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Managing a Dedicated Lab

Learn how to provision content to your Dedicated Lab and manage lab settings.

Ryan Gordon avatar
Written by Ryan Gordon
Updated this week

Admins and Moderators have the ability to manage and provision Dedicated Labs. This includes adding and removing Machines and Challenges to and from the lab.

Dedicated Labs have a Lab Capacity that determines how many Machines and/or Challenges can be added to the lab. You can choose which content you want to provision to your lab to fill these slots and have the ability to swap out content as you please.


Creating and Understanding Spaces

Spaces enable you to partition your lab into distinct "virtual labs," each with its own unique content, users, and reporting capabilities.

Rather than relying on one space where all users access content, you have the flexibility to establish multiple spaces. This allows you to organize diverse content types and allocate different users accordingly. Alternatively, you could opt only to use the Dedicated Lab, which everyone whom you've given a Dedicated Lab seat will have access to.

Creating a Space

In the Navigation Pane on the left of the platform, you'll find the option Create New Space. Clicking on it will pull up the Space Creation Menu.

You'll be prompted to add a name for your Space. We'd recommend that you keep this short but descriptive. You'll also have the option to make the Space private, which will make it visible only to those who you've assigned to it.


Inviting Users and Assigning Seats

Inviting Users to the Dedicated Lab

You can invite users directly to the Dedicated Lab Main Space by using the Invite Users tab. Simply add the user's email, assign a role, set an expiration date, and click Invite Users. You can view pending invitations in the Invitations tab.

When a new invitation is sent from the Dedicated Lab, a seat is covered. The seat can be released if the invitation expires (the invited doesn't join).

Use the right side button to duplicate the Role and Expiration settings for the next invitation and the Add New Invitation to create an extra empty line for another invitation.

You also can invite users using the User Management panel and then assign seats separately for every user.

Assigning Seats

Using the Manage Users page under the Management panel, you can assign users a license for the lab.

You can also assign users to the lab directly from the lab page itself by clicking on the Seats option in the upper-right corner.

All users are assigned automatically to the default Dedicated Lab Space with the crown icon and you can assign them to every other space as well, they will occupy only one seat.


Adding Content to Your Lab

To provision content to your Dedicated Lab, navigate to your lab's page and press the Manage button.

On the Assigned tab, you can view the list of content you already have :

To add new content, you can navigate to the Machines tab and scroll through the list of Machines in its entirety. By clicking on the content, you can preview its description, the Area of Interest, Technologies, Security Tools, and Techniques. This preview will help you get more details about specific content to assist you in choosing whether to add that content to your lab or not.

Once you've chosen a Machine, you can provide it to your Dedicated Lab by pressing the Add to Lab button. The same process applies to Challenges as well.

Note this button won't be clickable if you already have provisioned your lab to its maximum slot capacity for the given content type. If you are trying to provision a Machine, you'll need to remove a Machine from your lab first, and likewise for Challenges.

To help you find the content you are looking for, you can search the Machines by Name, Tag/Tags or use filters by Difficulty, Operating System, Area of interest, Technology, and Vulnerabilities :

Adding Requested Content from Users

Users can request content related to their Modules. Requests can be for Modules or Machines.

1. To view these requests, go to Manage, then Requested, in Academy or Dedicated Lab respectively.

2. Expanding a request will show the users who made it, and you can click Add to Lab to add the requested content.


3. Clicking Add to Lab will add the content to the respective lab.

A user’s request appears in all spaces a user has a seat in. Once accepted in one of them, the request disappears from all other spaces.

You can toggle Auto-Add Content in the lab settings to automatically add requested content without having to check for requests.

  • Keep in mind that, once accepted via the Auto-add option in one of the relevant spaces, the request disappears from all other spaces.

  • Moreover, if the Auto-add option is enabled in more than one space, the request will be auto-accepted in only one of them.

Removing Content from Your Lab

Deprovisioning content from your lab is just as simple as provisioning it. Scroll to the Machine you want to remove from the Assigned tab and then click Remove from Lab.


Managing Paths

Dedicated Lab Paths are groups of Machines and Challenges focused on a specific skillset or cybersec job direction. These groups are curated by Hack The Box staff to provide coverage over an area of interest. Each Path typically consists of up to 10 Machines or Challenges.

Hack The Box has a lot of content to offer, and sometimes navigating through that ocean can be daunting. With Dedicated Lab Paths, we lift a part of this responsibility by offering a one-button solution to provision the content most relevant to you and your team.

Expanding a Path will show :

  • A paragraph describing what this Path is about, along with a bullet list of learning outcomes

  • A list of content included in the Path (Machines or Challenges), usually up to 10 items

  • An option to add all Machines of the Path in the lab

  • A separate Add to Lab button for each Machine

You can use the ADD ALL button to add all Machines and Challenges inside that Path to your lab.

You can still add a Machine manually to your lab if you are looking for high-level customization to your content.

You can also use the REMOVE ALL button to remove all the Path's Machines or Challenges from your lab or REMOVE specific Machines from that Path after adding them.


Dedicated Lab Settings

From the Settings tab of your Dedicated Lab, you can access and modify the following settings:

  • Leaderboard Visibility

    • Set whether the Leaderboard is visible to everyone.

  • Lab Visibility

    • Set whether only users assigned to a lab can view it.

  • Writeup Visibility

    • Set whether users can view writeups for lab content.

  • Machine Guided Learning

    • Enables the guided mode ( More on that here)

  • Mask Mode

    • Enable mask mode will hide the names and avatars of all assigned content.

  • Information

    • Show descriptions and tags to all users.

You can also reset the Dedicated Lab Owns, ScoreBoard, and Activity while removing or retaining Machines and Challenges in the Lab


Tracking Skill Progress

Using the Skills panel, you can see a breakdown of the current Lab progress based on currently assigned users and currently assigned content to the Lab. This will give you insights on team progress and their area of interest.

You can view this progression breakdown for Machines, showing a spider chart and bar chart progress for the Areas of Interest. You can drill deeper into a specific category by clicking on the All Areas dropdown to select a specific Area of Interest and see a spider graph and bar chart for the categories of that specific Area of Interest.

You can also see the Skill progresses on two tags: Technology and Vulnerabilities. You can select one of the two skills from a dropdown on the top right and see a list of all relevant skills listed in descending progress order:

You can also find a Categories progress breakdown for Challenges in the Lab, displayed in a spider graph alongside a progress bar for the top 10 categories of the Challenges.

The last part of the Skills panel is a Categories progress breakdown for Sherlocks in the Lab, displayed in a spider graph alongside a progress bar for the top 10 categories of the Sherlocks.


Adding Custom Machines to Your Lab

You can find the steps needed to add a Custom Machine to your lab in the Custom Content article.

For more information on the Enterprise Platform, visit our Enterprise Help Center:

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