The very first step in setting up our vulnerable lab in the cloud will be to provision an instance that will be running a vulnerable operating system. For this purpose, we can use an Ubuntu LTS version. This can be accessed from the AWS Marketplace for quick deployment.

We will use Ubuntu 16.04 for this purpose:

Once we click on the Continue to Subscribe button, we are prompted to configure the instance that we are going to launch. Since this is a pretty standard image, we will proceed with the default settings except for Region and VPC settings.

For Region, you can use the AWS Region that is closest to yourself. However, keep in mind that all the other instances you create on AWS need to be hosted in the same region or they cannot be a part of the same network.

For VPC, make sure you note down the VPC and the subnet IDs that you are using to set up this instance. We will need to reuse them for all the other hosts in the lab. In this case, I will be using the following:

It should be noted that the VPC IDs and the subnet IDs will be unique for everyone. Once done, we can proceed to deploy the EC2 instance by clicking on the Launch with the 1-Click button.

Once done, the next step is to SSH into the newly created VM using the following command:

ssh -i <pem file> <IP address of the instance>

Once connected, run the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

These commands will update the repository listing and all the packages installed on the instance, so we don't have to deal with any old packages.