r/WGUCyberSecurity

I’ll cut to the chase here by saying I’m giving myself 4-5 months to complete 13 courses. (Yes I’m aware this is a lot, I have been eating and breathing courses for the past couple of months) I have a background in cyber, so most of my courses aren’t extremely intimidating. My ability to complete Net+ in under 14 days has given me some confidence in being able to do this. All of this being said, I’m fairly nervous about my ability to complete Pentest+ and the CS+IA capstone at this accelerated pace. Without ruining the integrity of either OA, does anyone have any tips that can help me?

Good evening everyone,

Just trying to see if any of yall had run into the issue of mail hog not working within the lab. It was working for me for a bit and while I was progressing through it stopped responding.

Anyone else run into this? If so can you let me know what you did to remediate it as I am almost done and the mail app fails to load.

Talking to a few founders lately about SOC 2/ISO 27001 and trying to understand

the real experience (not the marketing-page version from Vanta/Drata).

If you've been through it (or are avoiding it), curious about:

- Did you do it yourself, hire a consultant, or use a platform?

- What actually took the most time / was the most annoying part?

- Did a specific deal or investor actually require it, or was it "nice to have"?

- If you haven't done it yet — what's stopping you? Cost, time, or just not

knowing where to start?

Not selling anything, just trying to understand the real pain points before

building/recommending anything in this space. Happy to share what I find back

in the thread.

It’s so much easier to know at a glance what people are talking about if you use the actual course name. I have to imagine that most people don’t go around memorizing course numbers they might spend only a couple of days on, however, they’d definitely know what you’re talking about when you say Managing Cloud Security as an example.

Hello all,

So I emailed my course instructor my task 1 for approval. They were out of office until the 30th making today day 3 that they have been back roughly. How long does it usually take to get approval and a signature on task 1?

thanks in advance

Hey everyone! I just started at WGU yesterday July 1st and I was able to pass D685 Practical Applications of Prompt fairly easily.

All I did was use the materials provided, I didn't read through any of the content but did practice quiz A in each section. If I didn't understand a term or concept I looked it up the question with AI to tell me what each of the options meant and I only had to do that for a few before I had a pretty good understanding. Then I took the pre-assessment and passed, I did the big course practice test in the content then took the real thing and passed!

You guys have got this!

I forgot to study risk lol.

I used birch book I read chapters 1,5,11,12,13,15
This YouTube channel was helpful
https://youtu.be/1BXtaR0A82Y?si=IwXfyY8V66MJZh4i

I used ChatGPT for questions and study guides to break down areas I felt weak in.
I am sure passing Pentest, and my CCNA in Cyber Ops was helpful.

Some of those questions were really fuckin stupid. If anyone wants my notes, I will send them to you.

but yeah i forgot to go over risk lol.
If you have access to an AI, ask it for scenario-based questions.
I did a bit of Udemy with Dion, but I couldn't get through it because of the cryptography stuff.

I am on my last term and I am looking to see what order I should focus on completing these courses. Any tips on the courses would be helpful too. Thanks!

D334 Intro to Cryptography

D335 Intro to Programming in Python

D332 Pen Testing and Vulnerability Analysis

C769 Capstone

Hello! I’ve been wanting to work in IT since I was 7, as I’ve always had a natural affinity for technology. An interviewer mentioned WGU to me when I said I would like to go back to college eventually, and I have some questions about it.

I’ve done a year of college for an Associates in Cybersecurity and had to drop out due to personal reasons.

The hardest thing about college was that each class acted like they were your only class. This led to me struggling to juggle 5 different classes at the same time, each having their own essays, projects, and assignments every week.

I saw something about how you’re able to do things at your own pace with no deadlines. Would I be able to just focus on one class at a time? How long does it take to complete a course on average? Would it be reasonable to expect to complete one class a week? I plan on doing college full time so it will be my main focus.

In college, I had classes that prepared me for the A+, Network+, and Security+. I was able to complete those with relative ease, often working ahead. However, I’m still not certified due to the costs associated with the exams. How does the course cover the cost of the exams? Even though I completed those courses, would I be able to transfer the credits and still get the certificates?

What classes are typically considered the hardest? I’ve seen some posts talking about Database Fundamentals and I completed that course while I was in college, so hopefully it’s similar if I can’t transfer it.

So on Monday June 29th 2026 I took D426 after 5 weeks of studying it, you can see the tips I did in my last post. Well the same night I passed D426 I decided to then take the PA for D427 and easily passed it.

Well the next day I said screw it let's take the OA for D427 and I got an Exceptional on it, without studying it. I did a 20 minute review of the SQL code I got wrong on the PA on Google Gemini and then did the exam. The OA is nearly identical to the PA, the majority of the SQL I had to write was simply deleting rows, adding rows, creating a table, pretty much all simple SQL code writing. The multiple choice questions is very basic questions, pretty much if you passed D426 you don't gotta worry in that regard.

USE THE REFERENCE SHEET GIVEN TO YOU, WILL MAKE EVERYTHING SO EASYYYY

Man, I’m so excited, I have just shared it. I was just pulled aside by the Cybersecurity manager, who told me I am being moved to the team. I’m still studying for my degree, I have about 2 more terms left. But this new is a dream come true.

There is nothing that shows any device being compromised or down.

Gns3 showing devices all being “up” doesn’t help either. I assume they intended for a couple devices to be down or possibly just one.

Task B2 with pinging was all successful.

I see some posts on WGU connect where some students actually SSH’d to manually shut down a device.

Doing it manually could help bypass C1-2 and of course all of section D for Task 1.

What have you guys done so far to bypass this?

And also side note, they weren’t kidding around about the increased difficulty with this PA…

Have anyone passed this class yet or had their course evaluated? I’m trying to knock this out to graduate.

has anyone accurately identified the compromised devices in task 1? cuz one of my devices can't be ssh'ed into so i cannot update its DNS and i need to know if others are expecting the same before i submit

Has anyone been able to pass the PA yet? I still have the OA version and I’m thinking to switch to PA. I have not made any attempts yet. I have the opportunity to take the OA unless I ask to switch.