What Dante teaches
Dante is the best starting Pro Lab. It rewards a solid, repeatable methodology over any single trick.
Skills you need
- Enumeration discipline — scanning, service discovery, and note-taking across many hosts
- Web exploitation — the common vuln classes as an entry point
- Pivoting — tunnelling and proxying to reach segmented subnets
- Privilege escalation — both Linux and Windows fundamentals
- Credential reuse — recognising when loot on one host unlocks another
How to prepare
Work retired HTB boxes on the OSCP-like list first, get comfortable with a pivoting tool, and keep a clean methodology checklist.