Building a victim machine
In this section, we'll be building a machine that will be used to collect data from. While collecting normal system information is valuable, we'll be collecting security-relevant data from these systems. We don't want to detonate malware or perform risky behavior on a production system, so we'll be making a system purely to generate malicious data for us to analyze. We also call these victim machines.
In this section, we'll build one victim machine. Feel free to mix and match this approach with more than one Windows or Linux machine, use a different version of Windows or Linux, or if you're running low on resources, pick one or the other instead of both.
Collecting the operating systems
First, we need to collect the operating system ISO images for Windows.
Windows
Microsoft uses the Evaluation Center to provide 90-day copies of their software to IT professionals for zero cost. These are not meant for production deployment...