Everyone Who Studied CEH v13 From My Notes Has Passed. Here’s Why.

No failures. Not one, so far. Here is the exact system behind it, the proof, and how to copy it before you spend $2,000 on the exam.

CEH Master Certificate

So far, not one person who studied from my CEH v13 notes and sat the exam has come back to tell me they failed.

Not the theory paper. Not the practical. Zero.

And I know exactly how that reads. Like every other “100% pass rate” line you scroll past ten times a day. So before I ask for a single minute more of your attention, let me be honest about what that number actually means.

It is not magic. The notes did not sit the exam for anyone. Every person who passed put in months of real work. The group is small and it is self-selected, because the people who message me are the people who actually studied and actually showed up. I cannot track every human who ever opened the file.

But here is the part that matters: out of everyone who used these notes, did the work, and walked into that exam hall, the ones who reported back all walked out with a pass. And when the same result keeps happening to different people, it stops being luck. It starts being a system.

This post is about that system. What every one of them did. What you can copy for free by the time you finish reading. And yes, at the end, where you can get the exact kit they used. But you will get the full playbook either way, so keep reading.

Why I’m writing this again

I passed CEH Theory on August 19th, 2025 and CEH Practical on September 14th, 2025. First attempt on both. I became a CEH Master.

That was months ago now. The certificates are still valid. And the messages have not stopped.

Every week, some version of this lands in my inbox:

“Akash, my exam is booked. I’m terrified. Did your notes actually work for other people, or just for you?”

I used to answer one by one. I cannot anymore, because there are too many. So this is the honest, public answer, with the proof attached.

CEH Theory, cleared August 19th, 2025.

CEH Practical, cleared September 14th, 2025. All challenges solved.

That is my side of it. Now let me show you theirs, which is the part that should actually matter to you.

The uncomfortable truth about why people fail CEH

Let’s talk money for a second, because the stakes are the whole reason this matters.

The CEH Theory exam costs around $950 through EC-Council, or $1,199 through Pearson VUE. Add the $100 application fee. The Practical is another $550 to $650. That is roughly $1,600 to $2,000 just to sit both papers.

And the retake fee is around $499 per attempt.

(Prices shift, so check EC-Council’s current rates before you book. But you get the picture.)

Now sit with this. Most people who fail CEH are not stupid. They are not lazy. They studied hard. They failed because they walked into a $2,000 exam with their preparation scattered across forty browser tabs, a dozen half-watched YouTube playlists, and a folder of GitHub links they never finished reading.

They spent half their study time deciding what to study instead of actually studying. They covered nineteen modules well and left the twentieth thin, and the exam found the gap. Nobody fails CEH because the exam is impossible. People fail because their preparation was disorganised, and the exam is very good at punishing disorganised preparation.

That is the exact trap the people who passed avoided. Here is how.

What every single person who passed actually did

I have now watched enough people go from “terrified” to “passed” to see the pattern clearly. It is almost boringly consistent. Here is what they all did.

1. They studied practical-first, not textbook-first

This is the one decision that changes everything.

The people who passed did not treat the 20 modules like an encyclopedia to memorise. They treated them like a lab. Their notes were roughly 75% hands-on and 25% theory. Every module had the actual commands, the actual tool output, the actual “type this, expect that” walkthrough.

Why it works: when you have already written down the exact Nmap command for a specific scan, with the flags and the output you expect to see, you do not panic when the clock is running in the practical exam. Your hands already know the move.

The ones who failed usually did the opposite. They read about tools instead of running them. On exam day, recognising a tool by name is worthless. You have to use it.

2. They built pattern recognition for the theory paper

The CEH Theory exam is 125 questions in 4 hours. The 2026 format leans hard into long, scenario-based questions that test whether you understand why a tool or attack works, not whether you can recall a definition.

The people who passed stopped trying to memorise and started training three habits:

• Translate every question into plain English. CEH loves complicated wording. Strip the jargon. Ask, “What is actually happening in this scenario?” The answer usually appears on its own.
• Build a concept library, not a fact list. Attacks and their signatures. Tools and their exact use cases. Ports and services. Encryption methods with key sizes. Common CVEs. And for every entry, the why behind it.
• Practice elimination, not recall. Stuck on a question? Kill the two obviously wrong options first. Mark it, move on, come back with fresh eyes. The answer jumps out the second time far more often than you would believe.

