INE Cyber Security Pass | Review
Hopefully a write up that will help you weigh up your choice with the INE Cyber Security pass.
Purchasing Decisions
Cheap isn’t always bad
So I needed a platform or feed of training that was quite T shaped i.e. it covered a lot of areas, I recently started up https://vanguardcybersecurity.co.uk and could no longer afford the likes of SANS training despite how amazing the training is.
I was lucky enough to get the INE Cyber Security pass on an offer they ran, so roughly $1000. That might seem a lot but it gives you access to the whole eLearnSecurity curriculum and more!
- Incident response (Covers Splunk, ELK, Future of SOC, Network Analysis)
- Threat Hunting
- Digital Forensics
- Penetration Testing (eJPT and eCPPT)
- … Even some interesting courses like network hardening.
On top of that I’ve found I’ve had access to vendor specific training like Palo Alto, which is an awesome advantage for anyone trying to gain a role in an organisation that uses that vendor.
During the deal — I also got access to an additional free year, so two years for $1000, it then becomes really good value. It’s worth crunching the numbers, but if you take advantage and put the time in, you’ll definitely find good value, I aim to do about 3–6 hours a week.
The Content
So the content — I only done the eJPT with eLearnSecurity before they switched to INE, I find the slide decks and labs very similar. It begs the question of… is that a good thing? Absolutely.
The eJPT course was really good, I learn a lot with that method of slides and labs. The slide decks are quite open ended and some solutions to labs without using the hints rely on you doing your own research and learning.
The only criticism I have of this style, is without a live trainer/lecturer, you miss the guided pace of a professional going through the content with you. Sometimes you have to take a step back and realise how much content there is to learn, as the slides go quite deep without warning, it’s easy to get out of your depths.
Navigating the platform
I noted peoples reviews pointed out the platform was hard to get around, if you click ‘Learning Paths’, you will see all the eLearnSecurity curriculum. My only critique here is that it’s hard to track where in each course you last finished, it allows you to resume from the last slide but it doesn’t show on your home screen which course you were doing last. This is only bad if you’re doing more than one course like me i.e. eCPPT and eCHRP.
Hera Labs
The labs are generally ‘okay’, I found the labs that relied on GUI based tools like Velociraptor to be quite bad in quality and ‘laggy’, however the Splunk and ELK ones allow you to connect to the instance via your host browser, as you’re connected via the browser.
This ultimately depends on your course, as eJPT allows you to connect to a network via a VPN and ‘bring your own’ Kali box :)
My experience so far
I’ve been smashing out the incident handling and response professional path, it’s absolutely awesome and digs into some challenging areas, you sometimes have to google some aspects but that's the same as asking a live lecturer.
I really enjoy this platform and I’ve used Cybrary and PluralSight in the past (Both good platforms but to give an idea of where INE’s maturity is at)
Conclusion
- Awesome value
- Not quite as good as SANS (But it’s nowhere near the price)
- Really wide curriculum
- Cheaper combined options like BTL1, TryHackMe Paths, CyberDefenders
- Access to vendor content like Splunk, Palo Alto, ELK etc.
- Often run deals and offers
