Guide: Building a Legacy Security Lab on M-Series Macs

This guide addresses a gap for cybersecurity professionals and students using modern Apple Silicon (M1-M4) Macs: the difficulty in setting up labs for legacy x86 systems. Faced with the limitations of traditional virtualization tools like VirtualBox and VMware on this new architecture, I wrote this walkthrough for creating a functional Metasploitable2 and legacy Windows XP testing environment using UTM and QEMU.

The continued operation of unpatched legacy systems in critical infrastructure poses a significant, often underestimated, security risk. This guide empowers users to directly confront these threats by enabling hands-on practice with vulnerabilities like MS08-067, SMBv1 relay attacks, and EternalBlue. It restores vital capabilities for security training, vulnerability validation, and risk modeling (all on current Apple hardware) ensuring that practitioners can prepare for real-world attack vectors that remain actively exploited.

📰 Read the full guide and analysis on the blog:
👉 https://www.cvcyber.dev/post/legacy-systems-aren-t-dead-they-re-just-still-vulnerable

📄 Access the technical setup details and resources on GitHub:
👉 https://github.com/carla-cvcyber/metasploitable2-on-mac-m4