The purpose of this thesis was to introduce an alternative solution to replace the penetration testing environment, Next Defence, in Turku University of Applied Sciences. The research portion of the thesis was dedicated to becoming familiar with different online platforms dedicated for penetration testing, mainly HacktheBox.

Summer of 2019 was spent on becoming familiar with the HacktheBox-environment by performing penetration testing against the various vulnerable servers on the platform and creating a detailed report that was approximately 200 pages on how to exploit the servers and a short description on the difficulty of each of the servers. A similar report was also compiled of the Next Defence-environment, the report included steps on how to exploit the servers and it totaled approximately 80 pages.

After the research portion of the thesis, the criteria of usability, maintenance, development and evaluation was used to compare HacktheBox-environment against the Turku University of Applied Sciences Next Defence-environment. After the comparison example servers were done from both the HacktheBox and Next Defence-environments from which comparison and conclusions could be made regarding the difficulties of the example servers and both strengths and weaknesses of both of the platforms.