Red Team Apprentice™ Course (RTAC)
I took this class before k>fivefour was announced. (To the best of my knowledge, the class contents, as well as the teachers, are mostly the same.)
I hear that the teachers rotate, so if you take the class, the teachers I had may not be the teachers you have. The class is, at the time of this review, only offered in person and in Huntsville, AL. The location is cool, and there are a lot of places to eat at The Bridge Street. Plus, the Huntsville area is home to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, as well as Redstone Arsenal which has many tenants to include NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), the U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC), the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), and numerous others tenants. Nashville, TN is less than two hours drive north, and offers plenty to do from Nashville Predators hockey to Tennessee Titans football.
The best thing about this course is: your teachers have real world experience, your classmates *may* have real world experience and you can interact with them, whereas an online class doesn't offer the same benefits. Trust me, if you want the most from this class, ask lots of questions (they tell you the same thing in the course materials). The teachers are very smart and have a lot of experience.
My class was five days of training and a certification attempt on the sixth day. I recall the days were pretty long, but the time flew by. We also had some very technical people in the class as well as some people that weren't as technical. The teachers of my class worked with everyone and made sure everyone understood the materials.
According to the website, these are the topics that are covered in the 5 day class:
The course was taught by short lectures followed by hands-on exercises. If you finish the hands-on exercises early, there are extra exercises that are handed out for you to attempt and they are fun to do.
One of the neat things about the class was that some of the materials were printed and kept in a fancy leather Staples® ARC binder (8.5"x11") and various handouts fit inside the binder. {Find out more about the ARC system here: https://www.staples.com/deals/Staples-Arc/BI1414809}
Of the courses I have taken so far, this course most directly relates to my experience performing Red Team engagements. That isn't to say that the other classes reviewed on this site didn't relate, either directly or indirectly, but this class taught tools and techniques most closely related to enagements I have been on. For example, this class taught the power of logging and cleaning up machines after the engagement. (There were a few classes where it talked about cleaning up after exploiting a box, but clean up could simply be resetting the VM so none of your tools were found.
This course will teach you how to use tools to enumerate and move within an Active Directory domain and forest. These are some critical skills when performing a Red Team assessment.
More information coming soon!
And if you sign up for this class as a result of reading this review, please tell them RedTeamTrainingReviews.com referred you. There are no discounts (that I am aware of) but it will make me feel like I helped influence someone.
My two cents worth:
The class is good, and builds solid foundations. I think that having a slight understanding of Windows and Active Directory will help make the class easier.
If you can get your employer to pay for this class, go that route because the travel will make this a bit out of reach of some people's personal budget, but just like a live SANS class....it is worth every penny.
Also check out Millennium Corporation's web site at https://www.millgroupinc.com/ because they usually have Red Team Security Engineer job postings for several locations.
An image of what the certificate of completion, given out once the class was over, looked like.
An image of what the Red Team Apprentice Operator certificate, which I got several weeks after passing the exam, looked like.
I finally got to see what the k>fivefour swag looks like. Here is an image of what the Red Team Apprentice Operator certificate looks like.
An image of what the front of a k>fivefour Red Team Apprentice Operator metal dog tag looks like. The back had the operator's name on it along with the operator's operator number. The dog tag was a lot heavier than I thought it would be when I first saw it.
An image of the k>fivefour Red Team Apprentice Operator patch. I have seen a person with a k>fivefour backpack and the patch applied to it, but I do not have photos. So maybe there is more than just these new things I have posted, but this is some high quality swag by itself.
Sorry for the image quality. I was a little rushed to grab a scan of these so I could post them, and I didn't realize they were a bit crooked until later. I tried to rotate them and it cut them short just a little. I will try and make a little bit better photo for the page.