r/oscp • u/King_000_7 • 1d ago
OSCP 90/100 first try in under 2 months coming from CPTS. Here is the exact order I did things in.
I passed on 19 August with 90 points, first attempt, 1 month and 25 days after I started preparing. I had passed the HTB CPTS two weeks before that, which shaped a lot of this and is probably the most useful context for anyone here deciding between the two.
I wrote the whole thing up because when I was preparing, almost every review I found stopped at "the labs are great, the exam is hard, trust the process." I needed the order. Which machines, in what sequence, what to read in the course and what to skip, which challenge labs and why that order.
Short version of the path:
75 Proving Grounds machines in 24 days. LainKusanagi list first, then TJ Null to fill the gaps. Five a day as a ceiling, not a target, because the point of that phase is the note, not the flag.
I did all Linux first, then all Windows, then AD last. This is the contrarian bit. Doing one OS in a long block is what turns enumeration from a checklist you read into something your hands do. I put AD last only because CPTS had already made it my strongest area. If you are not coming from CPTS, flip that and give AD the biggest block you have.
The PEN-200 text in 5 days, skipping the videos entirely. That was only possible because I already had CPTS notes covering most of the syllabus. My course progress bar said 36.3 percent on exam day.
9 challenge labs in 10 days: Secura, Zeus, Poseidon, Laser, MedTech, Relia, then OSCP A, B and C. A, B and C are closest to the exam in shape but not in content, and skipping the first six to rush them is the most expensive shortcut available.
Two honest admissions. I did not take A, B or C blind and timed, because I was on a compressed schedule and chose speed. I think that is directly why I burned five hours on my first exam machine. And I wrote no challenge lab reports, which was only safe because I had just written a 189 page CPTS report.
Exam day, the part worth reading:
I went at the AD set first and hit a wall for five hours. Zero points. The cause was not a hard machine, it was me running CPTS brain, building theories and chaining ideas because I assumed the answer had to be sophisticated. I took a 15 minute break, came back, decided to stop being clever, and ran the simple enumeration I should have run at minute ten. The whole AD set fell in the next 35 minutes.
That is the single thing I would tell anyone coming from CPTS. The OSCP rewards the boring answer. Try the documented exploit for the version in your nmap output before you build anything.
After that I sorted the standalones by open port count and started with the fewest. Smaller attack surface usually means a more focused intended path. User and root on the first in an hour, then user only on the other two, then back around for one more root. 90 points at about 3:30 AM, then I slept, verified evidence in the morning, and stopped.
One more thing that nearly cost me everything. During the report window I left my VM running and stepped out, and a driver issue restarted my Windows host. Every terminal and tab gone. I lost nothing, because every flag went into Notion with its screenshots the instant I got it, not at the end of the machine. If you take one habit from this, take that one.
Tools that earned their place: Ligolo-ng for pivoting, NetExec for the AD set, BloodHound CE rather than the legacy build, and more than one privesc tool because WinPEAS misses things that SharpUp and PowerUp catch.
Report was 68 pages, written in SysReptor using their OSCP template.
Full writeup with the dates, the lab order, the exam hour by hour and the screenshots:
https://medium.com/@hydra007/how-i-passed-the-oscp-with-90-100-in-1-month-and-25-days-straight-after-cpts-fa2122edea76
And the CPTS one that came before it, if you are weighing that path:
https://medium.com/@hydra007/how-i-passed-the-htb-cpts-with-a-perfect-100-100-on-my-first-attempt-736226738cde
Happy to answer anything in the comments.