CRTA Certification Achieved!

Overview

I’m excited to share that I have successfully earned the CRTA (Certified Red Team Analyst) certification from CyberWarFare Labs! 🎉
The CRTA is a hands-on, highly practical certification that focuses on modern red team tactics, adversary simulation, and attacking Active Directory environments.

This achievement marks an important step in my journey toward mastering offensive security and real-world attack methodologies used by advanced threat actors.

Why CRTA?

The CRTA certification is designed to test your ability to perform targeted intrusions and stealthy operations within enterprise environments.
It emphasizes TTPs (Tactics, Techniques & Procedures) aligned with MITRE ATT&CK, making it incredibly valuable for red team professionals, penetration testers, and blue teamers interested in attacker behavior.

Key Takeaways

During the certification process, I gained hands-on experience in several critical areas:

• Active Directory Attack Chains: Executing real-world attack paths from initial access to domain dominance.
• Credential Access & Privilege Escalation: Extracting and abusing credentials using modern and stealthy techniques.
• Lateral Movement Techniques: Using tools and protocols such as PowerShell Remoting, WMI, PsExec, BloodHound, and more.
• Enumeration & Reconnaissance: Performing deep internal recon to map hosts, users, ACLs, and privilege relationships.
• Persistence Mechanisms: Implementing attacker-style persistence in AD environments.
• OPSEC & Stealth: Understanding detection evasion, log minimization, and operating under realistic constraints.

Tools & Resources

The CRTA lab and exam environment required a strong mix of tools and manual techniques, including:

• BloodHound & SharpHound: Mapping AD relationships and attack paths.
• Mimikatz / Rubeus: Credential extraction, Kerberoasting, and ticket manipulation.
• PowerShell Empire / Covenant: Post-exploitation and command execution.
• CrackMapExec: Lateral movement, enumeration, and credential validation.
• Impacket Suite: SMB and RPC exploitation, Pass-the-Hash, and more.
• Custom Scripts: Crafting PowerShell and Python scripts for automation and exploitation.

Challenges Faced

The CRTA assessment is entirely hands-on and simulates real adversary activity.
Some of the biggest challenges included:

• Navigating a realistic enterprise environment with limited initial access.
• Maintaining stealth while pivoting through multiple hosts.
• Identifying subtle misconfigurations and privilege escalation opportunities.
• Staying organized while managing multiple credentials, sessions, and attack vectors.

This certification pushed me to think like an attacker, adapt quickly, and rely on creativity as much as technical skill.

Conclusion

Earning the CRTA certification has been a powerful learning experience and has significantly strengthened my red teaming capabilities.
It deepened my understanding of Active Directory exploitation, adversary simulation, and stealth techniques used in modern cyber attacks.