First Week in Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Class

     In the first week, the most important thing to do is to install the VMWare in your preferred machine. I'm using a MacBookPro as my host machine. I'm currently using VMWare Fusion. The plus features of VMWare Fusion is that it can enable a seamless connection from the Emulated OS or VM with the host machine (My Mac). With seamless connection, everything in the mac will be synced to the VM so you can install application on the mac and use it in the VM.

     VMWare Fusion also has isolated install feature. With isolated install, you can install a perfectly isolated VM so anything in that VM will not affect the host OS and vice versa. This is the screenshot of the main interface of VMWare Fusion.

     I installed 2 Windows XP Service Pack 3 so i can try the network adapter of the virtual machine.
Network Adapter determines how the VM connect with other VM or the host. The first Adapter i tried is the NAT (Network Address Translation). NAT networks employ NAT to connect virtual machines to a physical network. This is achieved by using the host's IP address. NAT is responsible for tracking and delivering data between VMs and the physical LAN. 
This is screenshot of a VM pinging another VM using NAT connection.

     The second one I used Host Only Connection to try pinyin each VMs. With host only connection entire virtual networks can be created that run in a "sandboxed" environment. These networks are considered sandboxed because the virtual network doesn't contact existing physical networks. The virtual network isn't mapped to a physical interface and is called host-only networking. This is the screen shot of a VM pinging another VM using Host Only connection.

     Thats it for the first week in the class. Next week we will try using Kali Linux to do the hacking. But the first thing we need to prepare is the proper and right tools and VMWare is the perfect tool for testing this kind of thing because using VM you can create "SandBoxed" Environment.