Wednesday, June 10, 2015

How to Prepare and Pass CompTIA Security+ in the First Attemt?

CompTIA Security+ is one of the most widely known certification in the industry. The certification exam covers several areas including network security and vulnerability testing, server hardening, different types of threats and prevention, computer forensics that elaborates on techniques to be used for detecting and security violations, security policies, etc.

Thorough exam preparation takes at least 3 - 6 months with 3-4 hours of study every day. If you are preparing for the exam full time, it should be possible to clear the exam in about a couple of months. The questions are mostly objective type multiple choice questions with 90 minutes during. You can expect some performance based questions (3 to 5). A performance based question may be of a) drag - drop type, b). type some command on CLI (Command Line Interface or C prompt), c) Hot spot, where you would be required to identify a particular spot in a given picture. More varieties may be introduced by the vendor over the period of time. If you are equipped with answering performance based questions, there wouldn't be any surprises in the exam.

Study material: It is recommended that you go with any authorized study guide for Security+ such as
CompTIA Security+ Study Guide: SY0-401
by Emmett Dulaney and Chuck Easttom

CompTIA Security+: Get Certified Get Ahead: SY0-401 Study Guide
by Darril Gibson

After preparing for the exam using authorized study material, its time to test your preparedness. The following resources provide prep tests:

Security+ SY0-401 Prep Tests

The above tests cover performance based questions for thorough preparation. Note that the study guides too come with some practice tests, which would be helpful in preparing for the exam.

Avoid going to the brain dump sites, as they are mostly out of date questions with several errors, and its not a recommended practice to prepare for the exam using dumps. It won't help you in long run.