Penetration testing (also called pen testing) is the practice of testing a computer system, network or Web application to find vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit.
It is a safe virtual network environment designed to be attacked and penetrated as a means of learning and sharpening your pen testing skills without harming or damaging other machines.
Steps to set up pen-testing lab
Before going to the steps we have to download some applications through which we can setup our lab.
After downloading Virtual box setup we have to install it in our machine.
Once installation is completed we have to create out new virtual machine.
Now put a name to you new machine as you like , but we are using windows 7 so I am gonna put its name as windows7.
Now give sufficient amount of to the virtual box depending up on the ram you have and it require. And you are only allowed to give maximum RAM up to green colored region.
Now At this point we still need to add a hard drive to our virtual machine, so switch the radio button over to “Create a virtual hard drive now” then click create.
Select a virtual hard disk that you want to create and give dynamic storage permission so that we can save the storage of our main hard.
This is the last step before starting our virtual machine for installation. Go to the settings->storage-> Insert the iso that we have downloaded at first. This is iso is like virtual CD/disk.
Now start your virtual machine by clicking start button and it will boot your machine and start installing .
Once it starts installation it is just like the windows7 installing in the host machine or main physical machine.
After installation you can use this virtual machine just like a normal machine.
And more over you can install no. of virtual machine in your main machine and do pen-testing on different operating systems and sharp your skills without damaging other systems.