Cybersecurity Virtual Machine
Vidya R. Anjur · Huskie Commons (Northern Illinois University) · 2019
In this day and age, cybersecurity is becoming more and more crucial for all technology with internet capabilities. The idea of strangers being able to learn your most secret information and share it with others is very scary. I believe that more people should be able to have access to knowledge and tools in order to better protect their data and technologies, especially at schools. Learning subjects becomes a lot easier when students have an actual environment to practice in, and this project aims to be a hands-on learning environment for students and others interested in security. For my senior capstone project, I designed and set up a standalone ‘target’ security Virtual Machine. The purpose of this VM is for students such as myself to learn and practice hands-on security penetration and defense techniques, in order to have a greater understanding of cybersecurity. I created VMs such as a 'tools' machine with Kali Linux installed, Ubuntu installed on the target machine, and used Oracle VirtualBox to run the VMs. Within the machines, I used XAMPP, MySQL with PHP and HTML, nmap, dirb, and steghide. Those using these machines would learn about types of exploits such as SQL Injection and steganography, as well as a little bit about networking ports and web servers. I hope that this tool will be of great use to those looking to get into the cybersecurity field, especially those who don’t have many resources available to them.