After three to four months of preparation, I finally passed the exam and got the Practical Network Penetration Tester (PNPT) cert! This is an awesome certification for anyone who is preparing to get into pentesting.
Here are some pointers that i can share:
The provided courses are good enough to pass the exam. Play and experiment with the lab that you build as the part of the course.
Understand AD attacks thoroughly. Practice them. Understand the reason behind them.
Learn persistence techniques.
Learn pivoting - whatever Heath teaches in the course is good enough. However, i have seen other people talking about practicing Wreath from TryHackMe (it’s always good to practice). I tried to give it a go, but there was an issue with the wreath network for the past couple of months.
Enterprise, Attacktive Directory, Attacking Kerberos, Services - these are some of the rooms that I practiced on TryHackMe.
Have the report structure ready before you start with the exam.
Don’t upgrade your machine at the last minute before the exam unless you have a recent backup.
Remember the techniques discussed on the External Pentest Playbook - it’s a short course, go through it at least two times if you don’t have an actual pentest experience.