Starting a Cyber Security Home Lab as a Student

You do not need a huge budget to start learning cyber security. A small home lab gives you a safe environment to break things, fix them again, and understand how attacks really work.

1. Keep It Simple at First

As a student, focus on a basic but realistic setup:

• One Linux virtual machine acting as a server or target.
• One Windows or Linux machine acting as an attacker or analyst.
• A SIEM or logging tool (even simple log files and Wireshark are enough at the beginning).

This is more than enough to practice network scanning, basic hardening, and log analysis.

2. Practice Both Offense and Defense

I use my lab to experiment with both sides:

• Running simple scans and seeing how they look in logs.
• Hardening SSH, firewall rules, and users.
• Capturing traffic with tools like Wireshark to understand what is normal and what is suspicious.

The goal is not to become a professional penetration tester overnight, but to build strong intuition about how systems behave under normal and abnormal conditions.

3. Document What You Learn

Every time you complete a small experiment—like locking down SSH or detecting a scan—write it down. That is the kind of practical story you can share in internship interviews and also here on this portfolio.