Planning to do CRTA? 🤔

Hey folks! I’m Karthikeyan C (aka 0xK4rth1). Recently, I completed the Certified Red Team Analyst (CRTA) certification from CyberWarFare Labs.

Now, if you’ve ever tried searching for details about this cert, you’ll know it doesn’t have a huge fanbase yet — meaning there aren’t many resources or blog posts out there. So, here’s my experience: what CRTA is all about, who it’s best suited for, and whether it’s worth your time.

Let’s get started!

What is CRTA?

CRTA is an entry-level red teaming certification focused mainly on Active Directory exploitation.

If you already have some experience in penetration testing, this cert is a great way to step up your game by diving into the world of Active Directory attacks and defenses.

However, if you’re completely new to cybersecurity, I wouldn’t recommend starting here. You’ll appreciate it more once you’ve done a few web app or network pentesting labs first.

What You’ll Learn

Here’s what the course covers:

Setting up and understanding Active Directory

Scanning and Enumeration

Lateral Movement

Privilege Escalation

Persistence & Exfiltration

Sounds like everything, right? Well, not quite 😅

These are just the fundamentals — the building blocks. Each of these topics can go way deeper with multiple techniques and tools. But for anyone getting started with AD red teaming, it’s a great foundation.

The Exam Experience

Okay, let’s come to the exam part. The exam allows two attempts, and we can schedule it directly through their labs portal.

The total duration is 6 hours, and we need to submit around 18 flags to pass the exam.

18/09/25 — I had my first attempt on this day, and I got stuck because the lab environment was too slow. I missed a lot of hints and managed to capture only about half of the flags. To be honest, I wasn’t much into CTFs before, which was the main reason I failed the first attempt.

The next day, I scheduled my second attempt, but the earliest available slot was on October 3rd, so I saved the date.

In the meantime, I spent the gap days completing as many labs as possible on TryHackMe. I’ve attached my profile below — feel free to check it out if you’re interested:

https://tryhackme.com/p/0xK4rth1

03/10/2025 — Exam day! This time, everything clicked. I followed the same approach I’d practiced in the labs, and everything went smooth.

Finished the whole exam in just 2 hours.

Here, is the ***certificate***

Moral of the story? Learn from your mistakes. Don’t repeat them. That’s how you win.

Yeah, that’s a wrap.

If you have any queries, feel free to reach out to me through ***linkedin***.

I’m planning to do CRTP next, if you have any other suggestions, drop in the comments.