This is the week we’re all getting ready to start analysis of malware on our virtual environment, so we’ve used a fair amount of different technologies so far. My “favorite” technology of the ones we’ve used so far is VMWare Workstation Pro. It’s a program that allows you to host virtual machines on your computer, essentially allowing you to emulate different computers with different OS’s. For example, I could potentially emulate a Windows 10 PC on a Mac device. It also has additional configuration options, such as allowing you to also emulate networks for your VMs to connect to, or taking “snapshots” of your VMs so that you can use it as a sort of point in time that you can rewind to after doing work on it.
At the same time, it was also a difficult program to learn at first, even though I actually first started using it last Spring. In fact, that was the first time having any experience with virtual machines, so having to wrap my mind around the ability to simulate different computers within computers at the same time as learning how to use the software was certainly an experience.
Now that I’ve gotten more familiar with it, though, I’ve come to appreciate the functionality it provides. As someone hoping to get into the cybersecurity field, I’m aware of the massive number of benefits that come with being able to simulate a computer. You can run and analyze malware on that computer instead of a real machine, reducing the risk of irreparable damage being done to any significant devices. In the context of digital forensics, you could clone a computer possibly containing crucial evidence for a case, and then perform your analysis of that clone in the form of a virtual machine rather than tampering the original device.
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