I just removed my CEH certification credential from all my social media profiles, my website, and my instructor profiles. I am not planning to renew it.
I have for years not really recommended EC-Council and the CEH. It stopped evolving, better certifications came out, and EC-Council just seemed more focused on profit than actually educating the cyber security workforce.
Very few for-profit vendor-neutral certification providers do a good job (SANS does it well).
(ISC)², ISACA, PMI, and CompTIA are all non-profits.
EC-Council has in the last days been at the center of some controversy on plagiarism.
They had used other people’s work and articles, branded them as EC-Council original works.
One of the authors of the plagiarized works called them out on it and instead of saying: “Our bad, we apologize, we made a mistake, we are implementing X countermeasure to ensure no plagiarism is happening in the future and we will compensate the people effected”. This would have been less of an issue. It was fixable, they chose not to.
https://mobile.twitter.com/alyssam_infosec?lang=en
https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/o5w52x/eccouncil_credibility/
On top of that, they have some blatant sexism issues, this for me, is an even larger deal-breaker.
They had a LinkedIn poll asking:
“What according to you are the most common challenges faced by women in the cybersecurity domain?”
A: “Only men can do this job”
B: “Women can’t handle this job”
C: “Women aren’t encouraged enough.”
When people called them out on it, they started blocking all the women (yes supposedly only women) who said anything.
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/blogs/the-story-of-the-eccouncil-gender/
I am sad that I have to stop being a CEH, it is a cool certification name “Certified Ethical Hacker”.
That said, sexism is never OK, lack of ethics is a big concern. Those are always more important than any certification, regardless of how much time, effort, and money you spent obtaining it. I think my company and I spent over $10,000 in 2010 for my CEH certification.
Thank you for reading,
Thor Pedersen
