CompTIA Security+ Mastery Checklist: Are You Ready to Schedule Your Exam?

Security+ is broad, vendor-neutral, and tied to real exam constraints. The current CompTIA exam is SY0-701. It costs $425, allows maximum of 90 questions in 90 minutes, and requires 750 on a scale of 100-900 to pass.

Security+ readiness checklist

Exam mechanics: Can you state the exam code (SY0-701), voucher price ($425), question count (up to 90), time limit (90 minutes), and passing score (750) without looking them up? Can you name all five domains and their weights in order?

Security Operations (28%): Can you sequence the six incident response phases correctly? Can you describe what containment means and why it precedes eradication? Can you list five hardening actions for a server?

Threats and Vulnerabilities (22%): Can you distinguish phishing from vishing from smishing from whaling? Can you describe what password spraying and credential stuffing are and how they differ?

Security Architecture (18%): Can you explain the shared responsibility model for IaaS and SaaS? Can you describe what zero trust means and how it differs from perimeter security?

Cryptography and PKI: Can you name the primary symmetric algorithm (AES), two asymmetric algorithms (RSA, ECC), and two hashing algorithms (SHA-256, SHA-3)? Can you describe the PKI trust chain from CSR to revocation check?

Ports: Can you name the protocols for ports 22, 53, 80, 443, 3389, 445, 389, 636, 514, and 123?

If you can answer all of these confidently and your practice exam scores are consistently above 80%, you are ready to schedule.

What should you do with this information next?

Our CompTIA Security+ study guide covers all five SY0-701 domains. Available at securitypluscertprep.com/guide.

SimpuTech's Security+ AI tutor can build a personalized study plan. Try it at SimpuTech.com.