achieve 90% and much more than enough to pass it. Maybe I wasted too much time on it but to be honest, that was my first step into cybersecurity and I do not regret this time. I hope that my road will be helpful for all the people that want to pass it. I will be glad to answer all of your questions.
