Sacrifice rig

A sacrifice rig is a computer used to do something risky, which may result in corruption of the operating system, without causing any real concern for the machine because it will be reformatted and reinstalled from a trusted, read-only source.

Typical roles for such a machine include examining attached hard drives for computer virus, being deliberately exposed to a suspected virus or trojan horse (computing) to see if infection or damage occurs, or testing a software, driver, or operating system update that has a risk of catastrophic failure.

A typical method of rebuilding the rig after a test would be to use Symantec Ghost_(software) to reinstall a previously-made drive image.