Hello Friends Welcome back to the course in this video we are going to talk about setting up your own 1
malware testing lab. 2
So what are we really going to do here. 3
We are going to set up a separate virtual environment. 4
So a lot of times we only have one system at our disposal. 5
So having a separate work environment kind of creates different environments within the same box. 6
You have your own main operating system and you have a separate virtual environment where you can do 7
your malware analysis work. A separate guest OS to manage all the tools and samples at one place. 8
So again once you have a separate virtual environment ready you can have all your tools, all your malware 9
samples and everything located centrally and you don't really have to search for them here and there. 10
And if you have antivirus programs running on your main operating system it's not really going to 11
interfere with 12
Your malware lab. 13
The traffic that originates from your malware lab might get intercepted by the anti-virus running 14
on your host operating system. 15
But apart from that the files and other software and tools that are out there in your virtual machine 16
will not be impacted by any anti-virus that it running 17
in your host operating system. Any infection that happens in your virtual environment can easily be reverted 18
back to a clean state. 19
So what I mean by that is, let's say you have set up your virtual machine you have downloaded all the 20
tools then before you begin any analysis the first thing to do is take a snapshot of that virtual image 21
so that you have a clean state where you can always revert back just in case if your machine gets infected 22
and that is definitely going to happen when we are going to analyze malware by dynamically executing 23
them in different debuggers. 24
So what would be the lab requirements here. 25
So you'll have to download a Windows 7 or a Windows 10 ISO image. 26
There are a bunch of resources how you can do it. 27
You can even get the images downloaded directly from Microsoft's official website. Both these operating 28
systems would be ideal. 29
But if you want to use Windows XP I would highly discourage that because that is the support for that 30
operating system has now been stopped by Microsoft and it's very old. 31
So it will be ideal to start with either Windows 7 or Windows 10 ISO image. 32
You can download it from internet or from Microsoft's Web site and you can begin setting up your environment. 33
You would also need the Vmware which is licensed tool that 34
Will that help you set up your virtualization environment. 35
If you don't want to use VMware, you can also use Virtual Box which is free of cost and it can help 36
you in using your Windows 7 downloaded images and converting it into an actual virtual environment for 37
you. 38
So once you have the image and your virtualization software ready you can load the image and run the 39
iso's to set up your environment. 40
I want to leave this as an exercise for you and there are a lot of very good resources that are available 41
online that you can read and see how you can set up a Malware lab using your virtual environment. 42
I would recommend reading a blog written by Lanny Zelster which talks about how we can set up the malware 43
lab in just five simple steps. 44
So go ahead read these resources and try and setting up your lab. 45
This is not going to be very complicated. 46
It's a very simple step. 47
All you have to do is download the image, download the virtualization software, load those in the image 48
and you are all set to go. 49
So go ahead and perform all these steps and once you're ready let's get to the next video.