- The Short Answer: What a CCST-C Is
- Reading the Name Piece by Piece
- What Exam 100-160 Covers
- Format, Time Limit and Fee
- How CCST Cybersecurity Differs From Neighboring Cisco Credentials
- Who Hires CCST-C Holders and for What Work
- Do You Need Anything Before You Sit the Exam?
- Sequencing the Five Domains in Your Prep
- Where to Go Next
- Frequently Asked Questions
- CCST-C here means Cisco Certified Support Technician - Cybersecurity, an entry-level Cisco credential earned by passing exam 100-160.
- Cisco lists the exam at 50 minutes with a USD 125 fee.
- Five official domains span security principles, network security, endpoints, risk management and incident handling.
- Cisco's introductory 150 hours of instruction and hands-on experience is a preparation expectation, not a stated mandatory prerequisite.
The Short Answer: What a CCST-C Is
A CCST-C, in the context of this site, is the Cisco Certified Support Technician - Cybersecurity certification. It is an entry-level credential from Cisco Systems, Inc. that verifies foundational knowledge of cybersecurity concepts and the practical skills needed to support security work in an entry-level role. You earn it by passing a single exam, numbered 100-160.
The acronym is shared by other, unrelated credentials from other organizations, so it is worth being precise: everything on this page refers only to the Cisco certification. If you landed here from a search for a different "CCST-C," the exam fee, domains and employers described below will not apply to it.
The credential sits at the beginning of Cisco's certification ladder. It is designed for people who are new to security: students, career changers, help desk staff who want to move toward security, and junior IT personnel who are being asked to take on security duties. It is intentionally broad rather than deep, introducing the vocabulary, tools and procedures that more advanced credentials assume you already know.
Reading the Name Piece by Piece
The full title is a compact description of what the certification is meant to be. Breaking it apart helps explain what the exam rewards.
- Cisco: The issuing vendor. Cisco publishes the exam objectives, sets the exam and owns the credential.
- Certified: You hold the credential only after passing the exam; there is no coursework-completion version of it.
- Support Technician: The target role family. Cisco's CCST program is aimed at people who support systems and users, rather than architects or senior engineers.
- Cybersecurity: The subject track. This distinguishes it from the CCST Networking certification, which covers a different body of knowledge.
For more on the naming and how people refer to it, see our companion explainers on what CCST-C stands for and the meaning of CCST-C.
What Exam 100-160 Covers
Cisco organizes the exam around five objective domains in its official Exam Objectives document. Cisco has not published percentage weights for these domains in the material we reference, so treat all five as fair game and avoid any source that claims precise weightings. For a deeper walk-through of each area, read our complete guide to the five CCST-C content areas.
Domain 1: Essential Security Principles
This is the vocabulary-and-theory foundation. You must be able to define and distinguish core ideas, then apply them to scenarios.
- Vulnerabilities, threats, exploits, risks, attack vectors, hardening and defense-in-depth
- The CIA triad: confidentiality, integrity and availability
- Threat types: malware, ransomware, denial of service, botnets, man in the middle, insider threats and Advanced Persistent Threats
- Social engineering variants: phishing, spear phishing, vishing, smishing and tailgating
- Access management: AAA, RADIUS, multifactor authentication and password policies
- Encryption: hashing, certificates, PKI, strong versus weak algorithms, and data in transit, at rest and in use
Domain 2: Basic Network Security Concepts
Here the exam shifts from ideas to infrastructure. You need to know where protocols are weak and which technologies compensate.
- Vulnerabilities in TCP, UDP, HTTP, ARP, ICMP, DHCP and DNS
- IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, MAC addresses, CIDR notation, NAT, segmentation and public versus private networks
- DMZ, virtualization, cloud, honeypots, proxy servers, IDS and IPS
- Securing a SoHo wireless network: MAC filtering, encryption standards and SSID considerations
- Secure access technologies: ACLs, firewalls, VPNs and NAC
Domain 3: Endpoint Security Concepts
The most hands-on domain. It tests whether you can work at the operating system level and read what a machine is telling you.
