What you need for this book

To follow the exercises addressed in this book or to further explore on your own, you will need the following components:

• A single personal computer (Mac, Windows, or Linux) with sufficient resources that can be shared across multiple virtual machines. At minimum, you should have 2 GB of RAM. It is recommended that for optimal performance, you use a system with 8 to 16 GB of RAM. Multiple processors and/or processor cores is also recommended.
  • If you are running a system with limited resources, try to minimize the number of virtual machines that are running simultaneously when completing the exercises
• A virtualization software to run your security lab environment. Some of the available options include the following:
  • VMware Fusion (Mac OS X)
  • VMware Player (Windows)
  • Oracle VirtualBox (Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux)
• Multiple operating systems to run in the security lab environment. Acquisition and installation of each of these will be discussed in detail in Chapter 1, Getting Started. The operating systems needed include the following:
  • Kali Linux
  • Metasploitable2
  • An Ubuntu server
  • Windows OS (Windows XP SP2 is recommended)