Understanding our testing environment
It's essential to understand all the systems we are going to be deploying and their use in this book. Building a lab benefits security research because it allows you to perform the same tactics and techniques that real hackers would execute, without having to worry about breaking any laws. For our lab, we will be setting up various hosts that mimic real-life systems that you would see incorporated into businesses. The only difference is we will be using some much older versions of software and operating systems. The purpose of using older systems is because they typically are much more vulnerable than their up-to-date, newer versions, making learning pentesting much easier – and fun!
We want to ensure that we learn a little bit of everything, so we will be using both Windows- and Unix-based operating systems. These systems are built drastically differently but are systems that you will face in real-life pentesting situations.
Additionally, we will be using an operating system called "Kali Linux" as our hacking operating system. Kali Linux is a very popular hacking operating system used in the pentesting community, primarily due to its coming preinstalled with various hacking tool suites and being maintained by offensive security.
