GSEC Practice Exam 1

I completed the first of two practice exams tonight. They are a little daunting if for no other reason than SANS allows 300 minutes (that's 5 hours!) to complete 180 questions. That alone makes you think they are going to be exceptionally rough.

I completed it in about 90 minutes, and passed with an 88.89%.

It was a good exercise. It is a web-based exam, and I used a tool called Screengrab! for Firefox. That allowed me to take images of the entire browser window simply by right-clicking on the web page and saving it to a jpg. For all questions I was not 100% sure of, I would enter my guessed answer, take a screen image, and then if I got the answer wrong I would take another image of the explanation. In a few instances I answered without fully reading the question - a continual battle for me.

Without actually reviewing my captured list of errors and unsurities, I think I can say that I'm feeling a bit weak in cryptography and some Windows memorization facts. For instance, how many of you seasoned Windows sysadmins would know that S-1-5-32-544 is the well-known SID of the Local Administrators group? I'm not completely sure how knowing that makes me a better security administrator, but what the heck. Sometimes knowing those little tidbits makes all the difference. I just hope I don't push out some information that is actually useful by memorizing well-known SIDs.

I'll continue on my review tomorrow. At least I'm feeling more confident that I truly understand this material and will be well prepared for the exam.

Now, to bed...