Accessdata has announced (via email only thus far, I haven’t seen an announcement on their site) that the Accessdata Certified Examiner (ACE) will now be free (as in beer). At first I thought this was a scam or a joke until it arrived on both the email account associated with my ownership of FTK and my unassociated FTK forums account email.
Additionally, it appears they have removed all the pre-requisites for undertaking the cert, including ownership of an FTK product. The ACE Preparation page has been updated to reflect this. This is a major change since previously, you were required to own FTK (which costs over $3k plus the yearly subscription for support/updates) plus have attended 2 of their training sessions – BootCamp and Windows Forensics – which is thousands more in training costs.
Additionally, they have put up training videos for free download that cover the course material.
Now this would seem to potentially hurt their revenue stream, however it could increase the user base to off-set this, and their 3-day training courses are still very worthwhile. I attended their Internet Forensics course in 2005, and despite having 5 years experience at that time, I still learned a lot.
What this may do is somewhat elevate the certification against the competing EnCE from Guidance. One of the big criticisms of tool certs is that because you have already bought their product, and paid for their training, they have a vested interest in you passing. By making the ACE free, AccessData now has a vested interest in people not passing, since that would tend to move them towards undertaking the training courses to get skilled up.