Instructor: As I mentioned,
this course is going to be highly practical.
Therefore you will need a lab,
a place where you can practice and experiment
with the things that you're going to learn in the course.
Not only that,
but having a lab is essential for hackers or pen testers
because let's say you discovered a new attack
or you want to experiment with a new attack
or you learn something new online, and you want to test it.
Then the perfect place for you to test this
and practice hacking is a hacking or a testing lab.
Now to create a lab,
you just need the number of computers with different
operating systems and you will need a number of networks
if you're testing network attacks.
And if you're testing website attacks,
then you will need to install websites on these computers.
Or you can do all of this inside your computer,
inside one machine and install everything else
as virtual machines.
And this is what we're going to do.
So let's say you have your computer right here.
This is your main computer that you use every day
to check your emails or even to watch this course,
this computer might be running Windows or OS X or Linux,
it doesn't really matter, it can run any operating system.
You can keep all the programs that you love and like,
and install a virtualization software such as virtual box,
or VMware, a virtualization software,
allow us to create a number of virtual computers
inside your main computer.
So we can have three or four or five or 10 computers
all installed inside your main operating system,
inside your main computer.
The really cool thing about this is you will not need
a number of computers.
You can do everything inside a single computer.
So what we're going to do
is we're gonna have a hacking machine.
This is going to be the machine that we will use
in order to hack into other machines.
We're going to install Kali Linux on it
and we'll talk about what that is later on.
And we're going to have two target machines,
these are machines that we're gonna try to hack into
and practice hacking against.
One of them is gonna be running Windows
and the other one is going to be running an operating system
called Metasploitable
and we will talk about that once we get to it.
Now it is very important to understand
that you will not lose any functionality
when you install an operating system as a virtual machine,
you can use that machine exactly
as if it's a real physical machine.
So the really cool thing about using virtual machines,
first of all, you're not gonna lose any functionality.
Second, all the machines are going to be isolated.
So as we go through the course,
we're gonna be trying to hack into these machines
and we might actually break one of them, but that's fine.
It will not affect your host machine.
You will be able to easily fix this and go back
to a snapshot of when the machine was working
without affecting your main computer.
The other cool thing is that you'll be able to have a number
of different versions of each these machines
and you'll be able to change the configuration easily,
change the network settings,
or switch between different states of these machines
and so on.
So by using virtualization,
you will not lose any functionality,
but you will gain so many cool features.
And the main thing to keep in mind is your host machine,
your main computer will never be affected.
It's completely isolated.
And if we break any of these machines,
nothing will happen to your precious computer
that you use every day.
And this way you can always use your host machine
for daily use, for checking emails, watching the videos,
doing whatever you do normally,
and then use your virtual machines for hacking
and practicing the attacks.
And this is what we're gonna be doing in this course.
So right here,
I have a Windows computer
that does not contain any hacking tools.
So I can't really use it for hacking,
but I have a virtualization software called VMware
installed on it.
And this software allows me to run multiple
operating systems as virtual machines
within this host computer.
So I can use the host computer for my data use
and then use the virtual machines
for whatever use I want for testing or for hacking.
So if I zoom in here on the left,
you can see that I have a Kali Linux installed.
This is an operating system that we will use for hacking.
You can see I have another windows computer.
You can see that I have Linux.
All of it installed as virtual machines,
and then we're gonna be using these
as we go through the course for hacking
or for testing without affecting
our main host operating system, this windows computer.
Now don't worry about any of this,
in the next lectures I will show you in details
how to install this virtualization software, VMware,
on all of the major operating systems, on Windows,
Linux or Apple macOS.
As we go through the course,
I will also show you in details
how to install these operating systems
as virtual machines within VMware.