Build Your Own Lab¶
You don't need an expensive computer.
A spare PC, decent laptop or even a reasonably powerful desktop can become a cyber lab.
| Option | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Proxmox | Free virtualisation platform |
| Windows Sandbox | Disposable Windows environment |
| VirtualBox | Free desktop virtualisation |
| VMware Workstation Pro | Free desktop virtualisation — now free for personal use, worth knowing since VMware's everywhere in the industry |
For hosted, ready-to-go labs rather than building your own, see the platforms in Get Hands-On — TryHackMe and OverTheWire are the easiest starting points.
A lab lets you break things without breaking someone else's things.
Try:
- A Windows VM
- A Linux VM
- A small virtual network
- A web server
- A deliberately vulnerable application — OWASP Juice Shop and DVWA for web app bugs, Metasploitable2 for OS and network-service bugs — both web apps are built around the OWASP Top 10, the industry's own list of the most common and serious web vulnerability classes (SQL injection, cross-site scripting and the like). Worth a skim before diving in, so you recognise what you're actually looking at when you find something
- A logging system
- Wireshark to actually watch the traffic your other lab machines are generating
Why you might see nothing in Wireshark
On a switched network, a device normally only sees traffic addressed to itself — not everything on the wire. To watch other devices' traffic on physical hardware, you need to configure a SPAN port (Cisco's term) or monitor port (most other vendors' term) on the switch, which mirrors another port's traffic to the one Wireshark is plugged into. Inside a virtual lab this is much simpler — most hypervisors let a VM's virtual network adapter run in "promiscuous mode," which does the same job without touching any physical switch config.
A Windows and Active Directory lab¶
Windows and Active Directory is a common gap in self-taught learning, and it's genuinely worth lab time. Microsoft's own Evaluation Center gives free, 180-day evaluation ISOs of Windows Server — enough to build a domain controller, promote it to a domain, then join a Windows client VM to it. Watching a login actually authenticate against a domain controller teaches you more about how AD works than reading about it ever will.
Then start experimenting.