Best Computer for Hacking in 2023

Key Takeaways

if you're someone who's looking to get into cyber security or even I.T or you're looking to continue your career and you're wondering what type of computer you need to get started or continue that Learning Journey we are going to cover everything you need to know as far as computer requirements your budget how to find cheap computers and equipment and then we're going to talk also about password cracking and custom builds and we will also be showing you some real world examples of computers that are used by professional penetration testers and other cyber security and I.T professionals as well the first thing that we're going to talk about is the requirements and we'll establish what type of Hardware that you actually need to help you get the most bang for your buck and accomplish what we need to for Learning and advancing our career do you really need to spend thousands of dollars on a computer just to work in it the short answer is no we get asked this question very often here on YouTube on our Discord Channel and all across all of our different social media platforms so if you find this video useful please make sure to give it a like because that really does help us out here not every single role in it or in the cyber security world will require a powerful computer for some of you out there that's going to make you really happy to hear anytime you're going through a Learning Journey nowadays you can virtualize just about every single operating system and even applications that can help virtualize networking equipment like Packet Tracer or gns3 those are great tools to help you virtualize things that you normally would have to have physical hardware for so whether you're just getting started or continuing your Learning Journey one thing that you will more than likely be doing quite often is building virtual machines and we build out virtual machines on TCM Academy all the time for our training so you can get hands on and that's really the most important aspect that we're looking at as we're talking about the requirements that you need for a computer because we're going through a Learning Journey and because we're looking to get into the cyber security world you're going to find that you're virtualizing different operating systems or applications fairly often and it's really fun and exciting to do but you do have to have a powerful enough computer to do that nowadays I think the most important aspect when we're looking at computers that we need to focus on that one piece of Hardware is going to be your RAM that's going to be the highest priority that we place on everything that we talk about within this video and just something that I want you to keep in mind because when we're virtualizing things Ram that tends to be the thing that's utilized the most often so it'll go Ram processor and then your storage let's get into this a little bit further and talk about virtualizing some of the different operating systems when we're looking to virtualize different operating systems we might use a program like virtualbox or even VMware Workstation those programs will let you run or virtualize additional operating systems on top of that host computer or in addition to that host computer going through your Learning Journey virtualization is going to be a huge part of it because here's something that you can spin up on your computer brand new operating system and you can play with it you can break it and you don't have to worry about that affecting your main host machine so let's talk about some of the requirements for these operating systems but first let's keep in mind as we're talking about virtualization the main computer that you need to have will already have the requirements that it needs to operate that main operating system you will have your host operating system your host computer and from that host computer you will be able to virtualize other operating systems from there well those other operating systems that we want to virtualize they also have requirements that you need to meet in order for those operating systems to run virtually from your host computer it is a really phenomenal technology and it's amazing to see how far we've come nowadays and it's really crazy to see that you can have one main computer virtualizing sometimes even hundreds of other operating systems on top of it because they are that powerful nowadays so if you're looking to get into cyber security the biggest or main operating system that you'll be utilizing is going to be Kali Linux and more often than not people virtualize this and you could be running a Windows machine you could be running a Macbook you could be even running a dedicated Linux machine you'll still often find that you're going to be virtualizing different operating systems to complete different tasks or try out different things try out different tools that you've created and to give you an idea of what the specs are for these operating systems to run on top of your host machine for Cali Linux you need a minimum of two gigabytes of RAM a 32 or a 64-bit processor but I think everything is pretty much a 64-bit nowadays and it needs to be at least two gigahertz speed or better and you need at least 20 Gigabytes of disk space now one important note that I want to include here and this is actually coming from the website on Cali is that when you're using resource intent applications like burp Suite they recommend that you have at least eight gigs of RAM available for that operating system so for Cali Linux to run and utilize burp Suite they recommend at least eight gigs of RAM for that one single operating system so if you were going to virtualize Cali Linux on a machine and utilize burp Suite you would need to have at least at least 10 gigs of RAM and that's kind of like an odd number but you want to have at least two gigs of RAM dedicated for your host operating system to run functionally properly and efficiently you'll probably want to have at least 16 gigs of RAM as we'll talk about that further through this video another operating system that you may be virtualizing fairly often is Windows server and in this video we're just highlighting Windows Server 2019 for that to run the bare minimums are two gigs of RAM a 1.4 gigahertz 64-bit processor 32 gigs of hard drive space that's just for Server 2019 not a lot of