Pentest+ pass
Hello all,
I passed the Pentest on Friday with a 759. I want to tell you that the exam is not easy. But in no way is it as hard as all the posts that you’ve seen on Reddit. I was extremely worried starting this course because of all the fails and how many times people have taken it, yada yada. It is just like any other Comptia Exam but yes it’s hard.. it’s supposed to be. I studied for about 60 days but that’s because I had little to no experience scripting.
Here are the resources I used;
Certmaster perform labs - they were required
Gemini Pro - got the free one month
Pocket prep - bought the month, used it MAYBE 2-3 times for an hour each
Hank Hackerson - this helped me start my journey but I watched it while working out mostly
Quizlet - I got a pdf from one of the instructors and used AI to turn it into flashcards
I will tell you that Gemini was my absolute best study practice and it wasn’t even close. I used a master prompt for teaching a student to pass the exam (gave the version obviously) and wanted to focus on learning scripts, learning each tool (from PDF) and just focusing on the objectives.
I had Gemini run through the tools one by one, what it does, is it active or passive, when to use it, how to remediate it.
Every tool that used CLI, I went through it line by line and explain it to me. Even if I wasn’t understanding it I made it dumb it down even more. Trust me it helps, if you’re not understanding something tell it to try a different approach to teaching you.
For this exam, learn the tools, you can mostly get by just knowing what they are. Obviously look at the more obvious ones with more depth (nmap, metasploit, nslookup/dig, theharvester, etc.) you DO NOT need to kill one specific tool. Nmap and metasploit you should probably be familiar with but you don’t need to go crazy, they don’t expect you to know every little thing.
I would list everything to go over but there’s many posts on here about what resources people used and what to study. If this helps great and good luck on your exam/journey! You’ll do amazing. Just stop stressing and just study. You’ll pass it!