Labs

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Feature Request — Blue Team Pro Labs and Mini Pro Labs
Hello Hack The Box Team, I would like to suggest expanding the HTB Labs ecosystem by introducing dedicated Blue Team Pro Labs and Mini Pro Labs. Currently, the Pro Labs experience is heavily oriented toward offensive security, which is valuable for penetration testers and red team professionals. However, I believe there is an opportunity to provide a similarly immersive experience for defensive security professionals. My suggestion is to introduce realistic enterprise environments in which users act as SOC analysts, incident responders, and threat hunters. Instead of focusing primarily on compromising systems, participants would investigate security incidents, analyze telemetry, identify attacker activity, determine the scope of a compromise, and develop effective containment and remediation strategies. Potential scenarios could include: SOC Operations: Investigating alerts, correlating events, and distinguishing false positives from genuine threats. Incident Response: Responding to ransomware incidents, compromised accounts, lateral movement, and data exfiltration. Threat Hunting: Identifying stealthy attacker activity through Windows Event Logs, Sysmon, network traffic, and other telemetry. Enterprise Detection Engineering: Developing and validating SIEM detection rules and investigating endpoint alerts. Active Directory Defense: Detecting suspicious authentication, privilege escalation, persistence, and other signs of compromise. Cloud Security: Investigating suspicious activity in cloud audit logs and responding to identity-related incidents. The Pro Labs format could provide a complete enterprise environment with multiple interconnected systems, while Mini Pro Labs could focus on individual incidents and specific defensive skills. Progression could be based on investigation quality, evidence collection, attack reconstruction, detection coverage, and the effectiveness of remediation recommendations. I believe this addition would benefit aspiring SOC analysts, blue team engineers, incident responders, and experienced security professionals who want to practice defending realistic environments. It could also complement HTB's existing offensive labs by allowing users to understand both how attacks happen and how to detect and stop them. Thank you for considering this suggestion. I would love to see dedicated defensive Pro Labs become part of the HTB ecosystem. Best regards, A member of the Hack The Box community
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Pro Lab Activity Should Count Toward Weekly Steaks
Feature Request: Allow Pro Lab Progress to Count Toward XP Streaks Summary I’d like to suggest that meaningful progress in Pro Labs should count toward XP streaks, either through XP itself or through a separate mechanism that recognizes Pro Lab activity as a valid training day. The Problem Pro Labs are some of the most substantial and time-intensive training environments available on HTB. They require sustained effort, often over many hours or days, and are designed to develop skills through realistic, interconnected environments rather than isolated challenges. However, Pro Lab activity currently does not contribute to XP. This creates an unfortunate conflict with the XP streak system. If I spend several hours working through a Pro Lab, I may make significant progress and learn considerably more than I would from completing a small standalone XP-earning task. Yet, because that Pro Lab activity doesn't generate XP, I can still lose my XP streak unless I stop what I'm doing and complete something else that awards XP. In other words, the current system can create an incentive to interrupt meaningful training in order to perform a smaller activity solely for the purpose of maintaining a streak. That seems counterproductive. Why This Matters The purpose of an XP streak, presumably, is to encourage consistent engagement with HTB and continued learning. Pro Lab work is clearly consistent engagement and learning. The current implementation therefore creates a disconnect between the behavior the streak is intended to encourage and the behavior it actually measures. For example: «A user spends six hours actively working through a Pro Lab, compromises several systems, discovers new attack paths, and makes substantial progress — but receives no XP that day and risks losing their streak.» That same user could instead spend a few minutes completing an XP-earning activity and preserve the streak. The latter behavior shouldn't be more strongly incentivized by the platform. Possible Solutions I don't think Pro Labs necessarily need to award XP at the same rate as individual Machines or Challenges. There are several ways this could be addressed: Award XP based on Pro Lab milestones - Give XP for meaningful objectives or milestones within a Pro Lab. - Larger bonuses could be awarded at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% completion. Count meaningful Pro Lab activity toward an XP streak - A user who makes meaningful progress in a Pro Lab that day could have their streak preserved even without earning conventional XP. Introduce a "Training Day" mechanism - Completing a qualifying Pro Lab activity could count as a training day without necessarily adding a large amount of XP. Award a small amount of XP for daily Pro Lab progress - This could be intentionally modest so that Pro Labs don't become an XP-mining strategy while still recognizing the user's activity. Of these, I think milestone-based XP or a Pro Lab activity/streak credit would provide the best balance. The Principle The key point isn't that Pro Labs should provide "free XP." It's that the streak system should recognize meaningful learning activity regardless of which HTB content type the user chooses. Pro Labs arguably represent some of the deepest and most sustained engagement a user can have with the platform. It seems counterintuitive for the streak system to treat several hours of that activity as equivalent to zero activity. I'd encourage HTB to consider whether the current XP/streak design unintentionally creates an incentive to leave Pro Labs and complete unrelated content simply to keep a streak alive. A system that recognizes Pro Lab progress would better align the XP streak with its apparent goal: encouraging users to keep learning and engaging with HTB consistently.
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Features