Check Point offers 25% discount on R70 exams. You can find the VUE promotion code on this webpage.
Tobias Lachmann
Archive for the ‘Certification’ Category
Discount on Check Point exams
Monday, June 7th, 2010More benefits for recent CCSE certification
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010Check Point changed the benefits for their Check Point Certified Security Expert (CCSE) certification.
In the past we had
- Expert Access to SecureKnowledge
- Newsletter
- Logo rights
Now they added
- Access to level-3 TAC support engineers
I’m not sure what this means. I deal a lot with the TAC in Israel as part of my daily work, but never encountered a “level-3″ engineer. Normally your call is handled by a support engineer and, if escalated, handed over to an escalation engineer. And maybe a diamond engineer from the diamond support team assists. Would we interesting to know what “level-3″ means.
Anyway, the goal is clear: give the higher certified people direct access to support engineers that have the same level.
In addidtion, Check Point changed the handling of calls from Check Point Certified Master Architects (CCMA). Now they get escalation priority while opening a case. Also a good thing, as a CCMA is so highly trained that he could easily work as escalation support engineer with Check Point. If a CCMA opens a case, it must be severe.
The community demanded such priviliges for skilled people a long time (see CPUG board for the discussion) I’m glad that Check Point now made a step forward!
Tobias Lachmann
UPDATE: Pierre Lamy, Technical Lead of Ottawa TAC, pointed out what tiers/levels exist. A level-3 engineer is the normal support engineer who’s handling a case opened with Israel TAC.
I’m back!
Friday, April 2nd, 2010Hello everybody!
I’m back from my parental leave, which lasted till the end of March. During that period, I spend all the time with my son but no time with this blog.
Now I’m back at work and I see interesting things everyday that give me inspirations for articles, so expect new content soon.
What also happended is that I gained the CCSE R70 certification for contributing to the new CCSE exam. Thanks Ken Finley, this is greatley appreciated! Now I’m done with re-certification until CCSE+ comes out.
Bye for now
Tobias Lachmann
Re-Certification R70
Thursday, December 17th, 2009Today I passed the first part of my re-certification. Since the R70 CCSA exam is now available, I started with this one and will later on go for CCSE and CCSE+. I took the Accelerated CCSE exam once, wasn’t funny. I’m not going to do that again with R70!
The R70 exam is under NDA restriction, so I can’t go into detail or tell you about specific question.
But some general things can be said:
- we now have a tough time frame – 130 questions in 120 minutes!
- the questions are now more detailed and have good pictures which help a lot; but the scenarios are more complex
- you actually have real live questions which occur in the daily work
- all topics from the course are covered and you have to know more details about the product and general security methods
- it’s not like to old CCSA exam, it’s more like the CCSE actually
Sadly, some things haven’t changed:
- still questions that can’t be answered correctly
- questions with two! answers that have the same text -> which one will be judged as correct?
- answers like “1,2 and 4 are correct” -> here I found that no answer had the number X in it, which is also correct; kind of misleading
- lot’s of questions that need to be re-phrased to make sense; especially for non-native speakers some of them are very hard to understand
I took the exam without practicing and passed. But this is truly not recommended! At least you should buy the student handbook from the training courses to know all the topics. Remember, the course has now 5 days instead of the 2 it had before.
Will be interesting to see, how the CCSE goes.
I submitted some questions for this exam to Check Point. If I’m lucky, they will accept some of this questions. The promised reward was gaining the CCSE R70 certification.
If this works, I’m of the hook 
Tobias Lachmann