eJPT: Passed
Today I passed INE’s eJPT, with a score of 93%. Here is the certificate.
That is the first of the three steps I wrote down a few days ago: eJPT, then HTB Academy’s CPTS, then OffSec’s OSCP. One down.
Small note first
I will not write about the exam itself. No structure, no targets, no vulnerabilities, no tools or wordlists, and also no “general tips” that are only general if you already saw it.
That is simply INE’s rules and I agreed to them. And honestly it would also be boring for you — the whole point of the thing is that you sit there and figure it out yourself.
So: this post is about the two months before the exam, not about the exam.
How the preparation looked
Around two months of evenings and weekends, since end of June. I went through the whole INE course path in order and finished the last module three days before the exam. The material is really beginner level, almost nothing is hard on its own. What made it work was doing it every day, and making the labs harder than they are given to you.
Two things helped me more than the course content itself.
The journal. Every session got a dated entry: what I planned, what I did, what broke, what I learned. Not for other people to read, most of it is shorthand and frustration. But when I hit the same thing a second time, I have my own words about it from the first time. That is worth more to me than any course notes. It also feeds this blog. The netmask post came directly out of three angry lines about an evening I wasted in a lab.
The home lab. I built a small setup with a few networks on Proxmox and practiced pivoting there until routing between the segments felt normal and not like magic. Course labs give you an environment that works. A lab you built yourself breaks in ways nobody planned, and fixing that taught me more about how networks really behave than the modules did.
Getting more out of the labs
Course platforms are built so that you succeed. For a product that is the right default. For learning it is the wrong one. Two changes to how I used the material did more for me than more study hours would have.
Lab first, video second — always
The intended way is: watch the video, then do the lab that shows the same thing again. I stopped doing that pretty early and turned it around. I open the lab cold, without knowing the intended solution, and try to solve it. Only after that I watch the video.
The difference is big. Doing the lab after the video is just repeating. You copy a sequence somebody showed you five minutes ago, and because it goes smooth it feels like you can do it. Doing the lab first is problem solving. It is slower and much more uncomfortable, but it is the only one of the two that looks like what you have to do in an exam or on a real engagement. Nobody gives you a walkthrough before a real network.
The video is still worth watching after. But then it is a comparison, not a lesson. Sometimes it confirms my way. Sometimes it shows a cleaner one. Sometimes I found a way in that the video never mentions, and honestly that is the best of the three outcomes — and you can only get it when you go first.
The obvious argument against is time, and yes, it is slower. It is also the reason I still remember things I did in June.
Removing the hints: a small extension
Going lab-first showed me a problem. The lab pages often tell you too much before you even start. The description says something like “maybe the webserver is serving a file flag.txt”. The submit form shows you the format and the length of the flag. You did not click anything and you already know it is a file, or that it is 32 hex characters. Your search space just got much smaller and you can not unsee it.
So I wrote a small Chrome extension against it:
ine-flag-hider. It does not
blur anything, it removes the elements completely — the hint text in the lab
description and the flag hints in the submit form get display: none, so
there is nothing left to peek at. One content script, no dependencies, no
tracking, MIT license.
To be clear what it is and what not: it does not automate anything, it does not bypass anything, and it does not read answers from anywhere. It only changes how a page renders on my own screen, a page I have legitimate access to anyway. It makes the labs only harder. That is exactly the point. It is a discipline tool, not a shortcut, and you can turn it off any time when you are really stuck.
It took me one evening to write and it changed how the rest of the labs felt. If you work through the same material, install it and watch your own reaction. If the first feeling is relief and not annoyance, that already tells you something.
What I would tell someone on the same path
Do the lab before the video, and remove the hints. See above. If I could keep only one advice from these two months, it is this one.
Do the boring math on paper. My most expensive mistake in two months was guessing a subnet mask instead of reading it. It cost me an evening, and it had nothing to do with the technique I thought was broken. You never skip fundamentals, you only postpone them, with interest.
Take notes like somebody will ask you for a report. Structured, dated, per target, with what you tried and what came back — not a scratchpad full of commands. Doing this from day one meant that under time pressure the habit was already there, instead of inventing one while the clock is running.
Finish the material before you book anything. I did 100% of the course path, including the optional module, before I sat the exam. That was not really discipline, I just did not want to find out during the exam which gap I decided to skip.
Build something that is not a course lab. A home setup breaks in ways no course author planned, and debugging that is the closest thing to real network behaviour you get before you meet a real network.
What comes next
CPTS. It is a big step up from here and from everything I read a much longer road, so I expect the next certificate post to be a lot further away than this one was.
Until then the blog goes back to what it is for: technique explainers and methodology posts, generalized from what I am working on. The certificate is a milestone, not the content.