Hi eternal_security,

Thanks for the nice reply. I am glad I could shed some insight as one who is currently taking the eLS course.

To provide an update, I am still waiting for the lead instructor, Armando, to return two of my inquiries.

I also want to point out that there are absolutely no refunds. Which can be hard to swallow for many (as often times we sign up for something thinking it is one thing but turns out to be not what you had expected/needed/required).

I require very detailed step-by-step explanations and access to an instructor (even if only via email and/or chat). And so far, I am struggling with both of these issues.

Thanks for listening to my review. Again, glad it helped.

Best regards,
hungrymind

Hi,

Sorry to butt in, but since I am currently enrolled in elearnsecurity's PTP course, I thought I would throw my 2 cents in.

Upon first glance at the eLS PTP course, I was extremely excited. I was glad to see they covers network security and system security as well and not just web app security.

Now, with me being more than halfway through the web app security portion, I must say, the English is erroneous and confusing (I am sympathetic as I know English is not the instructor's first language. However, it was unacceptable that I had to go to various external resources to fill in the missing gaps). Second, there is no chatroom where students can converse with other students. Apparently it is on its way, but it's been some time now and we have not received an update. A chatroom cannot be that hard to implement (there is already a forum). Thirdly, and this bugs the hell out of me, there is no direct line of communication between instructor (or other instructors) and student. At present, I can email a support-line email, which does not guarantee a reply, or I can contact the instructor via the forum, again, without guarantee of a reply. I finally received a reply to one of my questions and that was after waiting several days. At present, the eLS course feels more like a very expensive slideshow. I'm almost afraid to submit my pen-test report, because I feel like I am missing something 

Some of you will think my review is unduly harsh, but I honestly believe that it is precisely this criticism that will inspire improvements. The trouble is that would-be instructors cannot just throw brain dumps up on a site and charge for access, there needs to be interactivity, you need to be there for your customer/student to answer any question that may arise (because what is the difference between this and a book or video learning). We pay our fees and expect that there will be an instructor there to help us when we get stuck.

Now, with all that said, the course is slated to be updated sometime soon. Again, nobody has set a date, so can't say when that is, only "soon". So perhaps the update will address all my concerns. Guess I'll have to wait and see.

Thanks for listening to my review.

hungrymind

Thanks Don! Trying it now.

I am enrolled in the eLearnSecurity pen-testing course and we just covered usage of Burp suite. Nifty little tool!

hungrymind

Hi MindOverMatter,

Do let us know when you finally get a response from them.
I'm considering attempting the CEH exam sometime next year and will be going the self study route.

Looking forward to the updates.

hungrymind

Hi everyone,

I am thinking of taking an online course in order to learn the fundamentals of penetration testing (and hopefully then some).

I have been considering Wayne Burke's offerings (not sure now due to the high price tag, but they look good), Offsec (very interested), and eLearnSecurity (also very interested due to the good reviews and the even better price point).

So this is more of a follow-up post to see who has started the eLearnSecurity course and their satisfaction level with it thus far, what to expect, the exam itself, etc.

Thanks guys.

hungrymind

Hi T-Bone,

Sorry for the late reply... I haven't been receiving notifications of replies, so my apologies.

I took Pen-Testing Fundamentals, so it is basically the cheapest, lowest level course... but I liked the inclusive of the book in the course price. Still, the course did not deliver on its promises. I say don't hype it if you can't back it up. I would have been happier attacking the De-Ice discs on my own or with a friend and would end up learning the same amount.

This is why I am sticking to self-study for now... but I am eyeing Wayne Burke's $500 Blended Learning course, however, I have yet to hear back from Wayne and I was told I might receive an CEH exam voucher (I am studying CEH on my own right now). But as it stands right now, that $500 course is no longer looking very useful. I think the really good, high quality course content is beyond the $1,100 mark (I always wondered why that number?). So I think I'll be leery of courses under that price point... at least for now.

Thanks for the feedback T-Bone. Do keep me posted :-)

-Alicia
aka Hungrymind

I'd like to bring up the fact that I took the official Heorot course run by the author of the book Professional Penetration Testing.

Has anyone else here taken this course, or is contemplating taking this course?

I received this book as a free gift upon signing up for the course. Overall, the course was a major let-down (for me anyway). Thomas Wilhelm (the author) has written a decent book, but his course doesn't hold water. He relies solely on free and open source distros and tools, then charges a pretty penny for the course access. What you get is a bunch of links to the freely down-loadable distros and Linux tools, you get to watch a few shoddy cam recordings made by the author, and then you are left on your own to challenge the De-Ice discs. Very sub-par offering from Wilhelm. Thus, I got my money back... this course is a major dud.

Now, as for the book, I thought this was a lot better than the course content, and offers decent walkthroughs of a professional pen-test, as well as useful tips and tricks. Not bad. So far, all pages are intent after an initial thumb-through.

I would be curious in hearing your guys' opinion on book and course.

Hungrymind

I recently subscribed to Hakin9 and was surprised to see this questionable email campaign from them.

I did a little digging, read the Amazon review for the book, and quickly determined that this was a lame attempt to "cash in".

A real disappointment!

Thanks for mentioning this!

Hello there!

Sorry for the delay in my reply (I am very forgetful when it comes to checking in).
Thanks for the replies.

My apologies, but I cannot really be specific, as it is the entire output of the W3af log that baffles me.

Maybe I should ask a better question, for example, is there a log analysis tool that I could use with W3af? Is there an online repository available for this sort of thing? I am brand new to pen-testing, but W3af had the nicest output of the few tools I've tried so far, so I decided to stick with it for the time being.

