@game0ver said:
Three reasons I can think of are the following:
If the machines were public then everyone, even non-htb members would be able to access them and even abuse them (e.g. DOS etc…)
If we didn’t use a vpn-client then it would be much more difficult (e.g. port forwarding demanded etc…) to handle the connection of a reverse shell or a metasploit-exploit.
In case anyone didn’t use a VPN or a proxy, then his real IP address would probably (through the exploit used) be exposed publicly to the other members that would be on the target machine the same time.
Yeah, I had an idea where in which you could segregate many copies of the box on one system, but it makes it way more difficult.
Thank you for your feedback. Thats the answer I was looking for.