Your lab architecture
If you're going to build a threat hunting lab, it's best to plan out all of the moving pieces, how they will interact, and what you're going to do with the data.
While there are hardware costs, the software for the lab that we're going to be building costs only one thing: your time.
For this lab, we'll utilize a few main components, as follows:
- A hypervisor
- Victim machines
- The Elastic Stack
As mentioned in the Technical requirements section, you will need a total of 12 GB of RAM, 6 CPU cores, and a 70 GB HDD that can be dedicated to the lab. Some cuts can be made, but I would consider this to be the minimum for a functional lab.
Before we continue, having built several hundred (maybe thousand) VMs and various other interconnected systems and environments, I've learned to embrace simplicity where applicable. For every lab I build, all of my usernames, service accounts, API accounts, and passwords are the same...