In order to practice the material presented in this book, you will need virtualization tools such as VMware or VirtualBox.
You will need to download and configure the Kali Linux operating system and its suite of tools. To ensure that it is up-to-date and that you have all of the tools, you will need access to an Internet connection.
Sadly, not all of the tools on the Kali Linux system will be addressed since there are too many of them. The focus of this book is not to inundate the reader with all of the tools and options, but to provide an approach for testing that will give them the opportunity to learn and incorporate new tools as their experiences and knowledge change over time.
Although most of the examples from this book focus on Microsoft Windows, the methodology and most of the tools are transferrable to other operating systems such as Linux and the other flavors of Unix.
Finally, this book applies Kali to complete the attacker's kill chain against target systems. You will need a target operating system. Many of the examples in the book use Microsoft Windows XP. Although it is deprecated as of April 2014, it provides a "baseline" of standard behavior for many of the tools. If you know how to apply the methodology to one operating system, you can apply it to more recent operating systems such as Windows 7 and Windows 8.