For Windows 10, I recommend at least 2 processor cores and 4GBs of RAM. Because of this, it is important to give each VM its recommended settings for optimal performance. When you run multiple virtual machines(VMs) on a single host machine, the host machine will slow down.If you do run into trouble, Google is your best friend. There are just too many things that might go wrong. Troubleshooting the installation of virtualization software and/or the individual VMs is out-of-scope for this post.However, VirtualBox can be a great, free, substitute for VMWare. I have had the best experience by far with VMWare’s line of virtualization software.

I will be using VMware Fusion Pro for this walkthrough.I’m hoping this will help out others, while also reinforcing old concepts and learning new ones for myself. Only expense will be a physical machine to host several VMs at one time. The best part is that nearly all the tools I will be using are open source or have an open source alternative, meaning there isn’t any cost to get started. My aim for this post, and ideally for a continued series, is to provide a simple straight forward approach to setting up a malware analysis lab. Because of that, I wanted to start a blog series to document my process for others, in hopes that my journey will make it easier for anyone trying to get started in the field. I’ve only just started to learn how to setup a proper lab and all the various techniques that exist to breakdown and understand malware. Its also a field that is extremely new to me. This is something that has always drawn me to the field. The process of breaking something down, looking at its individual parts, testing hypotheses as to what its capabilities are. Since joining the Cyber Security and Intelligence community in 2016, I’ve always had a strong interest in malware analysis.

Vmware vs virtualbox security