Going to Build My Security Lab

So my Mac died and as I cried I got lucky and my new job provided me with a laptop! I will be using that as my attach machine (cleared it with my boss) so I setup VMWare with Backtrack. Ultimately I will end up setting up a VM with some flavor of linux and set it up with the tools. I had this machine I got on ebay for $100 bucks, but I ended up losing the power cable for it (dumb I know) so I found one for $20 bucks. That machine will be my target machine. I want to start saving up to purchase a server, install VMWare, and then setup all kinds of VMs to attack. Going to take sometime, but going to use this to finish eCPPT, OSWP, OSCP, and finally OSCE. Been doing some soul searching and I really think I want to work on exploit development. Since I am leaning that way, I am also considering doing a Masters in Computer Science instead of IS. But plenty of time to worry about that...

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GAngel

For your needs I'd suggest a cheapo Q series quad with 6-8gb of ram. It will run what you're looking to do with ease.

ptilsen

Yeah, any quad-core or better will do. A six-core or quad-core-with-HT will get you a little bit more. A couple small drives in RAID 1 or a small-ish SSD should be sufficient.

effekted

Depending on the specs of your laptop you could probably use VM Player or Workstation if you have access to it and run your Backtrack VM and 2-3 VM's running min. specs. For a while I was dual booting Win 7/BT4 on my laptop but since have just switched to running a VM through VM Player. I took a pentesting class through Hacking Dojo and the guy who started that also created live cd's for test targets, google de-ice.net and you should be able to find a link to download them, there's 3 and they're between 200-260MB.

the_Grinch

Thanks for the suggestions guys! Right now I have the following:

Dell E6500 (Windows 7, Core2Duo, 4 gigs of RAM)
HP ePC (1.7 Pent4, 256 mbs of RAM) - This I should be able to up to a gig as I have an old computer that I can strip for RAM

Server wise I am looking to spend about $500 bucks and I have access (thru work) to some reduced computer rates. That will come in due time though....

JDMurray

GAngel wrote: »

For your needs I'd suggest a cheapo Q series quad with 6-8gb of ram. It will run what you're looking to do with ease.

Make sure that whatever processors you select they support virtualization. All modern AMD CPUs support virtualization, but not all Intel CPUs do.