Build Your Own Pentesting Lab

You can't practice hacking on real systems. You can't learn hacking without practice. A home lab solves both problems. Let's build one from scratch.

The foundation of every pentest lab is a hypervisor and an attack machine. By the end of this post, both will be running on your computer. All three operating systems covered.

An attack machine with nothing to attack is just a really cool Linux desktop. Time to give it something to do. We're deploying vulnerable targets and locking the whole thing inside an isolated network.

The lab is built. The targets are running. Time to actually break into something. Then we'll talk about where to go from here.