SANS OnDemand Training: Expert guidance for building a home lab and testing environment

SANS Institute announces the best special offers of the year for SANS OnDemand Training, giving students the opportunity to choose a free device with their purchase of an OnDemand course. To help students make the most of this opportunity to get a new free device, SANS Instructors offer up expert guidance for building a home lab and testing environment.

“I think everyone is capable of learning something new every day. Having access to a free device that one can set aside as a lab device can amplify this process,” says SANS Certified Instructor Justin Henderson.

“Working on things in a home lab lets me replicate how enterprise environments function, but at home, without the cost or risk to the business. It’s ultimately what helped me land multiple jobs, even though my experience wasn’t product based.”

One of the biggest challenges that cyber security professionals face in building out home labs is replicating the devices and infrastructure that are found in the workplace, according to SANS Blue Team Ops Instructor Mark Orlando.

With so many people working remotely today, “adding mobile devices to your security testing loadout can give you valuable insights into how your users’ mobile devices – many of them personal and unmanaged – may impact your corporate security posture, and what you can do to help manage that risk,” Mark says.

“Testing and forensics go hand in hand,” says SANS Principal Instructor Sarah Edwards. “You cannot be sure about a certain artifact [or] what it contains or what certain pieces mean without testing – and not just once, but over and over, and on multiple devices and operating systems.”