Lesson 2 of 2 in Earning Your Place
Labs, Exams, and the Credential
What the whole platform builds toward — and a credential anyone can verify without trusting us.
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You have now used almost everything. Three things remain, and they are what the whole platform builds toward: labs, exams, and the credential at the end.
Labs
A lab is a full challenge on its own page — a deliberately vulnerable target you attack for real. Where a lesson's challenge is a small exercise, a lab is the genuine article, and the flag you capture is unique to you.
Note
Deliberately vulnerable things never touch this site. Labs run on a separate, isolated origin with no account and no way to reach anything real — so attacking one is safe for you and for everyone else.
Why would each member's lab flag be different?
Exams
An exam is the serious gate. It is timed, it draws from a large question bank so no two papers are identical, and — unlike everything else here — it is deliberately not gamified. It decides a credential, and that should feel like it means something.
The credential
Pass an exam and you earn a credential: a cryptographically signed statement that you passed a specific paper, on a date, at a score. Anyone can verify its signature without trusting us at all — that is what makes it worth having.
Question+20 XP
What lets someone trust one of these credentials without trusting the platform?
Sign in to answer and earn XP.
That is the whole system. Read for free, practise in a real shell, earn XP for what you demonstrate, and — when you are ready — prove it with something nobody has to take on faith.
So where do I actually start?
The Learn page. Anonymity if you want to disappear, Linux if you want the ground under everything else, Web Application Security if you want to break something today. Pick one and go.
Tip
This course counts too. Finish it, take its quiz, and you have earned your first steps here already. Everything from now on works exactly like what you just did.