r/isc2

I want to share my personal perspective after passing the ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC) exam yesterday. Hopefully this helps people who are struggling to learn the material or find good resources online.

I registered about 3 months ago through the ISC2 1 Million program after seeing an Instagram reel. They offered a free self-paced certification course and one free exam attempt.

Even tho I work 12 hours shifts I tried to find time and began actively reading and understand materials at least 2 hours a day from their official ISC2 self-paced study plan. Some days I study it for hours, some days just one.

Whenever I didn’t fully understand a topic, I used Gemini or Grok to help me dig deeper. One method that worked really well was asking the AI to create quizzes with tens of questions focused on a single subject to understand it better. Some of the areas I focused on the most were:

• Understanding PKI & Cryptography (Public Key Infrastructure mechanics, symmetric vs. asymmetric encryption, private & public keys, digital signatures, and key management)
• Security Governance & Ethics
• Risk Management Strategies
• Access Control Models & Control Types (MAC, DAC, RBAC, and the functional classifications: preventive, detective, corrective, physical, administrative)
• Business Continuity (BC), Disaster Recovery (DR) & Incident Response (IR) — planning fundamentals, recovery metrics (RTO/RPO), and the incident handling lifecycle
• Network Security & the OSI Model (protocol data-primary function-hardware & devices-core protocols & technologies for each layer)
• ISC2 Scenario & Priority Logic — practicing “best,” “most likely,” and “first action” type questions (this type of "BEST" / "MOST" I stumbled on the exam day!
• Learning protocols: FTP, RDP, HTTP/HTTPS, SSH, DNS (at least, the most imporant ones)

After finishing the official materials, I saw that many recommended Prabh Nair's youtube playlist:

While he covers a lot of ground, I found it quite difficult to follow till the end (I didn't watched the last 3-4 videos from the playlist) because of his accent, fast speaking pace, and the fact that he often skipped explaining basic concepts like RBAC, MAC, etc. There were also grammar mistakes in his slides and the overall note format wasn’t the easiest to study from. But others might find helpful if there is not other way around.

In the last week before the exam I signed up for LinkedIn Learning Premium and started following Mike Chapple’s content and doing those 4 exam tests. His explanations were much clearer and more in-depth, though I didn’t had time to finish the full course.

The night before the exam I barely slept 3-4 hours, not really because of anxiety, but because of heat wave in Eastern Europe (and mosquitoes). My advice: try to rest properly the night before if you can.

My exam was scheduled for 1 PM. In the morning I quickly went through those four practice tests on LinkedIn and reviewed why I got certain questions wrong. Those definetely helped a lot.

I went for the 124 questions, some of them were weirdly put, out-of-context but it worked out in the end. After that I heard that at least 20 were beta questions and did not count towards my score. I also got one drag-and-drop style question where I had to drag words from the left side to the correct place on the right. (this one was easy!)

Read the questions and answers 10 times if it needs, you don't know the answer? start by eliminating the clearly wrong options, this often makes it easier to narrow it down to the correct (or most correct) choice.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I also did took notes in Notion and Obsidian. Next will be Network+

Hi, my exam for ISC2 CC was booked for tomorrow but today a few hours ago I received an email from Pearson Vue customer support telling me that they wouldn’t be able to deliver my exam anymore and that they know it’s disappointing news blah blah blah

The emails seem legit but I’m still confused because on their website it shows that my exam is still going on.

I am from the uk by the way

Can anyone tell me if this is normal or what

Ive got my exam on in the 25th of September and I started on thor pedersens course about 3-4 weeks ago. I'm starting to feel quite overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge and detail that is in Thors course and im worried im going to fail the exam because I'm still learning domain 3 out of 5 and theres so much to cover for the latter two. I havent had a chance to go over what ive written yet, so I cant recite anything atm.

Any advice?

Hi everyone, I don’t have any IT technical knowledge. I am planning to get into Cybersecurity and booked ISC2 CC exam as a starter.
My exam is in 3 weeks, how should I prepare?
Could you please suggest me training material?
Is it really difficult for non-IT people?
Thanks

Provisionally passed the Certified in Cybersecurity exam this morning. Wanted to share a few things that might help people still prepping.

Quick background: I'm a data analyst moving toward a SOC/detection role, so a chunk of this material connected to work I already do — but a lot of it was genuinely new (the security-specific frameworks, access control models, and the BC/DR/IR vocabulary especially).

What helped me most:

LinkedIn Learning practice tests. These were the backbone of my prep. I didn't just take them for a score — I honed in on every wrong answer and dug into why it was wrong until the reasoning stuck.

Encryption. I gave this extra focus since it doesn't map to my day job the way data concepts do — symmetric vs asymmetric, hashing vs encryption, where each one actually gets used.

Concept distinctions, not definitions. Especially the access control models (DAC vs MAC vs RBAC) and attacks vs defenses. That's where most of my missed practice questions were coming from — I knew the terms, but not the lines between them.

On the exam itself: it went the full 125 questions for me. I'll be honest — I had a rough moment around Q90, because a previous attempt of mine terminated early at 90 due to a testing anomaly. So watching it roll past 91, 92, 93... 100... was its own kind of relief. If yours keeps going past 100, don't read it as a bad sign — the exam serves items until it's confident about your score, and plenty of people who pass go all the way to 125.

