[chmod]

Hello all, today I'm going to show you how to set up a pen testing lab.

Why do I need a lab

A pentest lab is a set of target machines owned by you to practice your skills and test out new methods.

Because the machines are owned by you, whatever you do is legal and you can hack away at your hearts content without the fear of going to jail.

There are several methods of setting up a lab the first is buying a load of computers and setting them up with different OS'- expensive and takes up a lot of space.

You could use 2 machines one attacker machine and the other a multi boot system with a load of OS' loaded onto it- that's fine but you can only attack one machine at a time and must close down and reboot to attack another machine.

or you could use virtual machines meaning all the OS' and attacker machine victim machine can be loaded onto one machine with several running at the same time.- system requirements are fairly high but this is the method I will be using in this tutorial.

What is a virtual machine

Virtual machines are a piece of software that allow you to emulate another computer form within your own OS' meaning you can have several running at once depending on hardware and are perfect for pen testing labs, testing out new OS' without having to remove your old one.

let's get started

You will need several things to complete this tutorial first is a computer with fairly decent specs you will ideally want at least 2.5GHZ processor 4GB RAM and as much HDD space as you can get.

You will also need a VM program I will be using VMware for this tutorial.

ISO's I will be installing windows XP SP1,but other good ones include

• metasploitable Linux
  
• windows 2000- old but good practice never the less
  
• windows 2000 server- As above
  

Backtrack Linux will be our attacking machine and will also need to be installed there are lots of tutorials for that out there so I won't be going over that.

right then start up VMware workstation and you will be greeted by a screen that looks like this



next click on "create a virtual machine" to bring up the menu and choose typical(reccomended)



Then chose "installer disk_image file (ISO)" and browse to the location of your windows XP iso



hit next again and you will be shown the following options enter your name and licence key, password (recommended) and hit next. you can also select the automatic log on if you wish, but its not required.



You will now be greeted with a confirmation of the machine name and where the machine will be saved you can change this if you like



Next we start to enter the settings for our new Virtual machine choose the maximum disk size and how it will be stored I'll leave this up to you as it largely depends on disk size but leave enough to install software onto it in the future, then choose "save virtual disk as a single file" and hit next



Which leads us onto the confirmation screen check the settings and hit finish and power on the vm and it will start to install.

[Nailo]

dude this is AWESOME! MAX!!

[chmod]

No problem I will be expanding on this and doing some metasploit tutorials and such in the near future when I get some time

[bluesmoke]

i have already have this Lab ... Thanks