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 didnt 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 didnt 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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