Part of the Assume-Breach series — five hands-on security labs, two companion books, and a game. Browse them all at the series hub.

▶ Start here: https://ethicalhacking.borck.education/ — or run ./start.sh.

Using an AI assistant? Make it a thinking partner, not an autopilot — and never run a command you can't explain. The series guide Learning with AI shows how, including how to repeat each lab until you don't need the assistant at all.

A hands-on, self-paced ethical hacking lab series — 12 Docker-based labs you can run anywhere. Each lab lives in its own folder with a Docker Compose setup, a lab guide, and supporting resources.

All labs share a base Kali image, ghcr.io/michael-borck/ethical-base, built from base.Dockerfile with core tools (nmap, hydra, john, hashcat, wireshark, sqlmap, gobuster, …). A GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/build-base.yml) builds and publishes it to GHCR on every change, so labs just pull it.

• Default (online): docker compose up -d pulls the prebuilt image — no local build step.
• Fallback (offline, or to customise the tools): make build-base builds base.Dockerfile locally and tags it with the same name, so docker compose up uses your local copy automatically.

After the first workflow run, set the package to Public at github.com/users/michael-borck/packages/container/ethical-base/settings so anyone can pull without authenticating.

1. Clone & enter a week:

   git clone https://github.com/michael-borck/ethical-hacking-docker-labs.git
   cd ethical-hacking-docker-labs/labs/week6

2. Start the lab: docker compose up -d — the base image and all target services pull automatically. (First run takes a few minutes to pull.)

3. Enter the attacker shell: docker exec -it <container> bash — each week's README names its attacker container (e.g. password-cracking-lab).

4. Stop / clean up: from the week folder, docker compose down; or make stop-all from the repo root.

Repo-root convenience targets: make run-weekN (start week N), make status (list all weeks), make pull-base (refresh the base image), make build-base (build the base locally).

All 12 weeks are implemented. Week 2 is docs-only (ethics & law); weeks 1 and 3–12 are hands-on Docker labs. Run make status from the repo root to see which weeks are ready and their start commands. Each hands-on lab ships a README.md, a LAB-GUIDE.md, and any seed files its services need.

• base.Dockerfile: Shared Kali base image source.
• .github/workflows/build-base.yml: CI that builds and publishes the base image to GHCR.
• labs/weekN/: Per-week setups (compose, README, worksheet, seed files).
• data/: Shared resources (e.g. packet captures for the traffic-analysis lab).
• Makefile: Orchestration (build/pull base, run/stop weeks, status).
• .gitignore, LICENSE: Housekeeping.

Quickstart:

git clone https://github.com/michael-borck/ethical-hacking-docker-labs.git
cd ethical-hacking-docker-labs/labs/week6
docker compose up -d        # pulls the base image + targets
docker exec -it password-cracking-lab bash

Run in an isolated environment. You only need Docker installed — no local build step.

Note: Educational only. Follow ethics; no real-world testing without permission.

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