Why Build a Home Lab?
If you want to get serious about cybersecurity, you need a place to practice. CTF platforms like HackTheBox and TryHackMe are great, but there's no substitute for building and breaking your own infrastructure. A home lab lets you practice both sides - attacking and defending - in an environment you fully control.
The Setup
My lab runs on a combination of local virtualization and cloud resources. The core idea is to simulate a realistic small business network with common vulnerabilities, then build monitoring and detection around it.
Attack Infrastructure
- Kali Linux - Primary attack machine with full toolkit
- Custom scripts - Python-based enumeration and exploitation tools
- Burp Suite - Web application testing
- Metasploit - Framework for exploit development and testing
Target Environment
- Vulnerable VMs - Metasploitable, DVWA, WebGoat, and custom-built targets
- Active Directory - Windows domain with intentional misconfigurations
- Web applications - Vulnerable apps for testing OWASP Top 10
Defense Stack
- SIEM (Splunk/ELK) - Log aggregation and alerting
- Network monitoring - Wireshark, Suricata IDS
- Endpoint detection - Custom detection rules and scripts
Coming Soon
This post is being expanded with detailed setup instructions, network diagrams, and specific attack/defense scenarios. Check back soon for the full write-up.