This guide contains the following sections:

What are labs?

Labs are bite-sized challenges developed by experts and derived from threat intelligence. They're a fundamental aspect of our platform and are designed to encourage analytical thinking, curiosity and problem-solving.

Every lab has its own description, learning outcome, difficulty level and the points that will be rewarded upon completion of the lab.

Some of our labs are approved resources for studying toward CREST professional accreditations. Look out for the logo in lab descriptions if you're studying for the CREST CSPA or CRT exams.

Some of our hands-on labs will spin up a virtual machine so that nothing you do within the lab will affect your local IT infrastructure. Our labs are safe spaces to experiment with tools and techniques and dig deep into malware samples. Use our platform as a sandbox environment to learn and achieve the skill level required in the real world.

Note: We release new labs every week! Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn to find out about new content.

Lab types

Reflecting our goals to assess, build, and prove Cyber Workforce Resilience, we have developed two types of labs: Coach and Demonstrate.

Coach

These labs embed core cyber skills through guided hands-on experiences. They typically come in a collection, allowing individuals to gain a broad range of knowledge, skills and attributes in any tool or technique. Designed to deliver tangible learning outcomes, coach labs are mapped to real job roles so that individuals can measure their skills throughout their career. Most of the labs on our platform are coach labs.

Demonstrate

These practical exercises enable individuals to prove their expertise in relevant tools and technology. They are usually associated with a collection of coach labs and require individuals to demonstrate the skills they gained when completing that collection.

While individuals aren’t guided through these labs, the associated coach collection facilitates all learning necessary to complete them. They also allow more advanced users to assess, build, and prove their skill level. We'll make it clear when a lab is a demonstrate lab by including it in the lab title, as well as in the 'Demonstrate lab' column:

Searching for labs: exercise v. upskill

To make it easier to find the right content, we group our labs into collections and career paths. These are mapped to industry standards.

Lab collections are groups of labs typically on the same subject area, for example PowerShell or Linux command lines. They can also include lab bundles grouped for a specific skill, and learning outcome, such as infrastructure hacking.

Career paths are lab collections that have been grouped together to take a user from a beginner to an advanced level in a specific profession, such as a Secure Python developer.

You can search for our lab collections and career paths by navigating to either Exercise or Upskill in the main navigation menu. Find information on what is included in each section below.

Exercise

This is where our technical and business exercises live. This content is more hands-on and includes challenges and scenarios, Cyber Threat Intelligence, and Crisis Sim (if this is part of your license).

By engaging with these exercises, yourself and your organization can understand your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to cyber knowledge, skills, and judgement.

Upskill

Our career paths and lab collections can be found under the Upskill menu. Collections include: security fundamentals, application security and cloud security, defensive, and offensive Cyber. Availability depends on your license.

When searching for collections, you can filter by status (not started, in progress, completed), difficulty range, and content category, if relevant.

Search bar

Browse for lab collections, career paths, and individual labs using the search bar. Access this via the magnifying glass icon in the main navigation menu.

Use the dropdown to specify whether you're searching for a collection, career path, or individual lab or search with the default 'all' to bring up all content.

Top tips:

Searching for '*' (an asterisk) will bring up all labs on the platform
When searching for content, use the filters on the left-hand side to narrow down your search. For example, when searching for all labs, you can use the filter to narrow those down to CREST-certified labs, or labs in a particular content category:

How do I complete a lab?

Our labs provide information and clues for completion and are designed to get you using the tools and techniques to succeed. The answers are specific to the lab, so you won't be able to find these on Google; although, we encourage self-research of the generic approach which will help with problem solving.

In our labs, you might have to find hidden files or identify port names by completing commands. There's no "right" way to get the answer; it's all about applying your skills and knowledge to complete the tasks.

Using the Clipboard

Labs that have a virtual machine also have an in-lab Clipboard feature. This allows you to temporarily store data copied from a lab or a browser window and paste it back into the lab. This was designed to avoid issues imposed on your own device's Clipboard.

Note: the Clipboard is disabled on malware labs!

Visit our Clipboard support guide for more information on how to ensure a smooth Clipboard-to-lab experience.

What is a virtual machine and lab container?

A virtual machine is a piece of software that emulates a computer. You can put virtual machine software on a Windows machine and create another Windows machine, a Linux machine, or multiple machines, and network these on your own computer.

We create our Windows and Linux virtual machines in the cloud (AWS). They are real versions of Windows and Linux but don't run on physical machines. Instead, these virtual machines sit within lab containers. When you start a lab, the lab container starts the virtual machine it needs (typically Windows, Linux, or both) and runs it.

Feedback: Found an issue with one of our labs?

You may find that one of our lab FAQs solves this.

If you're still having problems, contact our Customer Support team.