QEMU for Red Team
Description
QEMU is a powerful open-source hardware emulator and virtualizer. In red teaming, it can be leveraged to create flexible, isolated virtual environments for testing, payload development, and malware analysis all under the attacker’s full control.
Steps
- Install QEMU: https://qemu.weilnetz.de/w64/2025/
- Right click > 7zip > Extract to “qemu...”
- Download the image of the linux distribution of your choice and paste it into the folder
- Open a terminal:
.\qemu-img create -f qcow2 testing-image.img 20G
.\qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2048 -boot d -smp 2 -net nic,model=virtio -net user -hda testing-image.img -cdrom kali-linux-2025.1c-live-amd64.iso
Blog: https://edivandh.github.io/virtualization-tactics-in-rt-operations/