Hacking Boot camps!

[K Tucker <ktucker1022 () yahoo com>]

Seems that I read from time to time people asking
about the merits of these hacker boot camps.  It might
be helpful if I relate my recent experience.  I
attended a 5 day Hacker boot camp conducted by Intense
school which is part of Vigilar.  Cost was $3200,
which I paid out of my own pocket.  The salesman I
spoke with did a great job selling me on the idea of
how “hands on” it was going to be and all the tools
the instructor was going to show us how to use.
The classes were supposed to be from 8:30am to 6:00pm
for the 5 days. The instructor didn’t show up until
4:00 pm due to scheduling conflict.  We only received
3 hours that day.  The following days started at 9:00
not 8:30 as advertised which might seem like a small
thing but at $3200 every minute counts!  The real
disappointment was the quality of the class. There was
little actual lab work. 90% of the class was sitting
while the instructor read from the class manual while
we looked at a slide of the same page he was reading. 
Sure it was nice to be read things like “CAIN and ABEL
is a good program for sniffing networks”, but we in
the class wanted to know how do you use it!  We were
never shown. We did have a little hands on lab work
which involved ethereal and sam spade and netcat. It
was hard to get them to work because none of our
vmware was connected to the network correctly so we
wasted another hour just trying to get that to work! 
The feeling in the class was that the class computers
should have been set up and ready to go before we even
arrived. Friday was the big disappointment. The class
began at 9:00am and they started the CEH examine at
11:00 am. That test only lasts 3 hours so by 2:00pm
the school was over!   Most of the class did not take
the test because we didn’t feel ready. 5 people in the
class did take it and 2 passed it. Those 2 were very
experienced in network security. The other 3 failed
it. I have emailed Intense school 4 times with my
concerns but have never heard back from them. I guess
they are not too concerned. My feeling is someone
would do much better to just get the book “Hacking
Exposed” and download the suggested tools and play
with them. You will learn much more and save a lot of
money!  



                
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