- Windows, macOS and Linux security features, Windows Defender, host-based firewalls, CLI and PowerShell, file permissions and privilege escalation
- Assessment tools: netstat, nslookup and tcpdump
- Policy and compliance checks: asset and software inventory, backups, BYOD management, PCI DSS, HIPAA and GDPR
- Patching and updates across operating systems, applications, drivers and firmware
- Log interpretation with Event Viewer, audit logs and syslog, plus malware scanning and remediation
Domain 4: Vulnerability Assessment and Risk Management
This domain covers how organizations find weaknesses and decide what to do about them.
- Vulnerability identification and mitigation, active versus passive reconnaissance, and port scanning
- Threat intelligence: CVEs, vulnerability databases, cybersecurity reports and news, subscription services and secure documentation sharing
- Risk management: vulnerability versus risk, ranking and mitigating risks, data classification
- Disaster recovery and business continuity planning, including backup and recovery controls
Domain 5: Incident Handling
The final domain asks how a junior technician behaves when something suspicious is spotted.
- Monitoring security events, knowing when to escalate, and the roles of SIEM and SOAR
- Digital forensics concepts: the Cyber Kill Chain, MITRE ATT&CK, the Diamond Model, TTPs, evidence preservation and chain of custody
- Compliance reporting and notification impacts under GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FERPA and FISMA
- Incident response policies, plans and procedures, and the lifecycle stages drawn from NIST Special Publication 800-61
Format, Time Limit and Fee
The facts Cisco publishes about the exam are straightforward. Exam 100-160 is listed as a 50-minute exam with a fee of USD 125. Registration and delivery run through Certiport and Pearson VUE, the channel Cisco points to for the CCST program.
Equally important is what we do not state. The source material we rely on does not establish an official question count or a numeric passing score, so any site quoting precise figures should be treated with caution. Check Cisco's exam page directly before test day for current details, and see our pages on the CCST-C passing score and full certification cost breakdown for how we handle the unknowns.
| Exam Detail | What Cisco Lists |
|---|---|
| Exam number | 100-160 |
| Duration | 50 minutes |
| Fee | USD 125 |
| Official objective domains | Five |
| Published domain weightings | Not established in our source material |
| Question count and numeric passing score | Not established in our source material |
A 50-minute window is short for a certification exam, which makes breadth of recall more valuable than the ability to reason slowly through a few hard problems. You will not have time to puzzle over unfamiliar terminology, so the vocabulary in the domain boxes above needs to be automatic.
How CCST Cybersecurity Differs From Neighboring Cisco Credentials
Cisco has several entry and associate-level options, and candidates regularly confuse them. Two distinctions matter most.
CCST Cybersecurity versus CCST Networking
Both belong to the same Cisco Certified Support Technician family, but they are separate certifications with separate exams. Networking focuses on how networks function and are supported. Cybersecurity focuses on protecting systems, data and users. There is overlap in Domain 2, where network addressing and infrastructure appear, but the cybersecurity exam always frames that material through a security lens: what can go wrong and how to defend it.
CCST Cybersecurity versus Cisco CyberOps Associate
Cisco CyberOps Associate is a distinct credential aimed at security operations work. CCST Cybersecurity is positioned earlier on the path, as a foundation. Think of the CCST-C as establishing the language and the baseline skills, with CyberOps Associate representing a separate and more operations-focused step. They are not interchangeable, and holding one does not substitute for the other.
Who Hires CCST-C Holders and for What Work
Because the credential is entry-level, it is best understood as a door-opener rather than a guarantee of a specific title. The skills it validates map onto support-tier positions where security awareness is part of the daily job. Typical environments include:
- Managed service providers and IT consultancies that need technicians who can apply patches, review logs and follow security procedures for many small clients.
- Corporate IT and help desk teams where staff handle account lockouts, MFA enrollment, endpoint hygiene and suspicious email reports.
- Security operations centers that bring in junior analysts to monitor alerts, triage events through SIEM tooling and escalate appropriately.
- Organizations subject to compliance regimes, such as those handling payment data, health records or student records, where familiarity with PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR or FERPA is directly useful.
