The Road to CRTP – My Personal Journey
The Road to CRTP: My Personal Journey 🚀
An in-depth look at my experience pursuing and clearing the Certified Red Team Professional (CRTP) certification by Altered Security.
🛡️ What is CRTP?
The Certified Red Team Professional (CRTP) is a hands-on certification designed for security professionals who want to master Active Directory (AD) security. Unlike many other certifications, it isn’t about “getting a shell” through unpatched vulnerabilities; it’s about exploiting misconfigurations and architectural flaws in a fully patched Windows environment.
The Course: Attacking and Defending Active Directory
The training provided by Nikhil Mittal is top-tier. I opted for the 30-day lab access, which included:
- Video Content: 14+ hours of high-quality instruction.
- Lab Environment: A multi-forest environment with several domains.
- Tools: Heavy focus on PowerShell-based tools (PowerView, Mimikatz, BloodHound).
📝 My Preparation & Learning Path
One mistake I made was activating the lab before finishing the videos. Don’t do this. Finish the PDFs and videos first so you can hit the ground running the moment your lab timer starts.
Phase 1: Enumeration (The Key to Success)
Active Directory is all about information. I spent a significant amount of time learning how to map out the network without being “loud.”
- PowerView: The bread and butter of the course. Understanding
Get-DomainUser,Get-NetLocalGroup, andGet-NetComputer. - BloodHound: Using the SharpHound collector to visualize attack paths. It’s a game-changer for finding hidden relationships.
Phase 2: Exploitation & Lateral Movement
I focused heavily on the following techniques:
- Local Privilege Escalation: Finding misconfigured services or stored credentials.
- Kerberoasting & AS-REP Roasting: Targeting service accounts.
- Delegation Attacks: Understanding Unconstrained, Constrained, and Resource-Based Constrained Delegation (RBCD).
- Mimikatz: Using
sekurlsa::logonpasswordsandlsadump::lsato extract secrets.
Phase 3: Domain Dominance & Persistence
Once you hit Domain Admin, the work isn’t done. I practiced:
- Golden/Silver Tickets: For long-term access.
- Skeleton Key: A more advanced persistence method.
- DCSync: Pulling hashes directly from the Domain Controller.
💻 The Exam Experience
The exam is a 24-hour practical challenge followed by 48 hours for report writing. You are tasked with compromising 5 target machines.
- 9:00 AM: Started the exam. The environment took about 15 minutes to initialize.
- The Strategy: I treated it like a real assessment. I enumerated everything first before attempting any exploits.
- The “Wall”: Around the 4-hour mark, I hit a rabbit hole. I took a lunch break, stepped away from the screen, and the solution came to me immediately upon returning.
- 5:00 PM: I successfully compromised all target machines and had all the necessary screenshots for my report.
Important Note: You don’t need to be a “god-tier” hacker to pass. You need to be methodical. If a command doesn’t work, check your syntax, check your privileges, and check the environment.
💡 Top Tips for Aspirants
1. Master the Lab Manual
If it’s in the lab manual, it (or a variation of it) can be on the exam. Do the lab exercises multiple times until the commands become muscle memory.
2. Build a Solid Cheat Sheet
Organize your commands by category:
- Enumeration (User, Group, Trust)
- PrivEsc (Local, Domain)
- Lateral Movement (Overpass-the-hash, PSSession)
- Forest/Trust Attacks
3. Take Quality Screenshots
Nothing is worse than finishing an exam and realizing you forgot to screenshot the whoami or hostname output for a specific machine. Document as you go!
4. Health & Mental State
- Breaks are mandatory: Your brain stops seeing obvious things after 3 hours of staring at a terminal.
- Hydration: Keep water nearby.
- Sleep: If you’re stuck at 2:00 AM, go to sleep. You’ll likely solve it in 10 minutes at 8:00 AM.
🏁 Final Thoughts
The CRTP is easily one of the most fun and practical certifications I’ve taken. It moved me away from “script kiddie” exploitation and toward a deep, structural understanding of how Windows networks actually function.
Good luck on your journey to becoming a Red Teamer! CRTP isn’t just another cert — it’s the certification that finally made me feel confident attacking enterprise AD environments.
If you’re serious about red teaming, stop wasting time on easy boxes and go for it.
The road is tough, but crossing the finish line feels fucking amazing.
Follow for more red team journeys and writeups.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aayush-pantha-b02750246/