PJPT Review

Hey everyone! This was not a certification I had planned on getting... at all. But since I’ve earned it, and I try to cover every practical certification I complete, let’s go ahead and give this one a review.

Why did I even take this:

Let me be clear: I did not pay for this exam. During an interview process for an offensive security role, the company had a list of certifications it would pay for a candidate to attempt instead of a doing a random CTF. In my case, the only one applicable to the role that I didn’t already have was the PJPT. At first I thought, “Cool, they’ll just skip this part.” However, after a waiting period, they asked me to complete the exam for the sake of candidate fairness, which I understood.

So, to be completely transparent, I took this exam for free, but that will not change my opinions on the exam itself.

Certification overview:

This is an entry-level penetration testing certification, described as follows:

The Practical Junior Penetration Tester™ (PJPT) certification is a penetration testing exam experience that will assess a student’s ability to perform an internal network penetration test at an associate level. Students will have two (2) full days to complete the assessment and an additional two (2) days to write a professional report.

As for pricing, this one comes in on the cheaper end at $249, with the bonus of one free retake if needed.

As for course material, TCM’s Practical Ethical Hacking course accompanies the exam, though I had already completed it years ago.

The Exam:

Out of respect for the TCM team, I will not be sharing any exam details that are not already publicly known.

Well, let’s just rip off the band-aid: I did not have a great experience. Granted, I passed the technical portion in about an hour flat, but it was a pain. The network was quite unstable, and for the first 10 minutes I could not ping any of the machines. That had me pretty irritated, and on top of that, machines would randomly die or ports would refuse to connect. Luckily, I kept a cool head, got through it, and reached the end goal of Domain Admin fairly quickly.

In terms of fairness, if we set the network issues aside, the exam is very fair and will be fairly easy for anyone who has spent time on CTFs or other exams. I think it is properly labeled as a junior-level certification aimed at beginners.

Like TCM’s other certifications, this one required a report, which is great. In the past I used Google Drive (yes, I am a heretic, but only for reports) because it made things simple. This time around, though, the pain and migraines were not worth it, so I opted to break out SysReptor with a custom template, which I highly recommend. After submitting, I received my passing notification two days later.

Closing Thoughts:

• The exam is great for beginners.
• The exam environment needs a tune-up.