Certified Cyberdefender ( CCD ) Course & Exam Review
Why I bought Certified Cyberdefender ( CCD )
The reason me buying the CCD course just after a few months after the release is that I have been solving labs on the Cyberdefenders website for a very long time and have played multiple CTFs hosted by Cyberdefender Team and from these CTFs and labs, I know these guys have great knowledge about their domains. So I thought let’s take the course and see if it is really worth it and you will find this answer later in the blog.
CCD Course Content
You can find a lot of other reviews sharing the modules of the course. I will add that also but I will tell you what difference I found in CCD course.
Course Modules
The Course covers majorly all domains:
- Security Operations Fundamentals.
- Incident Response.
- Perimeter Defense.
- Digital Forensics.
- Threat Hunting.
For more detailed content details check Cyberdefenders CCD
After completing the course I can say that there are no such prerequisites Anyone who knows the basics of security and how to google is a sufficient skill.
When I attempted the exam there are 170+ written articles and 21 labs available covering all domains of cyber defence. The labs are really challenging some labs took me 9 hours to solve. So have patience while solving the labs.
I like the Disk and Memory labs most as they really want me to research the topic and understand which artefacts are best to find the evidence and which tool will parse and how to correlate the information from multiple artefacts to reach the final answer.
For solving the labs you will have 120 hours. People asking in the discord server if this is sufficient to solve all the labs. From my experience, 120 Hours is more than enough. I solved each lab 3 times and also check a few of them while attempting my exam after that still I have 80 hours left.
Is CCD Content Good?
The course modules are really well structured and the content is not just the theory of the topic but there are examples which will tell you how this theory will be applied in real-life investigation. You will also be provided with the tools you can use and how these tools will be used with detailed explanations. Each module has multiple labs associated with it, which are created to test your knowledge of that module. They also added additional labs list which I liked as it helped me while preparing for my exam. The very important thing is the community they have built, everyone is very supportive and helps you in your learning journey.
Exam Experience
The exam is 48 hours long and this is more than enough time for anyone to complete the exam. I solved the exam and even rechecked my answers 2 times and did my day-to-day task then also I have 7 hours left. In CCD you have questions and you have to provide the answer no report is required to submit and try to provide how you reach this answer as the exam is checked manually and you can get partial points.
The Exam has 2 scenarios completely based on real Incidents covering all the modules you studied in the course. The Scenario is similar to how a corporate environment looks like systems, servers, firewalls, agents etc… The questions are not hard [ but some are 😁 ], the question has everything mentioned so that you can find the answer [ Read the question carefully ]. The question from each domain will check your in-depth knowledge of the tool you use and the concepts you are applying.
Exam Advice
You can pick any domain to solve first but I suggest reading both scenarios and understanding what happened in both cases and how we get to know about the incident will help you to understand the findings you found during your investigation, how the attacker laterally moved into the system and you can create the timeline of events question by question which will speed up your investigation process. The labs have an internet connection available so use it and if you found that some tools are not working as you expected don’t worry download them from the internet, I also used a lot of new tools which are not pre-available in the labs. Last piece of advice don’t panic focus on the question and scenario if you feel stressed just leave the chair and relax for a few mins as you have a lot of time to solve the exam.
