Foundations & Mindset
Building Your Hacking Lab
Kali/Parrot, VMs, and a safe isolated network to practice in.
Your lab is where you practice everything for real without touching anyone else's systems. The standard setup is a virtual machine running an attacker OS, plus vulnerable target VMs on an isolated network.
- Install a hypervisor: VirtualBox (free) or VMware Workstation Player.
- Download an attacker OS: Kali Linux or Parrot OS (both ship with hundreds of tools).
- Set the VM network adapter to 'Host-Only' or 'Internal' so targets can't reach the internet.
- Add a target VM: OWASP Juice Shop, DVWA, or Metasploitable 2.
- Snapshot each VM when clean, so you can revert after breaking things.
# Verify your Kali box can reach a target VM (example)
ping -c 2 192.168.56.101
# Update your toolset
sudo apt update && sudo apt -y full-upgrade