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Labs

Respond to a Website Defacement

In this lab, you’ll practice responding to a website defacement. When you’re finished, you’ll have responded to a website defacement, employed digital forensic analysis to assess the situation, restored the website from a backup, and secured the web server from further exploitation.

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Lab Info
Rating
(38)
Level
Beginner
Last updated
Aug 05, 2025
Duration
1h 25m

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Table of Contents
  1. Challenge

    Getting Started in the Lab Environment

    Here are the initial instructions and explanation of the lab environment. Read this while your environment is busy creating itself from nothing. Yes, this violates physics; we know. How fun!

  2. Challenge

    Triage and Collect Artifacts Post Incident

    In this challenge, you’ll confirm the incident, find and collect evidence in artifact bundles, and simulate sending these artifacts to an external location.

  3. Challenge

    Conduct Forensic Analysis to Determine Root Cause

    In this challenge, you will examine log files and system data, conducting digital forensic analysis to find the root cause of the website defacement.

  4. Challenge

    Recover the Systems That Were Affected to Normal Working Status

    In this challenge, you will recover the system to normal working status by patching the exploited vulnerability, and restoring a backup that was taken before the website defacement.

  5. Challenge

    The Last Challenge

    Welcome to the final challenge! This is your last chance to experiment in the environment. Clicking Finish Lab will end this little world that flittered into existence just for you.

About the author

Wes is an Architect and Engineer specializing in public cloud systems and web scale SaaS Operations. He designs, builds, and manages applications and systems that enable highly-available infrastructure, continuous delivery pipelines, and rapid releases in large, polyglot microservice ecosystems. Wes uses a variety of languages, frameworks, and tooling to build applications, define Infrastructure as Code, drive automation, and eliminate toil. He is vocal in the tech community by participating in mentorship, workshops and conferences, and is a Pluralsight Author. Wes is an advocate for Software Craft and the CALMS of DevOps; Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing.

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