HTB Machines

HTB Machines are realistic, hands-on challenges designed to help security enthusiasts, ethical hackers, and penetration testers develop their offensive security skills. These machines simulate real-world environments with various vulnerabilities that need to be enumerated, exploited and escalated to achieve full system compromise.

HTB machines come in different forms and can be categorized based on the following parameters:

• Difficulty: Ranging from beginner-friendly to highly advanced as follows:

  • Easy: Focuses on basic enumeration, common misconfigurations, and well-known vulnerabilities

  • Medium: Introduces slightly more advanced techniques such as chained exploits, web exploitation, and privilege escalation requiring deeper enumeration

  • Hard: Demands strong methodology, custom exploits, and bypassing security mechanisms like firewalls and EDR solutions

  • Insane: Designed for experienced penetration testers, often requiring exploit modification, deep technical knowledge, and custom payload development

• OS-Specific Machines: Focus on either Windows or Linux, helping users specialize in platform-specific attacks.

• State: Determine their availability, accessibility, and whether they contribute to your ranking and points. The main states are:

  • Active: Machines that are currently available for hacking and contribute to your ranking and points when completed. Every few weeks, old active machines are retired to make space for new ones

  • Retired: Machines that have been removed from the active rotation and no longer contribute to ranking or points. Can only be accessed by HTB VIP members, and official walkthroughs become available

  • Seasonal: Special machines that are released every week, and let you earn ranking points. They only give this kind of points a week after its release and then pass to be active machines

• Tags: Help to know the involved attack vectors, technologies, and skills a machine encompasses