CRTE — Red Team Experienced Practitioner Preparation Training

About this course map

CRTE — Certified Red Team Expert — is the Active Directory specialist certification from Altered Security. Where a general penetration test touches AD as one component, CRTE is about nothing else: it goes deep into the way a Windows domain, and a whole forest of them, can be enumerated, abused, escalated through and persisted in. It is the certification for someone who has decided that Active Directory is where enterprise compromise actually happens and wants to master it specifically.

The course behind it teaches tradecraft against a large, realistic multi-domain, multi-forest lab — the kind of environment a mature enterprise actually runs, with trusts, delegation and defences in the way. The emphasis is on understanding *why* each attack works at the protocol level, not just running a tool.

The exam is a practical: a fully patched lab environment that you enumerate, exploit, escalate and move through, ending in a report of the paths you found.

Module 01 — Active Directory as an attack surface

The model you need before any technique makes sense.

Module 02 — Local privilege escalation

Getting from a foothold user to local administrator.

Module 03 — Lateral movement

Spreading through the domain with what you have collected.

Module 04 — Domain privilege escalation

The Kerberos attacks that turn a foothold into domain control.

Module 05 — Cross-trust and forest attacks

The part that separates CRTE from a general AD course — moving between domains and forests.

Module 06 — Persistence and defence evasion

Staying in, and staying quiet.

Module 07 — Reporting the attack paths

Turning the engagement into something the client can fix.