Hack The Box is another great platform that is used to learn pentesting. This platform allows for people to practice their penetration testing skills on vulnerable machines. This platform allows you to start up a virtual machine instance (and even a Parrot instance if you need it, otherwise they provide a VPN) to create a secure environment for you to test in. These vulnerable machines are live and are secure from the internet so you do not have to worry about it being on your network.

There are two types of machines that are available – active and retired. Active machines are available to all users and only select retired machines are available to everyone. The complete list of retired machines are available to users who have the VIP subscription to the platform and those machines are the ones that writeups are allowed for.

For my purposes, I VPN into the environment using my own VM since it already has all the tools I enjoy on it. Although I have just began using this platform, I really enjoy it. For the vulnerable machines, you are able to submit a flag for both the user and root and gain points for it if it is an active machine.

Hack the Box: https://app.hackthebox.com/