HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:

Given this is a hands-on session, access to a laptop computer will be required. This class requires that students are running VMware. Please download and install VMware Workstation 10 or higher or VMware Fusion
6 (Apple) or higher prior to class. If you do not own a licensed copy of VMware Workstation or Fusion, you can obtain a free 30-day trial copy from VMware. VMware will e-mail you a time-limited serial number when you register for the trial at their web site. Please note that VMware Player is not sufficient for the class because it does not support snapshot functionality, which we will want to use. Also, VirtualBox is not appropriate because of compatibility and troubleshooting problems you might encounter during class.

You will be asked to take multiple snapshots of virtual machines during the course. Experience has shown that students with limited free disk space are more likely to experience snapshot and other VMware performance problems. Please test your ability to run a virtual machine, create snapshot, and restore a snapshot in a timely manner (creating a snapshot should take less than 2 minutes). Some disk encryption software interferes with VMware’s ability to create snapshots in a timely fashion.

VM images will be provided to students during the class. The laptop should have the following minimum specifications:

• Intel-compatible 64-bit 2 GHz dual-core CPU (a faster processor is
recommended)
• 8 GB RAM (more memory is recommended)
• 20GB of available disk space
• USB port 2.0 or higher (USB port 3.0 is recommended) • Ethernet network interface card (NIC) or built-in Ethernet network port • Wi-Fi network adapter or built-in Wi-Fi network card

USING YOUR SYSTEM FOR MALWARE ANALYSIS:

Hands-on exercises will involve operating with malicious code.
Although VMware will provide you with reasonable isolation, we do not recommend using your day-to-day production system as your laboratory machine. We expect you to exercise due caution when handling malicious code.

ADDITIONAL TOOLS YOU WILL RECEIVE:

We will provide you with additional tools for completing hands-on exercises, including a pre- built Linux virtual machine. You will also receive a pre-built Windows virtual machine. Hardware requirements outlined above are meant to ensure that you have sufficient memory and disk space available to simultaneously run the virtual machines.