How to Set up your Pen Testing / Ethical Hacking Lab with a single Computer ?

We have provide you plenty of Ethical hacking and Pentesting tutorial, still more article is going to come.  Meanwhile, i like to teach you how to set up your own Pen Testing/ hacking network Lab.

Use of your own Pen Testing Lab:

• Free, free ,free..! It's free lab, because it is yours..
• Only one system is enough
• can Practice your pentesting/hacking skills 
• can install any kind of malwares(spyware,trojan) or RATs and test how it works
• and more ...

is it possible to create a lab with single system?

Yes, you can. we are going to set up lot of vulnerable system virtually .  Confused? VirtualBox is open source software provided by Oracle corp that allows to run multiple guest OS(virtual system) in a single system . 

Requirements:

• Virtual box latest version and its extension (get it from here: www.virtualbox.org/) 
• Windows XP image file(xp.iso) ; it is going to be our target system
• Backtrack Linux image file(backtrack5.iso); we are going to launch the attack from this OS.

First of all, Learn how to configure the Guest OS in VirtualBox from here:

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/UserManual.html

This page will you explain everything about Virtualbox and how to setup Guest OS.

I hope you now familiar with installing Guest OS.

Set Up your Target system:
Now we have to set up the target system.  Install the Windows XP in VirtualBox using the xp.iso file.  After installation completed, disable the Firewall in xp so that it can become more vulnerable system.

Set up your PenTesting System:
Install the Backtrack5 in Virtualbox. Backtrack is penetration testing Linux that has lot of hacking tools .  We will hack the target system using this backtrack.

Network Settings for Guest Os:
Step 1:
click the File menu in Virtualbox and select Preference
Now select the Network Tab
Click the + symbol in the side that will add a new Host only network

Step2:

Right click on the Guest OX(eg:xp,backtrack) and select the Settings.
Select Network tab.
Now you can see the "Attached to" option menu.
change it from NAT to "Host only Adapter"

Do the same thing for both Guest OS.

Step 3:

Now run the both guest os .
Finding the IP address of Target System:
open the Windows XP Guest OS window.
open the cmd in Windows XP and type ipconfig
This will show the ip address of XP. It will be 192.168.56.101
Hacking with Pen Testing System:
open the Terminal  and type "nmap 192.168.56.101".
Now it will show the list of open port.

You can hack the target system with open ports.