Hi, after a few sample exam practice, I decided to give the exam a try and managed to pass the CC exam!
My Thoughts on the course
Before I give some of my personal Thoughts on CC's course, I want to give some context:
In terms of Information Technology, I have a vast head-start since I was primarily doing software engineering as a student/work for ~8 years. So some of the terminologies and topics covered were extremely familiar for me, such as service providers like IaaS/SaaS or common ports.
However, there were a lot of things that I wasn't very experienced in or didn't knew, such as:
- OSI Layers (Even after the exam, I am still not fully confident about this, lol)
- Types of Attack (Back then, everything is either a virus or malware 😅)
- Access Controls
- Threat Management
- etc
I wanted to delve into Cyber-security mainly to understand blue-teaming (on how to secure applications). And I personally feel this course was a good introduction, specially learning about threat management controls and different types of possible attacks.
Thoughts on Exam
- During the exam, I found myself trying to understand the question more than trying to pick the correct answer. Sometimes, the questions are worded in a very... unique way. Other times, the question presents a very interesting scenario whereby it isn't clear which answer is the best.
- I found myself internally debating on why a certain answer would be a better solution compared to others.
- There are very little memorization based questions (like default port numbers for XYZ), they do exist, but I believe I only encountered ~5 of them?
Overall, I would personally say that the exam was moderately easy. Easy enough that you can easily figure out the solution with some thinking; Tough enough that you do actually have to think and evaluate the choices.
Tips
Although its going to be very similar to the tips you will find online
- Learn when to NOT to use a certain solution. Don't just learn the correct answers, learn what is incorrect as well.
- I think this should be mentioned more, since we have AI tools such as ChatGPT today. For every practice question and it's expected answers. Try to debate (with ChatGPT, or someone else) on why the other incorrect answers can be a possible fit for the question. The goal is to understand why certain answers are inferior solutions, and under what additional circumstances, would those answers be superior solutions.
- Learn on the whys instead of the whats behind each scenario, concept or terminology.
