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Now that we've talked about using security tools in general, let's talk about some of the resources that are available to you to help get these tools and to help learn how they work and how to use them. You'll find that there's tons and tons of resources available to find your security tools, experiment with them, play with them and so forth and to see if they fit your needs before you add them to your security toolbox. First of all of course you have the Internet, the big old Internet, you can Google anything or use your favorite search engine of course and find anything you want on just about any tool. If you're looking for a particular tool just type in the search engine and you'll probably find a ton of different results. Anything from reviews of the tools to user manuals and so forth. If you're looking for a tool that performs a particular function but you don't have a name for a tool or don't have anything in mind just do a search on that particular function or something you want it to do such as a scanning tool, just type in network scans and you'll get a wide variety of tools that come up and you'll be able to research those and pick and choose the ones that suit your needs. Some of other resources out there, VMware, we've talked about VMware, VMware is not the only virtual machine software out there, but its one of the better ones out there that a lot of security professionals use. And with VMware you can build your security labs and test your tools in, because as we'll say in a minute, you really don't need to be testing these tools on a live network at first, you need to test them first in a lab environment and VMware can help you do that. Microsoft is a very good resource for security tools and security vulnerabilities and information on windows. There's a lot of information on the Microsoft site and unless you really dig down in there you wouldn't know is there. Technet and some other technical information pages are out there. You can get security tools as well, such as the MBSA Tool and other tools that you can use to help you secure Windows a little bit better. You can also find information out on some of the security vulnerabilities and fixes that are available for Windows Platforms. If you're into the Linux or open source realm you can look at Linux Distro or community sites to find out different information about the different Linux options out there, different Linux tools and how to use them. There are a lot of how to manuals out there in the Linux community that you can download and learn how to use particular tools such as inMap or whatever. Also look at training sites, a lot of these sites particularly Tool Specific Sites they have free how to downloads, e-Books, Faq's frequently asked questions, even user manuals. A lot of commercial products, firewall products, antivirus products and so forth have user manuals that you can download and actually read and learn how to use the tool. Additionally a lot of these tools, especially some of the higher end commercial paid for tools offer 30 day free trials or some kind of free trial that you can download and actually learn how to use the tool before you actually make the decision to purchase it. So if you're going to buy a tool I would recommend that you download the free version if there's one available or trial version and learn to use it to first and figure out if it will suit your needs and learn how to use it. And let me also say, now we mentioned this a little bit before that you should never try to test tools on a live network first because a lot of these tools can break things. A lot of them can actually execute denial of services attacks on the boxes or make things go a little but screwy and you may not know why or your users may not know why. So you don't want to try a security tools on a live network first, a production network. Build a lab environment and try them out on the lab environment. If you need a few machines just build them up. Normally you don't need a lot of different machines to try out tools, you just need two or three machines that maybe run specific pieces of software or specific OS' to try out these tools on. An actual network is good but it can be expensive to build and to reconfigure if you have a network that specifically has Windows Boxes and now you need to test a tool that's used on a Linux Box. You'd have to reconfigure that network and rebuild it. A better way to go might be to use virtual machines and as we've demonstrated through out this course, virtual machines are probably the best way to go because you're in a controlled environment, you can separate that environment from a production environment, you can rebuild it very easily if you need to, you can create different virtual machines that run different operating systems, such as Linux, Windows and so forth. So a Virtual Machine lab environment is probably what you want to start out with in order to test and use some of these security tools and that will probably be well worth the effort you put into it to do that. There are a lot of different resources out there as I've said and you only have to get on the Internet and find them or talk to other security professionals, become members of security groups or security organizations and you'll find out a lot about all these security tools that are out there.