Starting my first attempt at hacking Metasploitable 1, I was confident in my education, and that my practical lab experiences were enough to get me a shell. I was wrong. Of course, I knew the basics of using Kali Linux to conduct reconnaissance and how to determine which hosts are on the network.

eLearnSecurity has been a player in the certification market for some time now, although their notoriety has been eclipsed by the powerhouses of EC2, CompTIA, and EC-Council. Who knows why that is the case, but, it is what it is.

eLearn has a variety of certification options depending on what you are into; these include penetration testing, threat hunting, reverse engineering, exploit development, and of course, forensics.
To me, what sets them apart from the other competitors is the quality of information: Hands on labs, video content and slide show of content. I feel like the material is always researched well and the additional references provide truckloads of information.

The videos are also really well produced, which is essential for my sanity. I have trouble focusing if they are terrible quality. For instance, there was a pen-testing site that had a crap ton of content, but boy was it rough. I watched through a couple of series and just couldn’t take it anymore. The content within was tremendous but the videos were horrible. Anyways back to these guys. The narrator is well spoken and easy to understand, and the content helps bring clarity to the lessons.

Elearn is excellent but like everything they do have some negatives. One of the most significant issues I have seen is that when the course is first released, the quality is somewhat lacking; missing content, videos, exam, but they make up for it by offering extreme discounts, sometimes up to 40% for prior customers. With new courses, they tend to release a little too early and continue to push out content until the entire class has been released. I live my life this way so not too big of a deal for me personally. Beta test all the things live.
​
Also, if you have seen some of their older content that hasn’t been refreshed, it is a little rough due to grammatical and logical errors in the material. I imagine they were still building their team and processes when they released these because the content is much better now.