How I Passed the CompTIA SecurityX Exam (CAS-005)

I passed CompTIA SecurityX (CAS-005) this month. If you read the Security+ post, you know the drill by now — but this one didn't come together the same way, and that's really what this post is about.

Quick context on where SecurityX sits: it's CompTIA's expert-level cert, built for security architects and senior security leaders rather than people early in their career. Nearly double the exam time of Security+ (165 minutes vs. 90), pass/fail instead of a scaled score, and four domains where Governance, Risk & Compliance gets carved out as its own full section instead of getting folded into "everything else." That's the whole comparison — the real story is what it actually took to get ready for it.

What it took: experience first, everything else second

If you asked me to rank what got me through this exam, it's not close. Experience did the heavy lifting. The Udemy course and practice exams were there to check my work, not teach me the material.

Experience. This is the biggest thing, and it's not close. Years of leading a team through incident response engagements — scoping investigations, making the call on what gets escalated and to whom, weighing a control gap against actual business risk, sitting across from a client's leadership and explaining what happened and what it means — that's the exam. The PBQs weren't testing whether I'd memorized a framework. They were testing whether I'd actually made those calls before. I had. That's what the 10-years-general/5-years-security recommendation is really pointing at: this isn't a knowledge exam you can out-study without having done the job.

The Udemy course. I ran through a Udemy SecurityX course, but it functioned more like a light check than a primary study path. It was useful for making sure nothing in the newer domain structure was a blind spot — some of the governance and compliance framework specifics aren't things you absorb just by doing the work day to day, you actually have to see them laid out. But I wasn't leaning on it to learn security. I was leaning on it to confirm I wasn't missing something.

Practice exams. Same role they played for Security+: a handful of question banks across a couple of providers, mainly to get a feel for how CompTIA phrases and structures its questions. With SecurityX, though, they mattered less than they did the first time around — because the content itself wasn't new. They were a confidence gauge more than a study tool.

Why this one matters more than the last one

Security+ was a foundation stamp. SecurityX is different — it's validation for the seat I'm actually in. As DFIR Manager, most of what I do day to day isn't hands-on configuration anymore. It's governance: setting the standards my team investigates against, making the risk calls on what gets escalated, and translating technical findings into something a client's leadership can actually act on. SecurityX is the first CompTIA cert I've taken that tests that version of the job directly — and it's the first one where experience, not study time, was the thing that actually got me across the line.

If you're early career, Security+ is still the right first stop — don't skip ahead, there's no shortcut around the hours. But if you've already been the one making the calls this exam is testing, SecurityX is just confirming what the job already taught you.