Based on our objectives, we’ll need a number of machines with varying operating systems as well as a few attack clients to perform the actual penetration testing. The next step in building our lab is to set up the guest virtual machines. This was done via a downloadable installer and installs very quickly using the default options. The next step of our build is to install the VMWare hypervisor. Again, this is not an open source platform, but the open source platforms mentioned previously would also serve well in this type of environment. This hardware is relatively inexpensive when purchased used and it has sufficient horsepower to fit the needs of this particular lab.įor our virtualization software, VMWare Workstation was chosen due to availability, ease of use, and compatibility with previously generated virtual machines. A gaming laptop (MSI Ghost Pro) with 16 GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7-4710HQ CPU was used to fit this need.

While a cloud-based server might suffice, it is important to keep safety in mind as well as have availability when Internet access is limited. In addition, mobility was an important factor as the lab needed to be able to move with the author.

Due to the type of work performed and the potential research needs within the platform, a robust piece of hardware would be ideal versus running the lab on a PC. Since our objective is to support a variety of systems, we’ll need to make sure that the architecture can support Windows as well as Linux and provide a solid test bed for a number of different applications.

We did not need to emulate any specific client’s architecture, so we have a pretty free hand on the technologies used. In this case, the objective of the lab is to be fully featured and support a variety of different target systems for testing. This, naturally, is a great example of how a penetration test lab can be designed and built to support a number of different penetration testing scenarios. Jeremy Faircloth, in Penetration Tester's Open Source Toolkit (Fourth Edition), 2017 Case Study: The Tools in Actionįor this case study, we’re going to go through the process that was used to build the penetration testing lab used for a majority of the exercises in this book.

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