CRTP Passed
First, let’s start with my background before CRTP: eJPTv2 certified two months before CRTP, CCNA certified, and currently a second-year student in my bachelor’s degree. So as you can see, I didn’t have strong prior knowledge or work experience — for the AD part, I entered CRTP only knowing Kerberos and having finished the AD basics room on TryHackMe. However, I was genuinely passionate about red teaming and Active Directory environments.
I started the course during my final exams period at university, studying continuously every day. Two weeks of consistent daily progress was all it took me to finish the entire content — watching all the videos, reading the slides, and taking decent notes. At this stage I wasn’t applying anything yet; I was just carefully understanding how to build the mindset, how each attack works, and why things work (or don’t).
Then I started the lab. It took me 5 days to finish entirely, though the work was spread out rather than continuous — all 40 flags captured. After that, I revised the entire lab and my notes and decided to schedule the exam.
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Course: The course has three purchasing options for the lab access, all provide you with lifetime access to the content, the content is extremly worth it, the main limitation for me was the course only focuses on attacking active directory from windows not linux, but that can be easily learned after getting the theory behind everything as it will just be new tools, new syntax.
Exam day: I started Monday at 2:00 PM and it took me almost 14 hours total, including writing and submitting the final report. Enumeration is the key to solving the exam — it’s not hard, nothing unexpected. The course content and lab are enough to pass. Ofcouse at some point you’ll stuck and should try again and again, until you find the attack path, the exam doesn’t limit you with any tools to use, you can use any tools of your own even those not covered in the course, however you should demonstrate that in the report to be submitted after the exam.
The exam is 24 hours, and 48 hours to submit the report (don’t know that 48 hours start from when so that should be checked).
It took five working days for the results to be sent back, and yeah I passed it.
Next step?
Currently doing CAPE — already finished the first few modules and working on learning AD attacks from Linux, until now CAPE is feeling prety easy due to CRTP, almost everything covered in CRTP is being repeated back in CAPE which sounds intersting.
Finally, the course is absolutely worth it. The lab is genuinely interesting and feels like a game with attack chains. I’d strongly recommend it to beginners in AD — give it a try.
