The SANS Holiday Hack Challenges (HHC) present real-world examples of skills and techniques used in IT security. The competition runs each year in December and January, but the authors at CounterHack (https://www.counterhack.com/) keep the challenges running for several years so that we may use them for training.
The topics vary from simple Linux skills to complicated attacks against the infrastructure provided by the CounterHack ranges. The H2 Matrix (https://www.counterhack.com/h2matrix) lists the IT security fields and techniques involved, the difficulty of the challenges, and where to find them for the 2015 through 2019 challenges.
Each folder in this repository contains short documents that lead students though HHC challenges. Each document gives the student the basics they need to progress through that stage of the challenge, and then asks questions that require the students to solve that stage. The next document begins with the answers to the previous stage, and then moves on to the next part of the challenge. You can give all the documents to the students at once, and trust that they will honestly attempt to answer the questions in one document before reading the solutions in the next document. Or, you can hand the documents out one at a time and make the students show you they made at least some progress on their own before you give them the next document.
These challenges are fun and exciting labs for home and classroom work. They are not good as exams, however; the solutions to all the HHCs are available on the web.
Alas, I only started "lessonizing" the HHCs in 2017. However, excellent writeups are available for earlier challenges at https://www.holidayhackchallenge.com/past-challenges/.