Why Building a Cybersecurity Homelab will Help Your Career Big Time?

Let's know what Cybersecurity Homelab is and how it will help your career?

Cybersecurity is the practice of defending computers, servers, mobile devices, electronic systems, networks, and data from malicious attacks. It aims to reduce the risk of cyberattacks and protect against the unauthorized exploitation of systems, networks, and technologies. A Cybersecurity Homelab is a small-scale environment meant to simulate different components of a business network.

A home lab is an environment meant to simulate components of I.T. infrastructure, equipment, and configurations similar to a business or enterprise network. This aims to understand the process of installing, configuring, and optimizing I.T. infrastructure at a relatively small scale. Implementations of a home lab vary depending on the intended size, scale, and complexity of components. The majority of home lab environments are virtualized with virtualization software like Oracle VirtualBox, VMware Workstation Player, etc.

The Cybersecurity Homelab:

The convenient way for cyber security researchers is to build a home lab to conduct all the necessary testing. A vulnerability scanner, Workstations, Email server, Windows Active Directory Directory Services, VPN services, Windows and Linux servers, Firewalls, System Information Event Management, etc., are some of the common technologies cybersecurity researchers used in cybersecurity home lab. This cybersecurity home lab has components and tools similar to large-scale infrastructures. It's a safe environment to work with these components and learn how they work.

Cybersecurity homelab is run through a virtualize box called virtualization. Similarly, virtualization can be done on cloud-based platforms also. There is a variety of VirtualBox options available nowadays. Apple's Mac OS with over 15 versions, Microsoft Windows with over 23 versions plus server versions, and Linux with more than 1,000 distros are the top most commonly used operating systems. The OS of the Linux Distribution that possesses them all may require you to spend 24 hours of your time. The OS used for testing also requires an updated version for security and feature enhancement reasons.

Why building a Cybersecurity home lab will help your career big time?

• Stay out of legal problems
• It will help in security testing & development
• Maintain isolated development environment
• It will be sharpening cyber security skills
• With this one can run a network security device like Sophos UTM (free IIRC) and can evaluate the pros and cons
• Set up labs and pop boxes from VulnHub
• During the testing of some techniques which may cause damaging results
• During the testing, if the researcher uses a malware tool, it could spread to the other Internet-connected environment
• It is recommended that you have a basic foundation of networking terminology, computers, cybersecurity concepts, and formidable research skills
• Can set up isolated networks for different tasks
• Capture packets and how to use them for diagnostic information
• Run a malware sandbox in an as-safe-as-possible, isolated, virtualized way
• Try running a honeypot in an as-safe-as-possible, isolated, virtualized way
• Script stuff and make neat projects