Setting up a penetration-testing lab

Creating a penetration-testing lab is essential, it will allow you to practice and test new techniques and exploits in a secure environment. Using virtual machines for your lab environment will give you portability, flexibility, and low maintenance. You can work simultaneously on more than one operating system, set up complex network scenarios, and perform penetration tests on multiple targets. So, let's have a quick look at how we can set up a penetration-testing lab using virtualization.

Getting ready

For your lab, you can use the hypervisor of your choice; the most common hypervisors are VirtualBox, VMware Workstation Pro, VMware Fusion Pro (for Mac), VMware...