Basic Security Home Lab - with Charles Judd

hey everybody Charles Judd here with Kevin Wallace training I get a lot of requests from cybersecurity students for lab equipment rundowns especially from cyber ops or maybe see why I say plus students so wanted to give you just a quick look at what I actually use myself and to me one of the best things about a security lab or a penetration testing lab a hacking lab whatever you choose to call that is that it's really easy and really inexpensive to set up these days what used to look like this can now look like this everything's much more compact and everything's much cheaper the ability to virtualize everything makes this even easier for us and also many of the tools have very low hardware requirements which allows us to run tools on older machines or maybe on portable platforms like a Raspberry Pi now before we look at my own setup let's talk about why a lab is important and charles kettering the head of general motors research had a really great quote that I think relates to this and he said there's a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it so you can know a lot and not really understand anything and for me that's certainly true if I really want to understand something I absolutely have to get my hands dirty and with networking and security that means having a place that I can practice and that I can test things out for myself which is exactly what having a home security lab provides me so why have a lab well simply to be better we want to make sure we're brushed up on our skills and also to see real-life applications for what we're reading about or hearing about sometimes it's really easy to hear or read about a topic and still have a disconnect about what that actually looks like in real-world environment second many of our security tools are very disruptive to production environments if we try to run those outside of a safe sandbox area that a lab provides well we can cause some major issues and unintended problems so you don't want to turn most of these tools loose in the wild so to speak you don't want to use those in a production environment you want a safe place that you can play around with those so let me give you just a quick look at my own setup just to give you an idea about how easy it is to set up a home security lab for a basic security lab you really only need three things you need some type of hardware which can be your daily production machine or it can even be an older laptop or an older desktop that you no longer use now obviously the more hardware resources you have in that machine the more tools you're gonna be able to run and the better they're going to run with virtualization the more processor cores the better I personally run everything on my macbook pro 2017 which has a dual core i7 and 16 gig of ram now I have no issues at all running multiple VMs on this machine if you get into more complex labs you might want to change to a quad core but I frequently run upwards of 6 to 8 VMs simultaneously with no problems at all so I'd say don't be afraid to do that on your machine even if you think you have resources that are too low I'd say 4 gig of ram is the absolute bare minimum for a basic lab and of course more is always better another thing you may want to consider is some sort of secondary hard drive or an external storage option these virtual machines provision a certain amount of your physical hard drive space for themselves and so that can start to add up fairly quickly when you have multiple VMs on there and of course I have an Ethernet adapter that I can use in addition to my wireless connection you also need some sort of virtualization software as a completely free option you can use a VirtualBox and VirtualBox is great I've used that a lot myself now for me I actually right now I'm using VMware although this is a paid software VMware does have a 30-day trial period before you purchase it if that's something that you want to check out now the biggest advantage for me to the paid VMware version is the snapshot feature once you get a virtual host setup you can take a snapshot of the running configuration so that if anything happens during your testing to corrupt that operating system you can simply restore that snapshot and return to a known good state it's a really awesome feature that I use a lot and finally you need some operate systems you'll need operating systems for your test hosts and you'll need a penetration testing tools which typically come in the form of a Linux distribution you can download Windows OS free trials through Microsoft or you can probably find some old install discs lying around at work or if you're like me you have a closet or a drawer full of those old things somewhere you don't have to have them activated trial versions will work just fine and there are a number of Linux and Ubuntu systems that can be used as well a must have penetration testing suite is called Kali Linux and you've most likely heard of that there are so so many tools bundled inside of Kali so if you get nothing else as a penetration testing tool you definitely want to get Kali Linux if this is your first time putting together a security lab you may want to start off with something small like this basic topology you can see that we have a central host running some sort of virtualization software for me that's VMware before you that may look like a VirtualBox and then we see that there are virtual machines running on that in a basic of beginner lab I would recommend running three machines Kali Linux Metasploit able to and some sort of Windows operating system now I've already mentioned that Kali Linux is a must-have tool and I would put Metasploit able to up there pretty close to a must-have tool as well and what Metasploit able is is it's a Linux virtual machine that has been made intentionally vulnerable so the vulnerabilities make it really easy for us to try out common penetration testing techniques and to practice using our security tools so you can see here in my own VMware instance I have lots and lots of different virtual hosts including the three recommended VMs for a basic lab setup I have Kali Linux Metasploit able to and I have Windows seven now you probably noticed I also have an abundant that I use for physical networking lab connections and I want to show you something else that I have called be web now be web stands for buggy web application and this is another free VM and what this is is it is an intentionally vulnerable web application interface so this lets you test out things like sequel injection cross-site scripting and lots of other well-known web app vulnerabilities now one last thing that I want to point out here is that your virtual machines should be running on their own virtual network which is very easy to do with both VMware and VirtualBox you want to make sure that you isolate your machines to their own subnet where they cannot touch any production network or the Internet and this is done in VMware with what they call VM nets essentially virtual networks from here you can disallow the option for virtual hosts to connect to external networks using network address translation which they would typically do VMware can also provide the DHCP addresses for this virtual subnet you can see my own isolated subnet is a 192.168.1.0 slash 24 subnet so that's an overview of how you can build a really simple low-cost security lab solution now as you get more advanced and you get more comfortable with your skills you can expand and start to test against other virtual hosts things maybe like Windows Server editions Microsoft Exchange and other unintentionally vulnerable operating systems there are also lots and lots of great resources online where you can continue to learn places like hack this side org or hack me and many many more you may also want to check out the Red Team Field Manual this is a really simple reference guide that contains common Linux and Windows command line tools and there are things in there like Python and PowerShell commands as well I hope you've enjoyed a look at my own setup and I hope you've been inspired to take time to create your own security lab test environment for yourself especially if you're interested in cybersecurity thanks for checking out this video and I look forward to sharing with you again soon

Channel: Kevin Wallace Training, LLC

Views: 24,904

Keywords: cysa+, cyberops, cyber ops, cyber security, network security, home security lab, ccna security, ccna cyberops, #kwtrain

Id: tGARXXQ2fe4

Length: 8min 36sec (516 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 28 2018