Book Image

Building Virtual Pentesting Labs for Advanced Penetration Testing - Second Edition

By : Kevin Cardwell
Book Image

Building Virtual Pentesting Labs for Advanced Penetration Testing - Second Edition

By: Kevin Cardwell

Overview of this book

Security flaws and new hacking techniques emerge overnight – security professionals need to make sure they always have a way to keep . With this practical guide, learn how to build your own virtual pentesting lab environments to practice and develop your security skills. Create challenging environments to test your abilities, and overcome them with proven processes and methodologies used by global penetration testing teams. Get to grips with the techniques needed to build complete virtual machines perfect for pentest training. Construct and attack layered architectures, and plan specific attacks based on the platforms you’re going up against. Find new vulnerabilities for different kinds of systems and networks, and what these mean for your clients. Driven by a proven penetration testing methodology that has trained thousands of testers, Building Virtual Labs for Advanced Penetration Testing, Second Edition will prepare you for participation in professional security teams.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Building Virtual Pentesting Labs for Advanced Penetration Testing - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 2.  Choosing the Virtual Environment

In this chapter, we will discuss the different virtual environment platforms there are to choose from. We will look at most of the main virtual technology platforms that exist. We will discuss the following topics:

  • Commercial environments

  • Image conversion

  • Converting from a physical to a virtual environment

One of the most challenging things we have to do is decide on the virtualization software that we want to use. Not only do we have to decide on what we want to do with respect to the software we choose, we also need to decide whether we want to build a dedicated virtual platform or run the software on our existing system. In this book, we are going to focus on creating a new virtual environment on our existing system, which is normally a desktop or laptop. However, it is still important to at least briefly discuss the option of creating a bare-metal environment.

When we install a bare-metal environment (also known as a Type 1 installation of a...