What is the first step in preparing a malware testbed?

The first step in preparing a malware testbed involves ensuring the integrity and authenticity of the environment, which is best accomplished by generating the hash value of each operating system and tool. By creating these hash values, you are establishing a known baseline for what the OS and tools should look like prior to any malware testing. This process is crucial for later verification, as it allows you to detect any changes or compromises in the environment after conducting testing, ensuring that results are valid and reliable.

This step is vital as it sets the stage for a controlled and secure testing environment. If you're not aware of what the original state was, contamination or unintended modifications may lead to misleading conclusions about the behavior of the malware being tested.

Setting up Internet services, isolating systems, or installing guest operating systems are all important steps in the overall process of building a malware testbed, but they follow the foundational task of ensuring that the environment is adequately documented and verified with hash values.