-: Now to practice some of the attacks
that we're going to learn in the future lectures,
you need to have a target machine,
or a victim machine.
So this is a computer that you're going to target
and try to hack,
and test the attacks that we're going to learn against.
So you can do this against any machine,
but I highly recommend installing target machines
as virtual machines.
This is great because it won't break
a real computer for you,
if you actually break something.
It's also very easy to fix.
Even if you have a computer that you don't care about,
it's very easy to fix virtual machines,
you can just remove it and re-install it,
or store a snapshot and go back to it.
Now, as we all know,
Windows is a very common operating system.
It's used by a lot of people.
So in this lecture,
I'm going to show you how to install Windows 10
as a virtual machine,
so that we can test some of the attacks
that we're going to learn in the future, against it.
So we'll target this machine
when we want to test attacks against Windows,
or a target user that uses Windows.
Now, Microsoft has released ready virtual images
for people to test Windows.
So we can actually download a virtual image of Windows
for free from Microsoft.
I'm going to include the download links
in the resources of this lecture,
but I have the page opened here.
So the first thing you want to do
is select the type of virtual machine
that you want to download.
As I said, we want to download Windows 10.
So we're selecting MSEdge on Windows 10.
Next we need to choose the virtualization platform.
And you know, we're using VMware.
That's why we're selecting VMware,
but you have other options
if you're using other virtualization software.
Once you select VMware,
you're going to see a download button in here,
clicking that will download a ZIP archive
that contains the virtual image for Windows 10.
Now I've already done that,
and I already have it in here in my downloads.
As you can see, we have it here,
MSEdge Windows 10 VMware.
And as you can see from the icon,
this is a ZIP archive.
Therefore, in order to use the contents inside it,
we have to uncompress this file.
So to do that on Windows,
simply, we're going to have to double click it,
copy the content,
go back one directory and paste it here.
We're going to give it some time to uncompress the content.
On Mac you can do the same.
Simply double clicking it will uncompress the content.
And on Linux you'll have to right click,
and click on extract here.
Now I'm doing these steps from a Windows host computer,
but you should be able to follow them
on Apple macOS and Linux
because we are essentially
using the same virtualization software,
which is VMware.
Once this is done,
we're going to have another directory in here
with the contents of the virtual Windows image.
To import this to VMware,
we're going to first of all, run VMware.
We're going to click on "Open Virtual Machine"
or go to player, file, open.
We're going to navigate to the location
where we have this file in here.
So it's going to be in my downloads,
and MSEdge Windows 10 VMware,
and we're going to select
the only file that we can actually select from the list.
We're going to click on open,
and we can set the name of the machine in here.
So for example, I can set it to "Windows 10."
You can change the path where it's going to be stored,
but we're going to keep that the same.
And we're going to click on "Import" to import it.
You're going to have to give it a bit of time
to import this machine into VMware.
And perfect.
As you can see now, it's imported in here.
And as usual, we can simply start it
by clicking on the green play button.
But before doing that,
I actually want to modify the amount of memory it has.
So we're going to right click and go to settings.
And as you can see, by default,
it's set to have four gigabytes of memory.
I think that's a little bit too much.
It doesn't need that much.
So we're going to set that to two
by dragging the slider down to two.
We're going to click on "Okay."
And start it by clicking on the green play button.
And perfect.
As you can see now, the machine started.
We're going to click inside,
and click again to log in.
The default password in here is "Passw0rd!"
I'm going to hit enter.
And here we go, we have a fully working
virtual Windows 10 computer
installed inside our main machine.
And we did that so we can test attacks
against this virtual machine
without effecting our host computer.
Now we can go in full screen by clicking here,
and going into full screen.
The screen should automatically resize,
if it doesn't, right click "Display Settings,"
and you can set it to the right resolution for your screen.
I'm going to set it to 3840 x 2160
because I have a 4K screen.
You can see that the icons are actually really small
because I have such a high resolution screen.
In your case,
you'll only face this issue if you have a 4K screen.
So you'll also probably need
to set the scaling in here to 200.
And as you can see now,
the icon size has changed to the normal size.
Now, if you face any other issues,
check out the featured questions,
and if you don't find an answer,
feel free to ask us,
and we will respond to you within a maximum of 15 hours.