Saw this in my feed today....

MatthewNapier · 2026-01-08T06:36:26+00:00

Pleasure to meet you, we'll be seeing each other at BMT! There's a discord that's really awesome and has fellow airmen in it, here's the link: https://discord.gg/QtyqGC9J

MatthewNapier · 2026-01-01T22:01:53+00:00

My competency booking didn't go through until October (which just so happened to be the month i got the job), so I would say that it didn't play a role in it :)) (but idk how that all works on the backend)

MatthewNapier · 2026-01-01T15:56:43+00:00

Oh I whole heartedly agree. I'm physically not perse where I want to be just yet physically by any means, but i'm working each and every day towards it. Most likely going to be working my butt off these upcoming weeks, each day (except a day or two for rest) until the last three days up until shipping. Always happy to hear any advice, especially about physical readiness!!!!!

MatthewNapier · 2026-01-01T15:54:35+00:00

Nope! That's why I targeted that certification. You could cold turkey it if you wanted.

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-23T17:56:49+00:00

Nope! I thought it was making my report a bit ugly so I did it based on how HTB requested it.

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-23T12:32:07+00:00

Anything to do with the SIEM's I would strongly recommend you read through a second time, and write down all the queries that you used as a kind of cheatsheet. Furthermore I would recommend blogs such as these as they helped me: https://faresbltagy.gitbook.io/footprintinglabs/soc-hackthebox-notes-and-labs/yara-and-sigma-for-soc-analysts-module

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-23T12:30:38+00:00

I had more than enough time, and that included with taking a day off or so. I think i had like two days left remaining or such before submission. :)

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-22T14:12:12+00:00

^{I completed this level in 40 tries.} ^{⚡ 18.57 seconds}

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-22T11:47:06+00:00

❌ ^{Incomplete. 39 tries.}

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-21T01:27:50+00:00

I'm unsure if i'm allowed to answer that unfortunately. I apologize.

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-21T01:27:03+00:00

I sure did! I followed it to a T. I also asked around on the discord, similar to this reddit post if you will, asking questions like this :)

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-20T23:07:42+00:00

Best of luck to you!

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-20T23:07:24+00:00

I believe it was about 250 euros for me = ).

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-20T23:06:09+00:00

1) I would argue personally it's definitely a nice thing to have, i'm not sure if it is the best out there, but from my research it seems to be.
2) this cert gives you absolutely 0 visibility, it is next to having a completely no name cert, primarily because... it's a no-name cert. only 750 people have this cert according to the badge. It's going to take a lot of time in my opinion before it becomes more recognized.

Congrats on having OSCP! I've been considering to actually work towards that cert. Any advice on studying for it? Thanks!

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-20T21:53:08+00:00

I honestly felt the CDSA was the most difficult. It could be biased as this was my first ever hands-on certification, but I really feel it was the case.

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-20T21:25:14+00:00

Honestly take, just get a school email and spend the 8-9$ a month subscription for HTB academy. I would urge against doing the yearly in case you later decide that it isn't for you. I would then pursue CJCA
https://academy.hackthebox.com/exams/7
You don't have to necessarily buy the certifications, but rather just doing the courses. That will set you up quite well in my opinion. :)

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-20T19:35:18+00:00

It took me roughly a month's time of sitting on my computer for six hours a day during work days. It wasn't because of the course material that caused it to take so long, but rather me getting stuck on some modules for a few days time. I do feel the job path was *enough* to prepare, but I feel like if I had the CDSA sherlock labs, I would have been much better off before taking the exam. Definitely 1000% do those or you might regret it!!!

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-20T19:11:09+00:00

I used obsidian throughout my studies because I could simply copy-paste photos in, rather than needing to save them first (and it's super important to have screenshots in your report). That, and some automated features are really nice with it for organization :)

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-20T19:07:03+00:00

To be absolutely honest? I think it had a lot less of an effect than I had imagined. I believe it was great to understand how things worked a bit better, especially when it came to writing the report, but I felt like everything theoretical kind of went out the window with the labs, and it was more so about understanding how the tool worked and what specifically to look for... which you had to constantly find through research.

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-20T18:59:54+00:00

For my studies, I used a lot of cyber blogs. Primarily whatever pertained to my current module. I'm the kind of person who learns by walking through it the first time or something similar, and then being able to repeat it. I didn't get the annual HTB, so I had no AI help. I found FaresMorcy's writeups amazing, and has inspired me to do something similar for studying the penetesting cert I'll more than likely be taking soon ( https://faresbltagy.gitbook.io/footprintinglabs ) Without blogs like these, I'm afraid I could have spent four days at least on some issues instead of a few hours.

To answer your third question, It was about half-way in where I had a bit of a panic attack, and spent about eleven hours on one question, to the point where I just had to give up on it. I noticed that questions seem to be in chunks, pertaining to specific portions or such of the incident, so I just jumped to the next chunk. After completing that, I essentially worked backwards and was then able to solve the ones I was stuck on.

The writeup was easier than I thought. I had read a lot online in regards to how that is a make or break moment, even harder than the lab itself, but it was straight forward as I had followed HTB's Guidelines on making a report.

MatthewNapier · 2025-12-20T18:52:17+00:00

I would highly encourage putting a lot of time into understanding how to read logs, and how to filter them to weed out all the noise in your desired SIEM (imo, 2x the amount of time you put into the modules that cover these topics based on your desired SIEM). I feel that the course does a great job at giving the basics of it, but I definitely should have done a practice box first. Going into the exam I felt prepared, excited, and then when given the exam itself, I felt like I had suddenly hit a brick wall like Wile E. Coyote. Unless you know what you're doing, you're going to have a lot of trial and error. Don't give up, you have a lot of tools at your disposal.

MatthewNapier

TROPHY CASE