How to renew your CEH (or any other EC Council) certificate

I took the Certified Ethical Hacker (or in short CEH) V9 exam mid last year. The CEH certificate is owned by an organization called EC-Council. I noticed throughout the whole process — from getting approval to take the exam, booking the exam, the exam itself and the process of renewing the certification— that it’s not straightforward and poorly documented. I recently took the time to discover what needs to be done to renew my CEH certificate. And I hope by writing it down it might save other people some time.

If you’re interested in a detailed write-up about the eligibility process and the other administration that needs to be done to take the CEH exam, just leave a comment.

Renewing EC Council certificates

I will talk here about the CEH certificate, but the same procedure applies to other EC-Council certificates. As it is the case with many other certifications there is a procedure for renewing the certificate.

After you pass the CEH exam you’ll get an invite from EC Council to create an account

I remember that choosing a strong password was a painful experience due to password requirements. But anyway, don’ give up and pick a strong password that fulfills their requirements. They also foresee the ability to enable 2FA. Unfortunately it’s SMS only, but just activate it! Think about the overall look and feel of the portal and the unnecessary strict password requirements and you might agree that 2FA is no luxury here ;-).

If you’re logged in to the real fancy (are we still living in the 90's?) portal, called ASPEN, you have several options.

The one that is of interest for renewing the certificate is the EC-Council Continuing Education (ECE) tile.

I only have the CEH certificate, but if you have more EC-Council certificates, you’ll see them all listed here. You need to pay a $80 dollar yearly fee. Clicking the “Pay Now” button brings you here:

Once you ordered the ECE Annual Membership fee, you need to send the confirmation to membersupport@eccouncil.org and you should be good for a year.

The certificate is valid for only three years and during this period, the certification must be renewed by participating in the ECE program. This is what EC-Council says about that:

So 120 credits within this 3 year window and if you fail:

Adding credits is possible from within the same portal.

You also need to attach some evidence that you really completed the particular activity (event type). There’s a handy overview to see categories and their according credits and proof specification.

After you’ve registered an event type, the credits are pending until approved by EC-Council.