Notice: This article is for our B2B customers only. For Lab Access on our HTB Labs, see our dedicated article.
In order to access Machines or Pro Labs, you'll need two things. The first is that your Lab Admin will need to have assigned you to one of the labs available to your organization. The second is a connection to the Lab's VPN server. Using the VPN will establish a route to the lab on our internal network, and will allow you to access the machines in the lab.
There are two ways of connecting to a lab: OpenVPN and Pwnbox.
Connecting with OpenVPN
In order to connect with OpenVPN, click on the VPN Selection Menu in the top-right corner of the website, and select the lab you'd like to connect to.
You'll have the option of selecting either the UDP or TCP protocol. UDP is the default and works best for most people, though switching to TCP can help in cases where you are experiencing some client-side packet filtering or stability issues.
Once you've downloaded your ovpn file, you can use it to connect to our network. Open up your terminal and run the following command:
sudo openvpn /path/to/file.ovpn
You should see something like the following:
A successful connection will end with Initialization Sequence Completed
. Make sure you keep this window open while you work within the lab, as this will keep the OpenVPN process open and the VPN connected.
Connecting with Pwnbox
Pwnbox is our customized, cloud-based Parrot Security distribution that we offer as an in-browser virtual machine. It comes preinstalled with all the typical tools you'd find in a pentesting linux distribution and more.
Additionally, we allow users to store data that will persist across Pwnbox sessions by using the my_data
folder on the desktop. You can also personalize Pwnbox by creating a user_init
script that will run when Pwnbox starts.
Pwnbox is automatically connected to the VPN, so once you spawn it there's no need to worry about manually connecting to the lab you chose.
To spawn a Pwnbox instance, click on the VPN Selection Menu in the top right and choose your lab, then select Pwnbox.
Once you spawn Pwnbox, you'll be able to click View Desktop to be taken to your in-browser VNC session. You can return to the VPN selection menu to reopen Pwnbox at any time.
Please note that you can only spawn a Pwnbox instance if you do not already have an active instance of a Machine running. If you have an active instance, you will be met with the following:
To spawn Pwnbox, first terminate your active Machine. You can see which Machine you have currently running in the top left corner, and terminate it from there as well.
Pwnbox uses UDP
Protocol by default, to switch to TCP please run this command after you spawn it sudo sed -i 's/udp/tcp/g; s/1337/443/g; s/tls-auth/tls-crypt/g' /etc/openvpn/*.conf; sudo systemctl restart openvpn