requirements for Windows 10 you need two gigs of RAM and a one gigahertz processor and at least 20 gigs of of hard drive space these are the bare minimum requirements just to run these operating systems if you plan on using this computer as a daily driver meaning this is the computer that you'll use every single day whether it's for work for fun or for your learning you'll want to keep in mind that you're going to have other programs installed and running at the same time for instance if you're running a Windows computer right now you can open up task manager and you can see all the different programs that are running and using RAM and your processor and you might have a browser window open that's playing a video or you're anything like me you might have like you know 50 60 tabs of Google Chrome open and that can easily take up one two gigs even like four gigs of RAM very easily and very quickly so we have to keep this in mind as we're talking about the different specifications and requirements not only will your computer need to run a virtual machine or two or three or four virtual machines but you also have to take into consideration that you're gonna have Chrome open and you might have Discord open you might have other types of applications running at the same time now of course you can disable some of those applications but let's say for instance you're following along with a video and you at the very least have Google Chrome open you know that's definitely going to be pulling down some RAM and other resources as well so just keep this in mind as we're going through this with all of this in mind and for the sake of explaining everything in this video let's talk about the bare minimum requirements that you will need for your computer nowadays in 2023. I would say at the very least you will want 16 gigs of RAM now you could definitely get by with some tasks with eight gigs of RAM but I promise you you are not going to have the best experience and when you're trying to spin up multiple virtual machines eight gigs of RAM just it's not going to cut it to get the most bang for your buck you'll definitely want to prioritize at least having 16 gigs of RAM next we want to focus on our processor we want to make sure that we have a processor with at least four cores with Hyper centering so we should have eight threads total this would be the bear bare minimum and again it's not going to be a great experience with a processor with only four cores as you're trying to virtualize other machines you would be much better off with trying to find something with at least six cores and about 12 threads just so that we can have a slight upgrade and that will make a huge difference as we're spinning up multiple virtual machines the more cores and RAM that we can have the better our experience will be all around storage is the last thing that we really need to worry about because it's generally fairly cheap and everything tends to come with at least 250 gigs of hard drive space which is what we would really recommend now keep in mind if you have a lot of different applications or games and stuff that you want to throw on your computer you'll definitely want to have more hard drive space now you might be wondering why we chose those specs as the bare minimum that you would need to get started and that's because in our practical ethical hacking course on TCM Academy we have an active directory lab that you need to set up and that is four machines those are very specific specific locations with the very specific scenario that we gave you here you won't always be spinning up four virtual machines at once but you will find yourself spinning up at least a virtual machine or two fairly often depending on your role in security or as you're going through your Learning Journey here to gain more knowledge and if you're only spinning up one or two virtual machines at one time you can always allocate more RAM and more virtual CPUs to make them run a little bit faster so if you think you'll only be spinning up like one or two virtual machines at once you could definitely get by with a four core processor and eight gigs of RAM still not going to be the best experience but it will work for you and more than likely if you have a computer that came out in the last you know three four five years or so you should be okay because quad core processors have been around for a long time now and they've only gotten better and more affordable as well if you have a dual core processor you could maybe run like one virtual machine all right but again you're not gonna have a great experience but just keep in mind if if you do have a computer with two cores or four cores and only eight gigs of RAM if you're looking to utilize Kali Linux with burp Suite their recommendations are saying you should have at least eight gigs of RAM to be running burp Suites so that might be kind of difficult for you so these specifications that we gave you will be in one scenario and I promise you you will run through RAM and your processor in no time as you're loading up different tools and applications as you're going through your Learning Journey here now again keep in mind that these are just pretty much standard bare minimum specs that you'll want so you have a good experience whether that's through your learning or working Journey can you get by with less to some extent yes absolutely it's just not going to be the best experience as we stated a few times already but I just want to emphasize this so if you're really trying to be as affordable as possible you'll have to keep this in mind later on in this video we're gonna cover some resources that you can utilize to find cheaper Hardware or more affordable Hardware so let's just go over our budget now so just to say this one more time emphasize this even further you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on a new computer we're going to start at the very bottom here with the bare minimum specs that we gave you throughout this video and show you examples of computers that meet those requirements and they're also going going to be the lowest price so if you have a larger budget and you're able to spend more money you can absolutely look at upgrading the specs on these computers or find a computer that has better specs that more align with your higher budget again keep in mind that Ram is going to be very