Is there such a thing?

[pg94]

Is there such a thing as an online hackers lab and virtual pen testing network?

[cooper]

Lab as in courses to help you see an exploitable situation result in a problem, yes, plenty.

Lab as in place where people research potential problems, yes, plenty, but these tend to be for-pay jobs where found problems are company capital in some sense (show to clients they're ahead of the game, extort non-clients, collect a bug bounty with the software creator, take your pick).

Labs as in a tight-knit community of researchers that work together to find problems, no, not really, maily due to the absence of the 'work together' part. It's more loose groups of people that either find problems, or use other people's exploits to take advantage of issues they found but couldn't find an external attack vector for.

Virtual pen tester network, not really. If you think you can get your machine pentested for free, just attach it to the internet and wait. You won't get a nice report about the issues found, though. Pen testing is laborious work and people almost always do this for profit. That profit is either an invoice with your name on it or some criminal act that involuntarily involved your machine.

[digininja]

Check out Joe Mccray http://strategicsec.com/ and the SecurityTube labs http://www.securitytube.net/

[Elk]

I assume you mean labs as in a set of systems you can practice hacking on?

www.hacking-lab.com provides online hacking challenges. These cover OWASP challenges (which are a bit old, but still provides the basics) and their own creations which are various.

Plus Hackyeaster is always fun :)

Other alternatives are www.smashthestack.org http://overthewire.org/wargames/ which are more wargames than labs.

You could also download vulnerable ISOs and run these in virtualbox and set up your own lab.

Edited June 17, 2014 by Elk