Thanks for the encouragement, hayabusa.

If it were easy it wouldn't be that big of a deal. It just makes me want it that much more and I will appreciate it even more when I do pass the exam.

That's the spirit!  Stick with it, and you'll get it.  Great attitude!

Thanks!

I have been on the bench since the end of December and I have a pentest next week and it will last three weeks. My over abundance of study time will be reduced, but I look forward to using what I have learned in the upcoming pentest. PWB has been very educational and I have improved a lot since I started my job as a pentester last April.

Yes, I will be taking the exam again. I won't give up until I have that certification. I extended my lab time by two weeks, which also gives me another exam attempt. I only studied an additional two weeks after failing the first time before I retested. I figure I will take it again in a month if I feel like I am ready.

It's great that you still have the determination to continue.  You already pretty much said it yourself, "Nothing Worth Having Comes Easy".

I started the PWB course recently, so can appreciate the difficulty. I would be interested to know, where you felt you went wrong on this attempt.

Did you do all the extra mile excercises? And, how many of the machines in the lab did you manage to compromise before attempting the exam?

Thanks for the encouragement!

I didn't do all the extra mile exercises, although I spent most of my time on the areas I was having problems with. For me that was buffer overflows. I didn't spend my time wisely from the start. I started PWB last April. I wasn't studying enough for a long period of time and didn't study at all when I was doing pentests. If I would have done a better job studying from the start, I would be better off. January and February have been great months for me study wise.

I didn't compromise all of the lab machines and only did about half. I would recommend hacking them all. I think that is the best gauge of whether you are ready for the challenge. Yesterday to I 15 of the 16 servers I had previously hacked in the lab for practice. I was hoping this would help me remember some things and think about how I compromised them. At first I spent a lot of time using Metasploit and that would bad from a PWB point of view, but good for my job as a pentester. I am better with Metasploit, which is a tool I use on pentests.

As far as this attempt goes and to state the obvious, I wasn't ready. I knew that I would start getting pentests, so my work load would pick up and I wouldn't have as much time to study. I wanted to pass the exam before work started picking up. I start a pentest next week and I will make sure to study in my free time. I need to get better with buffer overflows and modifying exploits. Due to lack of experience, coding is a weakness for me and this is an area I am emphasizing.

I would recommend doing all of the extra miles and hacking every machine in the lab. Like others have said, when you can hack everything in the lab you are ready for the challenge. Go over the study material more than once and focus on your weaknesses.

One of my problems is being impatient and wanting to get things done quickly, but I need to focus more on learning. I am trying to improve my study quality and not focus as much on study quantity.