important and oftentimes a little expensive but it will be worth it so if you're looking to buy a brand new computer whether that's a desktop or a laptop or you decide to build your own for the bare minimum specs that we talked about this in this video you'll be looking at spending anywhere from 600 to 800 and here's a few examples here's an Inspiron 15 laptop from Dell it's 649 dollars but it meets those bare minimum requirements and another example is this Acer laptop which is six hundred dollars but it meets those requirements here's some other examples as well that I'll put on the screen but just keep in mind that these are just great examples of computers that are fine to help you get started if you're able to spend more money and upgrade components it will definitely make for a better experience for you but it is by no means required what if I told you that you could spend even less money and still have those same requirements you can buy a mini PC brand new for less than three hundred dollars and this will be more than sufficient and efficient than just plain fine to help you get started you aren't going to be playing crisis on any of these or anything like that but you will have a functioning PC that will help you in your learning experience heck you can even use a Raspberry Pi as a cheap option to help you virtualize some different machines as well these options are all less than three hundred dollars for something that's going to be brand new and if those aren't a good option for you one of the best things that you can do is just buy refurbished you can go on Best Buy Amazon Mac sales even Walmart has a refurbished and open box sections where you can buy computers at significant discounts just look at the listings that we found on Best Buy for refurbished laptops with the specs that we need I mean look at that we have a ton of options here for less than four hundred dollars and again if you have the extra money to spend it wouldn't hurt to purchase a refurbished computer with better specs as well you'll save a ton of money this way but ultimately the best option most of the time when trying to find a computer can be found close to home Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace are some excellent options if you're comfortable dealing with people and with the possibility that you may need to fix some minor issues or purchase some additional Hardware just to get things running you can often find computers that people say are broken or have a virus on them and it might not really require much money or any money at all to get them running and working again you can often find great deals on laptops with broken screens or keyboards that are still really good laptops and you can always just plug in a monitor or keyboard into that laptop and you'll be able to get started with something that's functional and working just great and again you can find really good deals meaning you can find really powerful computers for really cheap so definitely if you can check out Craigslist Facebook Marketplace those are going to be probably like the best way to get the cheapest equipment that you can and the same could be said for desktop computers as well you can find great deals on those some of them might not have hard drives but they're only like forty dollars nowadays for like 500 gigs so that's pretty affordable and one of the best things about desktop computers you can often upgrade the components in there so you can upgrade the RAM and sometimes you can even upgrade the processor in those and that can all be done very cheap because you could buy all of that Hardware refurbished as well and actually as I'm saying this it's incredibly important to research the type of computer or laptop that you're looking to purchase especially if you're wanting to upgrade that laptop or desktop computer because sometimes you're going to find especially with like the newer small form factor computers and even laptops that the components inside of them like the ram are soldered into place and you simply cannot replace or upgrade those apple is really big on this so with this point if you're anything like me you're probably wondering what type of computers professional penetration testers and other it professionals use on a day-to-day basis so I did the best thing that I could for you and I asked our team what the specs were on their computers and I would love for you to share what you are using in the comments below it's always interesting to see what other it Pros are using as well and speaking of that I also went out on social media and asked what it Pros are using in their day-to-day as it professionals so check out that post the link is in the description below and you could see what other real it professionals are using for their computers I stressed earlier that you don't need to spend thousands of dollars to get started and this is true so please keep this in mind as we go over some of these builds that we're going to talk about because some of these builds are absolutely ridonculous and these don't exactly represent the types of computers that every IT professional uses but as we go through these builds we'll discuss why some of these machines were built the way that they are the first build that I want to talk about is from Brad Thornton who is our director of compliance and he also does a lot of pen testing for us as well he's rocking an HP victus 16. this is an i5 processor with 16 gigs of RAM but this cost around a thousand dollars brand new so you can definitely find this cheaper refurbished for probably about half of that price the next build that we want to talk about is from our red team lead Joe Helly you might know him as the mayor Joe is rocking a Dell G7 7500 it has 32 gigs of RAM and it has an i7 six core processor brand new it cost him around fifteen hundred dollars next is Aaron Wilson who is our principal security engineer and he has a framework laptop that he proudly built with one of his family members I wanted to be sure to include that for him and it's running 32 gigs of RAM and an i7 12 core processor this cost him around twelve hundred dollars to build next is Alex Olsen who is our web app instructor he built his own computer with 128 gigs of RAM and he's running an AMD ryzen 9 processor with 12 cores and that ran him around four thousand dollars or so to build if you're wondering