CEH Certification Prerequisites, Cost, Skills, Job Prospects, and Salary

Hackers are becoming ever more advanced in their attempts to break into enterprise networks. For organizations, the success of these attacks means losses of millions of dollars’ worth of data and in other damaging avenues like system downtime. Certified Ethical Hackers are fast becoming the ultimate form of protection against such devastating cyber-attacks and the reason for their potency is that they operate on the same lines as these attackers but inside of exploiting the vulnerabilities and bugs they find in the system, the patch them up or ensure protective mechanisms are in place to stop others from coming in from such routes.

This certification is one of the most popular credentials that firms are looking for in people they are hiring for security-related roles and if you want to power up your career and give it a boost, then you must become a Certified Ethical hacker yourself.

Becoming a CEH certified personnel will require you to understand the pre-requisites of appearing in the exam, criteria for maintaining the credential, the course contents, and format of the exam. In this article we’ll explore exactly these facets and will also provide you with in-depth insight on the job prospects, salary advantages and other aspects related to the CEH certification.

Pre-Requisites For CEH:

To become eligible to appear in the CEH certification exam, EC-Council, certification’s accreditation body offers two different ways:

The Official Training Method:

There are multiple CEH online training courses out there that are approved by the EC-council and once you complete your training period there, you will then be guided towards the CEH exam directly.

Without The Training:

Candidates who don’t wish to take the CEH online training before sitting in the CEH exam will have to show proof of a graduate degree, preferably in the IT sector and secondly, hold a validated work experience of no less than two years in the cybersecurity domain. Once you have these documents, you will have to submit them with a non-refundable $100 eligibility application fee.

If your requirements are up to the mark, you will get registered for the exam through a specific voucher number provided by the EC Council.

Skills Covered During The CEH Exam:

The CEH exam is comprehensive and vendor-neutral so that it can prepare individuals for the daunting tasks of protecting system security through a wide variety of measures. The CEH exams allows individuals to develop the following types of skills to accomplish so:

• Extensive knowledge of the system, network and all related components
• Ability to work in all popular operating environments like Linux and Mac OS
• Ability to find out system vulnerabilities and zero-day bugs
• Formulate immediate countermeasures to safeguard against problems and bugs
• Understand password management and counter-attacks on them
• Ability to stealthily penetrate systems in order to eliminate tracking trails that could be harmful
• Diverse understanding of protection tools like encryption and cryptography
• Knowledge of the code of ethics related to ethical hacking
• Wide ended understanding of all new types of cyber-attacks and the measures needed to protect against them.

Furthermore, the ethical hacker must also have a knack of being ingenious towards identifying previously undefined attack avenues that even hackers don’t know about yet to in order to mitigate against any potential attack gateways.

CEH Exam:

Give the code of Exam 312-50, the CEH exam is of four hours and contains around 125 questions. The passing criteria is 70% of the total marks available in the exam.

Individuals who want to appear in the exam must get their registration done at least 3 days prior to the exam. The CEH exams are held at both the Pearson Vue Center and the ECC Exam center, and the individual can choose from either of them.

CEH Exam Cost:

The cost of the CEH exam is affordable at $500, but since the passing ratio of this exam is quite low, individuals must not take it lightly and either opt for a rigorous self-study program or if they can’t do that, then the next best course of action is to enroll themselves in CEH certification online training. These courses allow individuals to cover the exam’s contents in a streamlined manner by providing relevant study materials and guides that make their preparation strong thereby improving their chances of passing the exam in the first attempt.

CEH Job Prospects:

While the individuals appearing for the CEH certification often opt for a career in consultancy or training as an independent resource that organizations can board for time-bound tasks, there are multiple job titles for which the CEH certification makes the path towards hiring much easier. CEH certified personnel can apply for jobs like Network Security Specialists, IT Auditor, Computer Forensics Analyst and Site Administrator among others.

Furthermore, these individuals can also work in other IT domains as well like networking, programming, etc. in order to make them more efficient at designing systems that have robust security measures inculcated in them right from the design phase.

CEH Salary:

The most recent study done by Payscale.com on Ethical Hackers in 2019 found that CEH certified professionals earn an average of $79,260 per year, which is good pay scale for a medium level resource in the IT sector. However, some individuals earn much more than this salary range, especially if they have established their own concerns that provide ethical hacking services to firms or those who have accumulated a vast amount of experience in their job roles. For e.g. an information security manager who is CEH certified earns an average salary of $110,643 per year.

Conclusion:

The CEH certification is a credential which is slated to increase significantly in value as time progresses and that’s because as systems and organizations continue to become ever more dependent on technology for their business needs, the attacks on their systems will not just increase but will become ever more complex and ethical hackers will one of the most important people in these organizations to protect against such threats.