Is PNPT Certification Worth It for a Cybersecurity Job? Exploring PNPT!

4 min readJan 18, 2024

Hi, Ajak Amico! Welcome back to another blog. As I am currently applying for cybersecurity jobs, one of the most important certifications that all recruiters are expecting is the PNPT (Practical Network Pentester). Especially if you want to jump into the Red Team, this certification is mandatory in the job description. Today, I will share all about the PNPT Certification. Before starting, if you haven’t subscribed to our channel, do subscribe, guys. We cover content related to cybersecurity, Bug Bounty, and Digital Forensics Investigation.👇

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What is PNPT?

PNPT stands for Practical Network Pentester, and TCM Security provides it with a one-of-a-kind ethical hacking certification exam that assesses a student’s ability to perform an external and internal network penetration test at a professional level. This certification goes beyond theoretical knowledge, emphasizing practical skills essential for real-world scenarios.

PNPT Exam Pattern

So the exam consists of 7 days. Combined with practical and report writing.

5 Days- To complete Practical.
2 Days- To Write Report.
Live Demo Presentation with the examiner of 15 minutes.
Exam Fees- $400 (33,000 Ruppees)
1 retake exam Available.
No Expiry in Certification.

Training Overview:

The PNPT Training consists of five (5) full-length video courses designed to take a student with little to no background in ethical hacking to be able to pass the exam and earn the certification. Upon purchase, the student will automatically be enrolled in the TCM Academy.

• Practical Ethical Hacking (25 hours)
• Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) Fundamentals (9 hours)
• External Pentest Playbook (3.5 hours)
• Linux Privilege Escalation for Beginners (6.5 hours)
• Windows Privilege Escalation for Beginners (7 hours)

So, in total, you will have 50+ hours of training, with lifetime free access upon purchase. The PNPT Exam was designed to simulate a real-world penetration testing engagement.

Absolutely ZERO flags to capture (All real-time challenges)
NO multiple-choice questions.

My Personal Tips To Crack PNPT:

PNPT is Ain’t for beginners; it will be tough; people who have excellent knowledge in Active Directory penetration testing or capture the flag would find it moderately easy.
The reason for saying this is that this certification is not like a CTF competition; all the challenges are related to real-life scenarios. So, you need to practice according to that.
Take time to prepare and spend quality time in PNPT training provided by TCM Security. At least prepare for this certification for 5–6 months before taking the exam. Highly recommended!
TCM Security Courses: The 5 courses from TCM that are provided in the training pack for PNPT are PEH, LPE, WPE, EPP, and OSINT. You can find them at [https://academy.tcm-sec.com/) If you can’t afford the courses, that’s also fine. You can visit the TCM Security YouTube channel where 4 of the courses are partially available for free. This will give you a head start, and you can figure out the next step by yourself.
Practice Labs: In the PEH course, there’s an Active Directory portion where you’ll build an AD Home Lab and attack that. I highly recommend doing that by yourself; it will clarify your AD knowledge. Other than that, do all the capstone machines discussed in those courses. If you absolutely want to top it off, solve as many THM/HTB machines as you want in the weak parts of your knowledge.
Free Resources: The internet is full of them. Never rely on one single course/content/video/blog. Take a topic and learn it from different places. To do that, just Google the topic; lots of free blogs will appear. To mention some of the creators, I followed them:

Ippsec (solving HTB machines),
John Hammond (starting out with THM machines),
HackerSploit (Methodology and OSINT content),
Jeremy’s IT Lab (Networking stuff),
Conda (AD attacks),
VbScrub (AD stuff and attacks), and lots of other creators.

To Overkill: If you have exhausted all the previous resources and now you want to do something extra, I have some suggestions. Do the “Wreath” network from TryHackMe to get a deeper look at the idea of Pivoting and Antivirus Evasion. Do some of the AD machines from HTB following the Ippsec YouTube channel to understand his mindset on the machines.

PS: if you want more details about this, you can ping me on my Instagram.@ajakcybersecurity.

To Start your PNPT journey, Click here. 👇

https://certifications.tcm-sec.com/pnpt/

To join Tryhackme, you can join via my Referral link:👇

https://tryhackme.com/signup?referrer=5f0b4e98e1f9764cc2044313

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Learn Everyday, Happy Hacking 😁🙌