why that sounds so expensive we'll talk about that later on in this video as we talk about password cracking and custom builds next is Evan ottinger who is our senior security engineer or something like that and he built his own computer as well with 64 gigs of RAM and i7 processor with six cores and that cost him around three thousand dollars to build now before we talk about the next two builds I wanted to include myself and Adriana because I know somebody out there is going to ask if we don't include us Adriana is on our marketing team so if you follow us on social media or participate in any of our live streams you've more than likely seen her or interacted with her so I know people will ask about her as well so she is running a custom built computer with 16 gigs of RAM and an AMD ryzen 7 8 core processor and it costs her around 1200 or so dollars to build and I myself I'm running a custom build big with 128 gigs of RAM and an AMD ryzen 9 16 core processor and that costs down like around 20 400 or so at the time of the build Adobe products use a lot of resources now that we've gone over most of our team's computer builds here's where things start to get interesting if you follow TCM security for any amount of time you're more than likely familiar with our homegrown GPT AI I I mean DeWalt DeWalt is our help desk lead if you've ever had a technical issue with any of our courses or VMS that we run he has more than likely helped troubleshoot with you but he's so much more than that as he is also the bot I mean man behind the absolute Wizardry known as Pimp My Cali needless to say this guy does a lot with virtualization from troubleshooting building out custom VMS and scripts he runs a computer with 128 gigs of RAM and an AMD threadripper 29.90 this absolute monster is 32 cores yeah the 32 core processor just an absolute Beast so he very much deserves that as he is doing some really amazing things and giving us some really amazing results thanks DeWalt GPT now every build that we've talked about so far leading up to dewalts is pretty standard across the board that you're going to find with most it professionals working in the field for a number of years and this is important to note because by no means did any of the people that we talked about in this video start with computers that had those types of builds and they started with things that we talked about in this video bare minimum requirements please don't use these computers as a benchmark to determine what you might need to get started some of these builds might be affordable for you right now but for many of you out there they are not and that's okay you're going to find as you start venturing further and further in your it career you'll find yourself in a position where you should be able to afford some of these builds and your job or career might require you have a computer with better or even top of the line specs and speaking of requirements the one thing that I haven't mentioned at all in this video is a GPU a graphics card and the reason for that being is that when you're first getting started the graphics card is the absolute last thing that you should worry about because you're gonna find that this will also increase the price significantly and generally having a good GPU is just it's not required unless because yes there's absolutely a caveat here unless you are trying to crack passwords sure this can be done with a CPU but this will be painfully slow and utilizing a low end GPU will also yield pretty terrible results but ultimately if you're looking to crack passwords very often you'll be wanting to sync a lot of money into a graphics card or graphics cards many pen test organizations have some really expensive builds with multiple gpus running simultaneously to crack passwords and they do that much faster because the better and more GPU power you have the faster you'll be able to crack those passwords so for smaller organizations or Consultants they just might build out a custom computer that will help them in their daily life and serve a higher purpose as well like Heath Adams this is an absolute monster of a build and I have never seen anything like this and it's just phenomenal to even talk about like I just cannot believe a computer like this exists at this point but this computer that Heath built has a purpose his computer is running 512 gigs of RAM with an AMD threadripper Pro 59.95 WX which is a 64 core processor and two we're going to count them one two RTX 4090 gpus that build ran well over ten thousand dollars but Heath uses this as his daily driver and this is the machine that we use at TCM security to crack passwords for our organization because I mean gosh with a computer like that you better be doing something really powerful with it like cracking passwords that's why that computer exists so you don't need that to get started I'm just giving you this kind of grand spectrum of here's what you need to get started and here's where things kind of end up you know as you further your career and if you are looking to become a penetration tester and you're going to be cracking passwords then yeah one day you might need a computer like that but right now you don't need anything close so if that's something that you want to work up to one day I frankly don't blame you there because this would be amazing to have but you don't need anything like this right now to get started and that's what this video is all about throughout this entire video the theme has been keeping things affordable and also meeting the requirements that we need to get started or continue so we haven't said anything about Apple and that's for good reason because if you want to go out and purchase a Macbook and you can afford that by all means go ahead I have MacBooks myself as you saw and I love them but they are very expensive they are by no means required to get started but if you can afford it go ahead but keep in mind you don't need it so if you're looking for justification on why you need to spend thousands of dollars on a MacBook you're not going to get it here because you don't need to spend that kind of money I hope you find all the resources that we share with you helpful if you feel like we missed anything or you'd like to include your build in the comments below we would love to hear from you as always thank you so much for watching and take it easy