Happy to answer questions if you're studying for it. Onward to SC-900. 💜

I did not pass the test, and some of the questions were very confusing. I need help studying for the test using the new outline. Please let me know because I need help.

Hello everyone. I took the CGRC and failed. I feel so discouraged. The exam was harder than I thought. The exam was not direct at all. It threw me off. I don’t know if I want to take it again.

Hi everyone

QQ, i have passed CISSP on 17th July, and was endorsed a week later,my question is when can i expect my paper cert and pin to arrive by

Thank you

Hello everyone I have question for the CGRC exam. I know the Preparation is the first step of the RMF but I took a practice exam and it says Preparation is 0 step. Also another practice questions asked me how many steps in RMF and I said 7 but it says it was wrong and that it should be 6 steps. I am confused. I know it is 7 steps in total. For those who took the exam is preparation step considered step 1?

I started my studies on and off 2 months before my exam. As I registered for the free CC exam.

Exam topics that I faced multiple times in exams:

1.Access Control and access based questions with difference between the MAC, RBAC,DAC and ABAC

2. Different canons

3.Questions about cryptography like PKI, encryption algorithms, it's components

4.Straight away definitions for some topic asked in an obscure way

5.Difference between policy, procedure, regulation and laws

6. A few questions that didn't belong to any section

Sources:

CC book for studying

Official exam prep

Cert prep for exam prep that boosted the confidence to analyze concepts instead of merely understanding it

Used AI for generating notes with lots of hints and cues to better understand the concept and related evaluations

I think there's more than enough time to complete the test

Passed cissp today in the second attempt at 100 question.

One thing that changed from last time to this time was mikedn02908 r/mikedn02908 white papers on understanding CAT and answer selection.

I took andrew ramdayal course on Udemy

Did 6 7 revision of sybex and shon harris

Made own notes

Revised them back to back for knowledge

For answer picking Andrew ramdayal mindset video

Pete zerger cram video

Destination certification mind map

To track knowledge gap learnz app

I did 1300 questions with 80 percent accuracy

Boson exams with 80 percent accuracy

First attempt 2 months back with 150 questions

Mistakes got in a hurry after 100 questions

Passed today at question no 100 with 35 mins remaining

Consistency is the key. Before answering read questions properly. One single 2 digit word can change the answer

Happy to help the community

Hey guys! I am going to share my experience of how I’ve passed CC, mainly because others on this subreddit also helped me with their tips. I’ve had the chance to take the exam with the 1 million program.

The main thing that might (not) be useful to others, I didn’t use the official ISC2 self-paced course or any other ISC2 material. Regarding the self-paced course, I forgot to redeem it. My whole prep for the exam came mainly from:

• Prabh Nair’s CC playlist on YouTube: try to answer the questions before he explains the correct answer + he explains the main concepts brilliantly.

• THM: I was already using the platform before signing up for the exam, but you can find a lot of great rooms that go into detail regarding network security and access control. The platform can be great for building a good base foundation, but don’t use it primarily for CC.

• Practice questions: For this used Claude to give me different types of mock tests (10 questions / test that contain the 5 domains).

And that’s basically it, my whole preparation for the exam. I watched Prabh Nair and did the mock tests on the same day, before I’ve arrived at the exam centre in my city. Honestly, I didn’t expect to pass it, since I didn’t study a lot and especially because I didn’t do any of the usual practice tests from Udemy or LinkedIn, but I was lucky I guess. Some questions felt easy and you could answer correctly by using intuition or logic, but others were also very hard and made me think longer before giving the final answer.

Biggest advice for the exam itself: Slow down and read each question twice before you make a choice, you will not be able to get back to the questions again. Almost every choice I second-guessed was because I’d jump to the first familiar keyword instead of reading the whole question. ISC2 has their special way of wording every question, that’s why you have to read everything carefully.

Happy to answer questions if anyone is prepping. Good luck to all of you who didn’t take the exam yet!!

I am 75% of the way through my CPE renewal with about 11 months left, If I obtain the 120CPE points, pass an an audit if selected and pay my AMF. When is my actual updated certificate issued?

I am wondering because renewing CISSP would renew my Security X and all the other COMPTIA certs.

There is only a week between my CISSP and SEC X expiry dates so if my CISSP cert is issued in July, it may not be issued in time to renew my Sec X.

Does anyone know?

l failed my CC today and honestly I’m pretty annoyed even though I used the 1M voucher.

I’ve been studying for this exam for quite a while. I finished all of Prabh Nair’s CC videos, did around 500+ practice questions, and I was scoring around 80–98% on the mocks. I also have a few years of IT experience, around 30 mostly entry-level certs (networking, Fortinet, Red Hat, AI, and so on.), and a lot of experience in THM.

I genuinely thought I was ready, but the actual exam felt very different from every practice test I did. The “best answer” style really got me even though I felt like I was doing pretty fine.

At this point, is it worth paying to retake CC, or should I just move on to SC-200 and Security+ and come back to it later?

Has CC actually helped your career, or would you spend the money on another cert instead?

Thanks in advance. Just trying to figure out my next move.