Creating a lab environment at home for CEH Study

Klinecore

Fellow CEH pursuers,

I am in the process of setting up a little at home computer lab in my spare bed room with the intention of creating a study environment for CEH. I have some old lap tops I've acquired from family that have windows 7 on them, and plan on putting Kali Linux on one of them as well, and going through practical exercises to help me study. With of course the primary purpose being I am using my skills and knowledge on myself and not violating any laws, regulations, terms of agreement with my ISP, etc.

My question to you all, is what would be the best way to accomplish this, as far as network infrastructure goes. Would it be unwise to run everything off of my Comcast router that my family computer is on for this, and use a VPN service? Or, I have an extra router lying around.. should I set up some sort of configuration with that or possibly buy a third, additional router?

What would you do? To provide the security and privacy to ethically train on your own devices, your CEH skills.

Thank you! I am really excited to start my journey towards earning this certification. My time frame right now is aiming for is a mid-June exam date.

PC509

I just have a small setup using VM's and a Kali laptop. I use Vulnhub for vulnerable hosts and load those into VM's on a small server (doesn't need much as those VM's just sit there and don't have any real load). It's just getting some hands on with the tools on Kali, which can get fun. My lab has grown a bit more after I passed the CEH (still working towards the OSCP). I used an old Linksys WRT54G as the main switch/AP so I could test cracking WEP/WPA, which was fun.

The CEH tests on the basic tools, outputs, etc. and isn't too much in depth. However, once you start you might start digging way deeper than the exam objectives because it can get real fun.

yoba222

Regarding setting up a lab to train for passing the CEH, I wouldn't. You don't need to set foot in a lab to pass that exam. Unfortunately the CEH's current reputation was earned around this fact.

Regarding a home lab for pentesting/ethical hacking research, yeah you could try to set a network up with all the old machines. Personally, I'd pick the one with the most CPU cores/RAM and only use that one. Install VirtualBox, Kali, one or more of the plentiful and free vulnerable machines out there, and then one or more Windows 7/8/10 90 day free trial versions.

You can completely isolate the vulnerable ones from the rest of your network this way.