Lion Cipher Lab
Build and defend a monitored home-lab network (the cyber engineering capstone)
- Cyber / Security Engineer
- Advanced
- ~4–6 hours
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
Every earlier cybereng lab builds ONE piece in isolation — a firewall, a hardened server, a SIEM agent. Real defensive engineering is never one piece. A firewall that segments nothing you can prove, a hardened server nobody is watching, or a SIEM that never sees the server behind the firewall are each a false sense of security. The entire craft at this level is integration: making the parts work as a system, and then demonstrating that the system actually behaves — that the segments are isolated, that the server is locked down, and that when something happens on that server, your monitoring…
What you'll learn
- Integrating a firewall, a hardened server, and a SIEM into one defensible system
- Designing and enforcing a default-deny inter-segment ruleset
- Proving segmentation works instead of assuming it (positive and negative tests)
- Routing SIEM agent traffic across segments without breaking isolation
- Verifying an event on a host surfaces in centralized monitoring end to end
- Writing a professional build/runbook a colleague can operate from
Steps in this lab
- The mission: integrate and prove, don't just build
- Draw the network before you touch it
- Set your recovery model FIRST — the one real risk here
- Stand up the segmented firewall with a default-deny posture
- Place and confirm the hardened server in the SERVERS segment
- Deploy centralized monitoring and cross the segment boundary
- PROVE the segmentation — positive AND negative tests
- PROVE the whole system: an event on the server surfaces in monitoring
- Write the build/runbook — the deliverable
- Tear down or snapshot — leave it clean