Building Your Own Hacking Lab
Practice makes perfect. To put your hacking skills to test, you can either check out some great websites for it (Links for CTFs, Labs, WarGames) or you can roll up your sleeves and build your own cybersecurity lab. Here’s how.
1. Installing a Virtual Machine (VM) and a Hypervisor
A virtual machine (VM) is an emulation of a computer system. A hypervisor or virtual machine monitor is computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. As a first step, you need to install a Virtual Machine. There are many reasons to use a VM such as for better hardware performance, to lower the cost and to separate your main OS system from your lab for security reasons, etc.
Download VirtualBox™ — Oracle
Download VMware™ Workstation Player — Fusion
Download Hyper-V™ Server 2008 R2 — Microsoft
2. Installing Kali Linux
Kali Linux is a Debian-derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing. There are hundreds of tools as a part of Kali that are geared towards various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Computer Forensics, and Reverse Engineering.
You can register for an official Kali Linux Training for free if you need to know about Kali.
3. Firewall
You will also need to learn about firewalls. pfSense is a good place to begin.
4. Installing Vulnerable Machines
You established a secure environment. You were equipped with the tools. Now you need a target to attack. Here are some for you.
Hacking Metasploitable 3 — (YouTube Playlist)
Happy Hacking!
