Bridged versus NAT versus Internal Network

People are totally confused regarding how the network configurations in VirtualBox and VMware work. The three most popular configurations are Bridged, NAT, and Internal Network.

Let's start with the easiest option, which is the Bridged network. This architecture will let your Kali Linux connect directly to your network (LAN), and will get an automatic IP address from your home router. So, if your network is 192.168.0.0, then your Kali IP address will be something like 192.168.0.x (for example, 192.168.0.101). Now, you can interact with the machines on your network by using Kali Linux:

Some people are afraid of connecting Kali to the network, because it's open to personal computers. If you're anxious about it, you can choose NAT or NAT Network (on VirtualBox). If you're using VirtualBox, then use an NAT Network instead of NAT, because an NAT Network will automatically assign IP addresses (see the section of Installing Kali on VirtualBox for more details on the implementation of this architecture). When you choose NAT (or NAT Network), your Kali host will be assigned a different set of IP addresses. For example, if your home network IP addresses use the range of 192.168.0.0, then with NAT, you should use a different virtual LAN (VLAN), such as 10.0.0.0:

An Internal Network is for particular people, who want the machine to be completely isolated from LAN and WAN. You're probably asking yourself the following question: what is the purpose of all this? You will use this architecture if you know ahead of time that you're testing a VM with malware installed on it. Also, this architecture is used by security professionals when they interact with a Capture the Flag (CTF) machine that they don't trust: