Cover6 Community

The lab isn't done until there's a domain. In Part 3 of the Home Lab Setup
series, we add Active Directory — the foundation of most enterprise Windows environments and the target of most enterprise attacks. This is the build that makes everything that comes next possible.

🎯 What We'll Cover
- Standing up a Windows Server VM and promoting it to a domain controller
- Adding a Windows workstation to the domain — your first functional AD environment
- Getting Nessus Essentials running inside the lab
- Basic log visibility — where to look when something happens on your network
- What a complete, assessment-ready home lab looks like before the next series

You've got your lab running. Now let's use it. In this session, we pick up where the home lab series left off — you've got your VMs, your network is segmented, and tonight we're scanning.

🎯 What We'll Cover
- Nmap fundamentals — discovery, version detection, OS fingerprinting
- Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) — 600+ scripts, the ones you actually use
- SMB enumeration with enum4linux and crackmapexec
- Banner grabbing with netcat and curl
- Documenting your attack surface before you exploit anything

🔍 Odapeeka Connection: Before the ransomware hit Odapeeka State University, the attacker spent hours doing exactly this. We'll walk through what that scan looked like — and what Security Onion caught (and missed). This session is a natural on-ramp to Cover6: First Watch.

In this session, we move from scanning to understanding what we found. We'll walk through vulnerability identification and analysis — how to use tools like Nessus, OpenVAS, and Nikto to surface weaknesses, how to read CVEs and CVSS scores, and how to prioritize what matters.

This is where the data starts to mean something.

📋 What We'll Cover
- Vulnerability scanning tools: Nessus Essentials, OpenVAS, Nikto basics
- Reading CVEs and CVSS scores — what the numbers actually mean
- Common vulnerability categories: misconfigurations, unpatched services, default credentials
- Prioritizing findings: what to fix first and why
- Blue team view: how defenders use the same data to harden systems

This is where theory meets practice. Exploitation is turning a documented vulnerability into actual access. We do this in the lab — on systems you own — and we document everything. Written authorization before you touch anything external. Always.

📋 What We'll Cover
- Metasploit framework — how it's organized, how to think in modules
- Module → Payload → Session — the three components of every exploit
- Bind vs. reverse shells — when each matters
- Documenting exploitation evidence for a real report