I passed the Certified Red Team Operator (CRTO) exam by RastaMouse from ZeroPointSecurity.
CRTO is designed to push ethical hackers beyond automated tools and into the mindset of a Red Teamer.
When I booted up that CRTO lab with Defender turned off, I thought I’d breeze through the attacks. Then I flipped it on—and everything broke. That’s when the real red team began.

CRTO isn’t just another cert—it forces you to think inside a modern enterprise as an adversary. You learn Cobalt Strike, domain recon, Kerberos moves, and when noise turns into a knockout. Zero-Point doesn’t spoon-feed preventing logs—they expect you to think in stealth.

The course is so fun to study, every module has its own lab and some modules also include challenges

The Module Kerberos is the most important in my eyes if you want to easily pass the exam, focus hard on this one.

The Course costs £399, well on time of writing this blog you can get this course just for £200 at this price its a steal.

Although I don’t have prior experience working as a Red Teamer/Pentester, I actively solve CTFs whenever I get the chance. Though I have got my CPTS (Certified Penetration Tester Specialist) by hackthebox. Also I ve completed some HTB prolabs: Dante, Zephyr and offshore.

But to be honest you don't need Prolabs or CPTS in order to pass the exam, but some experience with CTF's is always useful.
Everything in the exam is taught in the course, you just need to think straight and Out of the Box.

I started the exam with full motivation and I was able to solve 95 % of complete exam in 10 hours, the last part was a little hard for me but again every thing in the exam is in the course. So if you are stuck too just go through the course again.

After 15 hours my exam was over and boom, I failed. Even after completing the challenge part I got caught by defender multiple times : (

Then I had to wait again for a week and in meanwhile I studied the Defense Evasion Module thoroughly and this time I was completely ready to take on the exam.