What you need for this book

This book assumes a medium level of expertise on Linux operating systems, strong knowledge of networking technologies, including both wired and wireless, moderate experience with OS platform configuration, and moderate experience with general information security concepts. This book will go through the process of setting up a basic testing lab, the installation of Kali Linux, and the tools needed to perform network reconnaissance, and exploitation. Because you will be running exercises against live hosts, it is important that this environment is isolated from other non-test environments.

Kali Linux can be installed into a virtual environment such as VirtualBox or VMware, or can be installed onto a dedicated hardware. This book requires that you have enough compute resources for the Kali Linux installation as well as the target systems. In addition to the minimum requirements for your hypervisor, minimum hardware or virtual requirements are listed as follows:

• CPU: 10 cores
• Memory: 24 GB RAM
• Disk space: 260 GB

In this book, you will need the following software list:

• Kali Linux 2017.x
• VirtualBox
• Windows XP
• Windows 7
• Windows 2008

Internet connectivity is required to install the necessary additional packages that must be installed onto Kali Linux, depending on the recipe requirements.