Security / Research
Authorised Pen-Test Range
A closed, self-owned range for vulnerability research and defensive learning — fully isolated, fully authorised, never pointed outward.
Started 2024-09-15 / Updated 2025-07-05
Security understanding does not come from reading advisories. It comes from watching an attack path work and then closing it.
Everything here runs on hardware I own, against targets I built, on a network segment with no route to anything else. That constraint is the point.
Rules of engagement
The rules are simple and non-negotiable, and they are what make the research legitimate.
- Only self-owned, intentionally vulnerable targets.
- No route from the range to the internet or to any other zone.
- Findings stay in the lab; nothing is tested against third-party systems.
- Every session starts from a snapshot and ends with a rollback.
What the range is for
Understanding detection, not exploitation. The interesting half of every exercise is what the logs, the firewall and the host telemetry did — or failed to — record while the attack ran.
Carry-over into real work
It changed how I read marketing and data infrastructure. Tag containers, tracking endpoints and third-party scripts are attack surface, and now I look at them that way.
Setup
- Domain
- Security
- Isolation
- Air-gapped segment, no egress
- Authorisation
- Self-owned targets only
- Focus
- Detection and defence
Tags
Stack
- Isolated VLAN
- Hypervisor snapshots
- Vulnerable target images
- Host and network logging
Domain
All Security experimentsAuthorised, ethical and controlled
All cybersecurity and penetration-testing activity is performed in authorised, ethical and controlled lab environments, on systems I own or have explicit written permission to test.
Want the detail behind this experiment?
If this overlaps with something you're building, I'm happy to share what worked and what didn't.