Building a virtual penetration testing lab allows you to create an environment that is safe for you
to hone your skills in.
Scale the environment to add a new vulnerable systems and even remove all the legacy systems that you
may no longer need and even create a virtual networks to pilot your attacks from one network to another.
The concept of creating your very own virtualized penetration testing lab allows you to maximize resources
on your existing computer without the need to purchase an online lab time from various service providers
or even buy an additional computers and services.
So you don't need to buy the these like kind of technologies.
You can just use the virtualization technologies.
So overall, you will be saving a lot of money as opposed to buying physical computers and networking
equipment such as switches and routers.
So as a cyber security trainer and professional, I have noticed that many people who are beginning
their journeys within the field of information technology usually think that a physical lab infrastructure
is needed based on their field of study.
To some extent this is true, but as a technology advance, many downsides are associated with a building,
a physical lab to practice your skills.
There are like three main downsides and disadvantages of this.
The physical space is required to store many servers and networking appliances that are needed.
There are also power consumption per device will result in overall higher rate of financial expenditure
and the cost of building or processing.
Each physical device is high, whether it's a network appliance or a server or just a computer.
So these are just some of the concerns many students and aspiring IT professionals experience.
In many cases, a beginner usually has a single computer such as a desktop or a laptop computer.
So being able to use the virtualization technologies that have emerged as a response to these downsides
has opened a multitude of tools in the field of it.
So this has enabled many people and organizations to optimize and manage their hardware resources more
efficiently in the world of virtualization.
A Hypervisor is a special application that allows a user to virtualize the hardware resources on their
systems so that they can be shared with another operating systems or an application.
So this allows you to install more than one operating system on top of your existing computer's operating
system.
So imagine that you are running Microsoft Windows 10 as your main operating system, but you wish to
run Linux at the same time on the same computer.
You can achieve this by using hypervisor.
So hence we are going to use virtualization to ensure we can build a cost effective penetration testing
lab environment.
In this course, we are going to need several applications and frameworks to install our virtual penetration
testing lab.
So firstly, we're going to need the hypervisor.
This hypervisor is required for creating virtual machines.
We will be using the VMware player, but you can also use the Oracle VM VirtualBox.
So we're going to need internet access.
This is required for downloading additional applications.
Internet access will be provided to our attacker systems while ensuring all our systems remain virtually
isolated.
We will need a machine, a penetration testing machine, so the system will be attacker system and we
will be using Kali Linux.
We will need vulnerable client systems.
So this will be our target and victim systems for security testing.
The vulnerable systems will include Metasploitable two and Metasploitable three, both Windows and Linux
versions of course.
So traditional systems may be added as you progress through this course.
We will also lastly, we will need the vulnerable web applications.
So these are the systems that contain vulnerable web applications to help you understand the security
weaknesses in web applications.
So these will be open Web Application Security Project, OWASP and the OWASP Broken Web Application
PWA.
Furthermore, this diagram is our network penetration testing lab topology.
Let's get started.
And so I dropped and, uh, created this topology to show you how our networking IP addresses is contained
and how which virtual machine has the following IP addresses.
Here.
We're going to need the main virtual machine.
Um, so this is going to be a.
Kali Linux.
Increase the font.
So and in this SQL Linux disconnect, this will call this call Linux will connect to our.
A Windows machine.
Windows.
In this machine or like just a computer computer.
Here.
This is our main machine here.
Uh, in this case, it's going to be my laptop.
Mean machine.
And here and between this here, actually, we're going to need.
Virtual machine.
This is our VMware.
We're going to have installed VMware here and in this VMware player, virtual machine player, we're
going to use Kali Linux.
We will also need, uh, the.
Read Team Lab.
This is going to be our red team.
Lab lab.
And we will need.
Uh.
Okay.
This is a colinux.
We will also need the Metasploitable.
And this is our Metasploitable.
The wall systems.
And this main machine is going to connect to Internet.
But they are they're going to be isolated.
So don't worry about that.
And here these are going to be connect to the Internet and the Internet.
So this is our like our basic diagram for creating our virtual machines.
Now that you have an idea of the lab topology as well as the systems and technologies which we are going
to be working with throughout this course.
Let's get started by setting up a hypervisor and virtual networks in next lecture.