Analysis of a hostile program requires a safe and secure lab environment, as you do not want to infect your system or the production system. A malware lab can be very simple or complex depending on the resources available to you (hardware, virtualization software, Windows license, and so on). This section will guide you to set up a simple personal lab on a single physical system consisting of virtual machines (VMs). If you wish to set up a similar lab environment, feel free to follow along or skip to the next section (Section 6: Malware Sources).