The exam's content tells you the kinds of tasks these employers expect: reading Event Viewer and syslog entries, running netstat or tcpdump to see what a machine is doing, verifying software inventory, applying updates, scanning for malware and knowing when something deserves escalation. We deliberately avoid quoting salary numbers here because we do not have verified figures; for a qualitative discussion, see our pages on CCST-C jobs and the return on investment of the certification.
Do You Need Anything Before You Sit the Exam?
Cisco describes the successful candidate as someone who has completed roughly 150 hours of instruction and hands-on experience in the introductory material. It is important to read that correctly: it describes the preparation a candidate is expected to have, not a mandatory gate you must clear before registering. We do not establish it as a formal prerequisite, and there is no stated requirement to hold another certification first.
In practice, this means a motivated beginner can attempt the exam, but should plan for a meaningful investment of study and lab time rather than a quick cram. Our requirements and eligibility guide covers how to think about readiness, and the difficulty guide discusses what tends to trip people up.
Key Takeaway
Treat the 150-hour figure as a benchmark for how much hands-on exposure a prepared candidate typically has. If you are well short of it, spend the difference on lab practice with command-line tools and log files rather than on additional reading.
Sequencing the Five Domains in Your Prep
Rather than generic study advice, here is a CCST-C-specific ordering that follows how the domains build on one another. Adjust the timing to your own schedule.
Domain 1: Build the Vocabulary
- Master the CIA triad, threat types and social engineering variants
- Learn AAA, RADIUS, MFA, hashing, PKI and the data in transit, at rest and in use distinction
Domain 2: Learn Where Protocols Break
- Study weaknesses in ARP, DNS, DHCP, ICMP and HTTP
- Practice CIDR notation, NAT and segmentation, then compare firewalls, IDS, IPS, VPN and NAC
Domain 3: Get Hands-On
- Run netstat, nslookup and tcpdump and interpret the output
- Review Event Viewer and syslog entries, file permissions and patching workflows
Domains 4 and 5: Process and Response
- Distinguish vulnerability from risk and study CVEs, DRP and BCP
- Learn the Cyber Kill Chain, MITRE ATT&CK, the Diamond Model, chain of custody and the NIST 800-61 lifecycle
The reasoning is simple. Domain 1 supplies the terms every later question assumes. Domain 3 is placed after the networking material so that tool output makes sense, and the process-heavy Domains 4 and 5 come last because they tie everything together in incident scenarios. For a fuller plan, see our CCST-C study guide and the one-page CCST-C cheat sheet for last-minute review.
Where to Go Next
Understanding what the CCST-C is gives you the frame for everything else: what to study, what to budget and what the certification can realistically do for your career. A sensible next step is to test yourself against the real breadth of the objectives. Our CCST-C practice tests are built around the five official domains so you can see which areas need work before you pay the exam fee, and you can explore related explainers such as the CCST-C certification overview and exam dates and scheduling.
If you are still deciding whether to pursue it, weigh the modest USD 125 exam fee and 50-minute exam length against the breadth of foundational skills it validates. For many newcomers to security, that combination makes it a low-risk first credential. You can check your readiness at any time on the main practice test site.
Frequently Asked Questions
On this site it stands for Cisco Certified Support Technician - Cybersecurity, an entry-level certification from Cisco Systems, Inc. The same acronym is used by unrelated credentials elsewhere, so always confirm you are looking at the Cisco one.
You take Cisco exam 100-160. Cisco lists it as a 50-minute exam with a USD 125 fee, delivered through the Certiport and Pearson VUE channel referenced on Cisco's CCST Cybersecurity page.
They are Essential Security Principles, Basic Network Security Concepts, Endpoint Security Concepts, Vulnerability Assessment and Risk Management, and Incident Handling. Official percentage weights are not established in our source material.
No. Cisco describes it as the preparation a successful candidate typically brings, not as a mandatory prerequisite. It works best as a benchmark for how much study and hands-on practice to plan.
No. CCST Cybersecurity is a separate certification from CCST Networking and from Cisco CyberOps Associate. Each has its own exam and objectives, so preparation for one does not directly substitute for another.