How To Set Up A Lab For Ethical Hacking

Learning how to hack ethically takes practise. To reach a respectable skill level in this profession, one needs to practise and be patient. You can learn a lot by keeping a lab setup close at hand. In a lab, you can practise your abilities in a safe setting, minimising the risks associated with doing so on actual systems. 

Having a virtual lab will benefit you in a number of ways 

• The ability to practise whenever it is most convenient.
• You don’t need to expose your data to the risk of being lost due to malware infection.
• Additionally, by testing on a real website that you do not own, you are shielded from any potential legal issues.
• You have the ability to play around and experiment, which is generally not feasible with online laboratories.

Hardware and software tools are necessary for setting up the lab. Let’s first go over the hardware specifications.

1. Hardware Requirements:

• A desktop or laptop with as much RAM and processing capability as you can find.
• a sizable HDD or SSD to store your equipment and other crucial files.
• a host operating system for your PC. Depending on your preference, it could be Windows, Linux (of any family, any flavour), or Mac OS.
• Before beginning, make sure your guest OS has the most recent security updates installed.
• a WiFi adapter with monitor mode functionality. (Optional)

2. Software Requirements:

• Virtual Machine Player or Hypervisor: All of the guest operating systems, vulnerable virtual machines, and test servers will be hosted by the virtual machine player or hypervisor. There are numerous commercial and free hypervisor solutions offered by numerous companies. For instance, Oracle offers Oracle VirtualBox, VMware offers VMware Workstation, and Microsoft offers HyperV. Depending on your preferences and price range, you can pick any of them.
• Guest Operating Systems: Windows and Linux will both be available as unpatched guest operating systems. These will be set up to check for zero-day vulnerabilities and other issues for which patches and exploits have been made available.
• Vulnerable VMs: Virtual machines that are vulnerable have been specifically designed to be very vulnerable. The majority of VMs are used in hacking activities and are eventually made available online. Typically, these virtual machines (VMs) are CTFs with secret strings that must be discovered after compromising (pwning) the VM. Metasploitable, OWASP broken web applications, DVWA (Damn insecure Web Applications), BadStore, De-Ice, and Multidae are a few examples of well-known insecure VMs.

3. Essential Tools:

It is now time to get the tools necessary for pwning your favourite susceptible assets after you have identified and installed them. To begin, install these programmes on your computer.

• Metasploit Framework (MSF): The Metasploit programme, which has an open-source variant, is frequently used to take advantage of known vulnerabilities in software and hardware. The list of exploits is updated frequently with the most recent discoveries that have been made public. 
• WireShark:Although it is a tool used by network administrators, you may use it to expand your collection of hacking tools. This tool will assist you as a hacker (who must be ethical, of course) in network pentesting using the same fundamental feature of network monitoring: it can assist you in gathering private information such as plaintext passwords over unencrypted connections (http, telnet), analysing malware behaviour by identifying the endpoints it attempts to connect to, and more. 
• Nmap: It is the one tool that practically all penetration testers utilise. It is a port scanner with a selection of other tools, including network mapping (the name “nmap” stands for “network mapper”) and OS detection. By creating scripts in NSE (the nmap scripting environment), it can be automated. The target’s services and apps are listed using port scans. In some situations, these enumeration data can be highly helpful for pwning the target. 
• John The Ripper: It is a password cracking programme that is open-source, free, and very well-liked by penetration testers. It is offered on fifteen platforms because of its popularity. The tools’ original purpose was to decipher UNIX password hashes. The most recent stable release, which came out in May 2019, however, supports Windows NTLM, Kerberos, and thousands of other hashes.
• Burpsuite or OWASP ZAP:Both are excellent all-in-one tools for web application penetration testing. An prospective (ethical) hacker must become proficient at web application hacking because the majority of services are now offered online. All the tools you’ll need to hack (ethically) into a web application are included in these two toolkits.
• Kali Linux: This operating system was made largely with white hat hackers and penetration testers in mind. For practically every duty prior to, during, and following a penetration testing session, this OS provides a vast range of tools. It already includes all of the aforementioned utilities, so there is no need to manually install them.