We will use exercises developed by Professor Wenliang (Kevin) Du at Syracuse University as part of SEcurity EDucation (SEED) labs. These exercises use Virtual Box and a pre-built Virtual Machine (VM) installed locally on your computer. This setup will give us the chance to experiment with attacks and defensive techniques on the VM without fear of damaging our own machines. First install Virtual Box, then install the SEED Lab VM. If you are running on a non-Intel Mac (the latest models), you might consider the AWS option below instead.

Install Virtual Box 6.0.18. Make sure you install version 6.0.18 as the latest version may not work for some experiments.

We will use the pre-built Virtual Machine Image from SEED Labs for our experiments.

1. Install the Ubuntu 16.04 VM version for Virtual Box. Follow the installation instructions here. Be sure to follow Appendix B to set up networking.

2. Once you have installed the VM, make a clone. We will use the cloned VM in the packet sniffing and firewall labs. I've changed the background and added the following at the end of .bashrc on my clone so I can visually tell the difference between the clone and the primary:

THEIP=$(ifconfig | grep 'inet addr:'| grep -v '127.0.0.1' | tail -1 | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}')

PS1="\[\033[01;31m\]\u@"$THEIP" \w $\[\033[00m\] ";
(source: https://superuser.com/questions/668174/how-can-you-display-host-ip-address-in-bash-prompt).

I recommend taking a snapshot of your primary VM and the clone after these steps are complete. If something later goes wrong, you'll have a clean install on which to fall back.