Technical requirements

While some pentesters have a couple of laptops, each one with a release of one of the most prevalent operating systems (Linux, macOS and Windows), other prefer hosting their testing environments on some public or private cloud. I also previously worked with forensic analysis. There, the operating system’s family does make a point when conducting a deep analysis because of filesystems’ internals or some other intrinsic feature, such as libraries, command utilities or kernel. Nowadays, I belong to the team who works with local VMs.

Hence, I used a virtual machine for all the subsequent chapters of this book. To have a decent experience, it’s advisable that you have at least the following hardware config:

• Some Intel Core i7 or an equivalent AMD chip, or some Apple silicon computer.
• 16 GB of RAM.
• 1 TB of hard drive.