In specific, the last line of the log posted in my original post says: [Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:19:17 AM UTC] The URL: "http://example.com/pqd_dl.php" has an object tag

I couldn't find any specific info on this. What exactly is an object tag, and what does it mean to have one on a .php page? Is this a vuln in itself? I am just having a hard thing finding any input on making sense of the W3af log in general.

Thanks for your help guys. Much appreciated!

-Alicia

Hi everyone,

I am a regular lurker and reader around here... not much of a poster yet, but soon to be! So this would be my second or third time posting here.

I have a question for the original poster, tux633k, as well as everyone else reading the thread...

So I am currently studying the CEH casually and would like to attempt the exam some day. One thing that I cannot seem to find a solid answer to is, how do employers view "self-study" style courses? Somewhere along my travels, I seem to recall someone (perhaps an instructor video, or online forum comment) made mention of the fact that both EC-Council, as well as employers view the "self-study" option of the CEH cert to be not as well recognized or respected as, say, taking the CEH training live, in person, and then attempting the exam at a later date. I recall that the assumption was that the live, in-person aspect gave the student an air of legitimacy and trustworthiness... but this is going on an intuitive hunch. more than anything else.

My apologies if I have got it dead wrong and/or if this is just a silly myth designed to scare us into coughing up more for some expensive in-person training! 

So I figured now was a good time to ask the question.

Thanks for your input!

Greetings everyone,

While I am not a frequent poster around here, I am a frequent "lurker" and have enjoyed the generous contributions from forum members here.

I finally have a question of my own, and have searched the boards here, unable to find an answer to my specific question. So, here goes....

I have been asked to conduct a Penetration Test on a friend's website. I have his full consent to go "whole hog" in order to find potential vulnerabilities. He is aware of my knowledge level (strong theory, little hands on experience with Pen-Testing). He hopes that this project will bring me some much needed experience.

We decided to use W3af for our pen-test. Now that we have made our first attempt with W3af, we have now encountered the dilemma of how to read and interpret the results.

I am signed up with the W3af mailing list and I have asked this same question there. While the people there were helpful, I was unable to come across any solid resources on how to understand the actual results spat out by W3af.

I am a Windows user migrating over to Linux. I have limited Linux experience, but hope to change this around very soon. Lastly, I just want to point out that when we did the first W3af Pen-Test, we chose the most generic settings available. In fact, I think we just went with full defaults set and let it run for awhile. If this is a silly thing to do, I would appreciate the head's up on this. We are completely clueless! 

A brief sample of our results generated by first W3af attempt (IP has been blanked out for privacy reasons):

[Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:11:17 AM UTC] Found a new virtual host at the target web server, the virtual host name is: "webmail.example.com". To access this site you might need to change your DNS resolution settings in order to point "webmail.example.com" to the IP address of "example.com". This vulnerability was found in the request with id 269.
[Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:12:02 AM UTC] Fingerprinted this host as a Microsoft Windows system. This information was found in the requests with ids 377 and 378.
[Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:12:02 AM UTC] A robots.txt file was found at: "http://example.com/robots.txt". This information was found in the request with id 379.
[Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:12:21 AM UTC] The target site *has* a DNS wildcard configuration. This information was found in the request with id 450.
[Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:12:21 AM UTC] The contents of http://xx.xxx.xx.xx/ differ from the contents of http://example.com/. This information was found in the request with id 451.
[Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:19:17 AM UTC] The URL "http://example.com/music/" has the following allowed methods: GET, HEAD, OPTIONS,
[Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:12:42 AM UTC] : 2 real server(s)
[Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:12:42 AM UTC] ======================================================================
[Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:12:42 AM UTC]
[Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:12:42 AM UTC] server 1: Apache/2.2.15 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.15 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
[Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:12:42 AM UTC]
[Sun 04 Apr 2010 05:19:17 AM UTC] The URL: "http://example.com/pqd_dl.php" has an object tag.----------------------------------------------------------------------


And on and on it goes. The site consists mainly of PHP files. This site uses shared hosting. W3af was able to locate a few files and folders that were not intended for public viewing or use. This is very concerning. At this point, we just want to be able to decipher a very detailed log out out by W3af. Any insight is GREATLY appreciated! 

Anyway, thanks for your help guys. Looking forward to learning more and contributing more as time goes on....

hungrymind

Okay I'm going to eat my words here.
Looks like these videos were created by the community.
Ignore my previous post entirely!!! 
I shall always do my homework FIRST!

Thank you!

Hi everyone.

I am a newly registered member of EH.net but have been a lurker for awhile.
Wanted to reply to Tom's post as I am very eager to check out the interview this Friday. I'm pretty sure I'll also be signing up for Mr. Wilhelm's Pen Testing Fundamentals course (either this month or next month - have to figure that out first).

Thanks for posting the link. I'll be listening!

Best regards,
Alicia

Hi.

I am new to this forum. So hello to everyone, first and foremost.

To Allstar: While this collection does indeed look amazing, I am just wondering where this collection originates from? I recall seeing something like this awhile back, possibly at the Remote Exploit forums, but maybe not. My only concern is that this belongs to another site. If I am wrong though, do let me know, and my apologies in advance. If I am right and it is indeed warez, or a collection shared without permission, I don't think that will help EH.net progress, it will only set it back.

I recognize what Don has done here, and I know others do too. This is one amazing site and forum. Don't think there is anything like this, nothing organic like this anyways. There are too many ethical hacker resources that appear closed off, or even elitist at times. So this is refreshing.

Just my two cents.

Best regards,
...another hungry mind