3. They walked into the practical with a cheat sheet, not 20 modules of notes

This is the single biggest difference-maker on practical day, and almost nobody tells you about it.

During a 6-hour practical exam, you do not have time to scroll through 20 modules looking for one command. The people who passed carried one compiled document. Every essential command, flag, payload, and enumeration technique, organised and ready in seconds. Nmap syntax. Exploitation commands. Password-cracking one-liners. SQL injection payloads.

They opened their full notes maybe once or twice the whole exam. The cheat sheet, they used constantly. It did not just save time. It stopped the panic spiral, which is what actually kills people in that room.

4. They knew the 12 tools cold

Not twenty. Not fifty. Twelve.

Nmap. Wireshark. John the Ripper and Hashcat. Hydra. Metasploit. SQLmap. WPScan. hash-identifier. Responder. PhoneSploit and ADB. VeraCrypt. OWASP ZAP.

Master those twelve and you can solve the large majority of CEH Practical challenges. The people who passed did not spread themselves across every tool on the internet. They went deep on the ones that actually show up.

5. They used the break as a weapon

Every person who passed the practical told me some version of the same story. They hit a wall. Nothing worked. No leads. And then they took their 15-minute break right at that moment, not when they were tired.

They stepped away. Came back. Re-read the same question. And something shifted. Angles they had missed became obvious. Multiple people, including me, solved challenges they were completely stuck on using nothing but this. When you are stuck, your point of view is stuck. Change your point of view and the problem changes with it.

The thing that connects all five

Look back at that list. Notice what it is not.

It is not talent. It is not a hacking background. It is not a genius IQ or years in a SOC.

It is organisation. Every single one of those five points is really the same point wearing a different shirt: have the right thing, in the right format, at the right moment. Practical-first notes. A concept library. A cheat sheet. Twelve tools. A reset button.

That is the whole game. And it is exactly what took me six months to build from scratch, going through the dense 2,000-page EC-Council courseware, multiple textbooks, and hundreds of scattered resources, keeping only what actually mattered for the exam.

The people who passed did not repeat those six months. They started where I finished.

What’s inside the kit they used

I packaged my entire six months into one learning kit. This is not a shortcut. It is the organised version of the hard work, so you spend your time learning instead of hunting.

Here is what is in it:

• Complete 20-module practical notes. 75% hands-on commands and methodology, 25% essential theory. Plain English. Every module, every tool that matters.
• The Golden Cheat Sheet. The exact document used in the practical exam. Every command, flag, and payload in one place.
• 50+ practical exam sample questions. Built to mirror the real practical format. For methodology, not memorisation.
• The complete tool mastery checklist. Every tool, organised by exam domain.
• Theory exam strategy. Scenario techniques, elimination methods, module-by-module focus areas.
• The exam-day playbook. The full time-management and strategy approach from both my exam days.

It is pay-what-you-want, starting at just 1,999 INR. That is a rounding error next to a $2,000 exam and a $499 retake.

Why walk into that exam with anything less than the exact preparation that has, so far, not produced a single failure?

👉 Get the Complete CEH v13 Learning Kit here

One honest thing before you go

I am not going to pretend CEH Master is some career-ending, mountain-top achievement. It is one step. A strong foundation. But it is a real one, and passing both papers on the first try, without burning $499 on a retake, feels very good.

If you are starting your CEH journey, or you are mid-preparation and quietly wondering whether you will make it, you can. The people in those screenshots were exactly where you are. The difference was not who they were. It was what they had in front of them on exam day.

Give yourself that.

👉 Get the kit and start today

About me

I’m Madanu Akash, a cybersecurity practitioner who earned the CEH Master certification by passing both CEH Theory (August 2025) and CEH Practical (September 2025) on my first attempts. I care about making this stuff clear, practical, and a lot less painful than it was for me.

🎥 I documented the whole journey on YouTube — watch it here

💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/akash-madanu

📱 Daily cybersecurity content: @cyb3rwithakash

Questions? Drop them in the comments. I read and reply to every one.

👉 Get the Complete CEH v13 Learning Kit

The only thing between you and CEH Master is organised preparation. Make it count.