Building a Cybersecurity Home Lab
I have been on the fence on how to properly study cyber security concepts. Aside from learning the fundamentals of IT and cybersecurity, getting practical or hands-on experience is important or even necessary. However, what can I do to get the practical experience? After all, theoretical knowledge is useless without the ability to apply them.
My goal is to create a virtualized environment where I can practice and experiment. After scouring the internet for inspiration, I used the guides listed by Day from cyberwox and Tony Robinson’s Building Virtual Machine Labs: A Hands-on Guide (Second Edition) for my home lab.
The lab will tackle some of the major concepts that are essential in cybersecurity like networking and systems administration.
Here is the network diagram for my lab.
**Diagram created via https://online.visual-paradigm.com/
I will be building the lab using VMWare on a Windows 11 host.
Here are the hardware specifications for my lab:
32 GB RAM
6 core processor (12 threads)
268 GB HD space
The lab will be broken down into the following sections:
1. Installing and Configuring pfSense
4. Installing Metasploitable2 and Generating Alerts on Security Onion
Here are the list of software that I am going to use:
1. VMWare Workstation 17 Pro — https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-pro/workstation-pro-evaluation.html
2. Pfsense Community Edition version 2.7.0 — https://www.pfsense.org/download/
3. Security Onion version 2.4.10 — https://download.securityonion.net/file/securityonion/securityonion-2.4.10-20230821.iso
4. Kali Linux 2023.3 — https://www.kali.org/get-kali/#kali-installer-images
5. Metasploitable2 — https://sourceforge.net/projects/metasploitable/
After installing VMWare, I added more virtual network adapters by going to edit > virtual network editor. Select Change settings in the next window. Select Yes on the UAC screen.
We will need to add three more virtual network adapters. Click Add Network, select VMnet2 on the dropdown menu and click Ok. Once the virtual adapter has been added, uncheck both “Connect a host virtual adapter to this network” and the “Use local DHCP service to distribute IP address to VMs” checkboxes. Repeat the process when adding VMnet3 and VMnet4. Select apply and ok to apply the changes.
We will also configure the Host-Only adapter by pressing Windows + R key on the keyboard and typing in ncpa.cpl. This will pull up Network Connections. You can also navigate to this window manually by going to Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network Connections.
Right click VMWare Network Adapter VMNet1 and go to Properties > Select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) > Properties > Select Use the following IP Address and then enter the following info:
IP address: 172.16.1.2
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
