Preparing the necessary components and prerequisites

In this section, we will focus on preparing the prerequisites needed for this chapter. We will start by retrieving the IP address of your local machine. We’ll use this IP address value later when configuring the firewall rules to allow our local machine to access specific resources inside the lab environment. In addition to this, we will also set up the Google Cloud project where the cloud resources will be deployed in this chapter.

Lastly, we will generate SSH keys (a public key and a private key) for accessing the attacker VM instance later in this chapter. As we can see in Figure 4.1, the private key will be stored inside your local machine while the public key will be stored inside the attacker VM instance.

Figure 4.1 – Generating SSH keys for accessing the attacker VM instance

With this setup, the server (the attacker VM instance) can confirm the identity of the client (your local...