What Is It?
The Playground
What: Private network of servers, appliances and network devices that is hosted in various locations.
Who: It's operated and maintained for our members, by our members.
Where: Various member locations who decide to host a node of systems.
Why: Gain real world experience in an active environment where junior admins can experiment with enterprise level applications and services and advanced admins have a real world environment to protect. It is also used for ethical hacking challenges. This is what keeps things legal. Hacking on other networks we do not exclusively own and operate that is not isolated and protected against honest mistakes is not permitted and grounds for immediate dismissal of the group.
How: 98% of the software and services we use is free and open source which is also the same environment in the enterprise businesses and data centers. The remaining 2% we've either purchased with our group funds (donations) or have written permission.
When: Getting a VPN account is only possible for those who have 20,000 points or more within our points system. This could equate to logging in to our website 20 days in a row or replying to 20 posts in our forums. We do this to weed out people that really don't have an interest in what we do. Occasionally we get the odd person who registers on our site and asks if we can hack their bank account to pay off their credit card. (heavy sigh)
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