PCI PA/P2PE certifications

Took the Payment Application (PA) Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) exam back in March, just a couple of weeks after taking the Point to Point Encryption (P2PE) QSA exam. Surprisingly they both seemed fairly easy tests, the P2PE was a little harder since I had to study up on some crypto information.

Had been trying for a few months to assist with some P2PE assessment work, but it seems that is not as easy as I had hoped. Had asked to shadow some people or assist on small projects, but got nothing. I then asked to work on PA assessment, was invited out to the Colorado office to learn the internal processes, and go over some documents. Was asked if I was interested in joining the PA team by hte managing principal.

Finally decided to stop trying to get into the P2PE team, and took an opportunity on the PA team. Applied for a Senior Consultant position, but was only transferred over as a IT security Consultant. Not exactly sure what the deal is with promoting me to Senior, especially since I have more experience then most Senior Consultants that I have worked with so far. But that battle is for another day.

Will see how things go with doing the PA assessments, they do not seem to be very difficult, most of the testing is easy. The pentesting portion is kind of a joke, as they do only minor tests against SQLi, XSS, CSRF and buffer overflows. Almost makes me miss doing the pentesting stuff, and the exploiting software vulnerabilities.