Setting Up a Lab

In the previous chapter, we learned the concept of hacking. In this chapter, we are going to learn how to set up a virtual environment, so that we can later perform penetration tests on it. In this chapter, we will cover the concept of virtual machines, and will also perform its installation steps. Later in the chapter, we will learn how to install Kali Linux, and the two victim machines on VirtualBox: Windows and the Metasploitable machine. We will also discuss what each of these machines does, and why we are going to use them. Toward the end of the chapter, we will see the concept of snapshots, and how to implement them.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Lab overview
• Installing Kali Linux
• Installing Metasploitable
• Installing Windows
• Creating snapshots and using snapshots