Building a Cybersecurity Purple Team Home Lab — Part One | by Varun Belani | Apr, 2024

As a cybersecurity or IT professional, it is paramount that we keep our skills up to date. Regarding training, there’s many resources out there, but in my opinion the best way to train yourself is to build something from the ground up. What you build doesn’t have to be an advanced XDR it can be something simpler like what I’m working on. Technology at the fundamental level hasn’t really changed. The new security solutions that come out everyday work the same fundamentally. Building simpler projects that are based on more complex production ready products is a great way to learn how a security/IT solution works, this process of learning is applicable to most new products that come out.

Building my purple teaming lab is what I decided to do during my layoff. Instead of sitting around waiting for something to happen and allowing my skills to grow dull, I decided to take initiative to grow as a person and a professional. This home lab has helped me to persevere and discipline myself when problem solving and troubleshooting is hard.

Building persistence is the key to becoming a good problem solver.

I used the classic troubleshooting methodology of recognizing where I was at on the OSI layer and going up or down the stack depending on what kind of problem I was facing that needed resolution. For example, just last night I didn’t understand why my Windows 2019 Server DC was not getting an Internet connection. I noticed the network adapters had a red x on them. I started troubleshooting at Layer 3 (Networking/Routing), I managed to ping the AD-DC gateway, but obviously could not ping the DC. I recognized the adapters were not even available on the Windows DC so this was a layer 1 or layer 2 issue. After some research I needed to install Proxmox specific network drivers for Window guests, once I loaded the driver iso onto the VM and installed them, the networking adapters were online and I could finally ping to the DC.

When I managed to solve a problem, it was a victory, whether big or small it kept me motivated to stay on this path of self-training.

Part One covers the hardware needed, initial setup and networking configuration on Proxmox.