Certified Azure Red Team Professional (CARTP) Review
I have been working as a Penetration Tester for about two and half a years now, when it came to Infrastructure/AD Penetration Testing, it was always testing the on-prem environments. However, as technology is progressing further towards the cloud, a lot of organizations have started to migrate their on-prem solutions over to the cloud like Azure, AWS, GCP, and other third-party cloud service providers like G42. So I felt, it was necessary to expand my expertise towards this security domain. Browsing through various courses, I found out that Altered Security has a Red Teaming certificate on an Azure environment, so it was a fairly easy choice to get started with Azure through their course/certificate. The purpose of this blog is not to type out the Course Outline, for that you can go through the entire course information via this link: https://www.alteredsecurity.com/azureadlab. In this blog, I’ll be detailing my experience about the whole journey.
Course Review
First of all, the reason of choosing this course is because it doesn’t directly dive in the security aspect of Azure. It explains the functionality and the services that Azure provides. This ensures that you first understand the service, then exploit the misconfigurations and finally compromise that particular service.
The great thing that I liked about the course is that it truly felt like a Red Team course before there were no assume breached scenario. It included all aspects from getting Initial Access by exploiting the publicly accessible application, or phishing users to compromising the entire Tenant. I thoroughly enjoyed the course and it took me around 3.5 weeks to get through the entire course.
Lab Review
The course came with a 30 day lab, which can be started anytime by you within 90 days of purchase of the course. I’m personally a fan of this because it really helps people like us who are professional working in the first two parts of the day, and can only give a limited amount of time each day towards the course. So I started my lab time after finishing the course. The lab was fantastic, with little to no latency, no configuration or denial of service issues faced. In the lab, we get the chance to try almost every single thing that was taught in the course. I enjoyed going through the labs so much that I finished the entire lab within 3 days.
Exam Review
After finishing the course and the lab, I re-did the labs again for the second time and then started my exam. In the exam, we get a machine with no tools, so transferring the required tools were a bit of a hassle honestly, but after that the exam was straight forward. Transferring the tools and setting up the machine took me about an hour and then completing the entire exam and getting to the “crown-jewels” took me 2 hours. So I was essentially done within 3 hours and then I took a long break before working on the report and submitting it.
Additional Information
- Going through the course and the lab is enough for you to clear the exam.
- As usual, “Enumeration is Key”.
- After submitting the report, they ask for 7 business days for you to get the results, for me it took 5 business days (6 days) to get the result. After getting the results, you’ll need to verify your name on the certificate. You’ll then get your certificate by next day.
- Tools will not be on the testing machine. In the exam, even the use of the testing machine is not required, you can use your own machine to give the exam, so make sure all the required tools are downloaded and installed on your machine.
If you have any questions that you’d like to ask, you can contact me over my LinkedIn.
