Zero-point Security's Red Team Ops (CRTO) review

What it is

A first-person review of Zero-point Security's Red Team Ops (CRTO) course and exam by Daniel "Rastamouse" Duggan. The summary covers the syllabus; this review carries the practical decision factors — cost, logistics, and the reviewer's exam experience.

Cost and logistics

• Price: £399 (~€473). Course access is lifetime and rolling-release (updated over time); the 40 hours of lab time are the finite resource.
• Reviewer finished all labs in ~30 hours unrushed, so 40 hours is comfortable.
• Labs run in Guacamole (HTML5 remote desktop), reachable from any modern browser. Key limitation: the environment is hermetic — you cannot pull your own scripts or tools onto a compromised host.
• Multi-host AD domains require you to establish persistence on machines you've already compromised, so you can pause and resume the lab without redoing prior steps.
• A full CobaltStrike license is included in the labs — useful if you've never used it.

Exam

• CTF format: 48 lab-hours spread over 4 calendar days (budget them freely — 12h/day or straight through). 8 flags, 6 needed to pass.
• The exam is vulnerable to techniques the course covers and also uses Guacamole. The reviewer notes practicing elsewhere is hard because you need your own CobaltStrike license.
• Reviewer passed 6/8, stopping with 90 minutes left at 3 AM.

What to do (if taking it)

The single most useful actionable tip: be thorough in enumeration. The reviewer burned two calendar days on an early flag after mis-enumerating one host and chasing false leads, then reached flag 6 in under half a day once unstuck.

Have a checklist of "how to test technique X using command Y" and go through it methodically.

Caveats

• Subjective single review; no reproducible technical claims to verify.
• CRTO carries little weight in HR/ATS filters at time of writing, though the reviewer says most security practitioners recognize it — so weigh it as skills value, not resume-keyword value.
• The reviewer explicitly contrasts it favorably against Offensive Security courses for clarity of explanation; treat that as opinion.