Command and control
There are many cloud providers and thanks to competition, they are fairly cheap. We don't need a beefy machine: we can get away with a micro instance from any of these providers:
Google Cloud
Amazon AWS
Microsoft Azure
DigitalOcean
Google Cloud and Amazon AWS have tiers that provide you with all the VM resources you need for free; for a limited time, of course. However, the few dollars a month it costs to run VMs in the cloud is well worth it for those of us who rely on C2 infrastructure.
Note
These C2 instances should also be a per-client deployment and the disks should be encrypted. Due to the nature of our work, sensitive customer data may flow in and could be stored insecurely. Once an engagement is complete, destroy the instance, along with any client data it may have collected.
Once the VM is up and running, it is usually assigned an ephemeral external IP address. In some cases, you can request a static IP, but this is generally not required. Ephemeral external IPs will...