As I mentioned, this court 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 protesters 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, not to create a lab.
You just need a number of computers with different operating systems and you'll need a number of networks.
If your testing network attacks and if your 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, cause
this computer might be running Windows or OSX 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 going to have a high crime commission, this is going to be the machine
that we will use in order to hack into other machines.
We're going to install Linux on it and we'll talk about what that is later on.
And we're going to have to target machines.
These are machines that we're going to try to hack into and practice hacking against.
One of them is going to be running windows and the other one is going to be running an operating system
called Mehta's Floatable.
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 are not going to lose any
functionality.
Second, all the machines are going to be isolated.
So as we go through the course, we're going to 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 of 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 going to 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 daily 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 Caleigh 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 going to 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, Mac OS.
As we go through the course, I will also show you in details how to install these operating systems
as virtual machines within VMware.