Setting Up A Virtual Machine Hacking Lab

Virtual Machines form the backbone of AWS and many other services in the industry, but that is not the point of this article. The point of this article is to help you set up a method for you to play around with hacking into things. You will need enough ram to run 2 machines at once if you're gonna do this. Without further ado, let's get started.

Installing Virtualbox and Getting Your Machines

Virtualbox is the software we'll be doing this with. It can be downloaded here. Run the program and install Virtualbox.

We'll need a pre-built virtual machine for both an attacker and a defender. You have options for both these things.

Some prominent hacking distributions of Linux that you can use for your hacking lab are:

• Kali
• Parrot Security
• Blackarch

For systems to attack, the best one is probably Metasploitable, because its preloaded with vulnerabilities, but you can always configure your own system to be vulnerable and try to break into it. A good resource if you do this would be STIGs, which are step by step guides of how to harden a system with default settings.

Setting Up A Network

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