Category: Linux

One of our goals when developing Kali Linux was to provide multiple metapackages that would allow us to easily install subsets of tools based on their particular needs. Until recently, we only had a handful of these meta packages but we have since expanded the metapackage list to include far more options: kali-linux kali-linux-all kali-linux-forensic…

Enter Kali Linux “So, what’s the difference between BackTrack and Kali?” you might be asking. Unfortunately for us, that’s not a simple question to answer. It’s a mix between “everything” and “not much”, depending on how you used BackTrack. From an end user perspective, the most obvious change would be the switch to Debian and…

DigitalOcean is a cloud provider similar to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and many others. They offer instances, called “droplets”, with different Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, etc. Similar to AWS, DigitalOcean has datacenters around the world and sometimes multiple datacenters in each country. However, one feature in particular sets them apart…

Due to increasing popularity of cloud-based instances for password cracking, we decided to focus our efforts into streamlining Kali’s approach. We’ve noticed that Amazon’s AWS P2-Series and Microsoft’s Azure NC-Series are focused on Windows and Ubuntu. The corresponding blog posts and guides followed suit. Although these instances are limited by the NVIDIA Tesla K80’s hardware…

A little while back, a bug with the LVM encrypted install in Kali Linux 1.0.4 was reported in our bug tracker. This bug was high priority in our TODO as encrypted installs are an important feature in our industry so we wanted to squash this bug ASAP. This article will describe the process of debugging,…

As the end of the year is coming up (some may say not quickly enough), we want to take a few minutes and recap on our roadmap 2019/2020 post. At a higher level, the last 12 months of Kali Linux (outside of the normal release items – e.g. packages updates), Kali has had various refreshes,…

Now that our 2019.2 release is out, we thought we would take this opportunity to cover some of the changes and new features we have coming to Kali Linux in the following year. Normally, we only really announce things when they are ready to go public, but a number of these changes are going to…

One of the many useful things we can do with APT is create metapackages, which are effectively empty packages that declare a list of other packages as dependencies. Kali Linux includes metapackages for password cracking, software-defined radio, wireless, web applications, and more but if you have specific needs (like most people), it’s quick and easy…

Users often request the addition of vulnerability scanners to Kali, most notably the ones that begin with “N”, but due to licensing constraints, we do not include them in the distribution. Fortunately, Kali includes the very capable OpenVAS, which is free and Open-source. Although we briefly covered OpenVAS in the past, we decided to devote…

Introducing the KLCP Certification After almost two years in the making, it is with great pride that we announce today our new Kali Linux Professional certification – the first and only official certification program that validates one’s proficiency with the Kali Linux distribution. If you’re new to the information security field, or are looking to…

Kali Linux in the Amazon EC2 Marketplace EDIT: For updated Kali Rolling images in the Amazon AWS, check this post. After several weeks of “back and forth” with the Amazon EC2 team, Kali Linux has finally been approved into the Amazon EC2 marketplace. This means that our users can now activate and access Kali Linux…

Whenever we are given the opportunity to describe Kali Linux, we use the word “powerful”. Have you ever wondered or asked yourself why exactly we consider Kali to be so “Powerful”? Why is Kali any different or better from say, an Ubuntu machine with a bunch of security tools preinstalled on it? After all, our…

We have been hearing a lot about WireGuard lately and with it being recently added to the Kali repos, we thought we would give it a quick try to see what all the fuss is about. All in all, we found this is a really nice and quick to configure VPN solution, and might be…

WPA2 Key Reinstallation AttaCK or KRACK attack Recently, Mathy Vanhoef of imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven, discovered a serious weakness in WPA2 known as the Key Reinstallation AttaCK (or KRACK) attack. Their overview, Key Reinstallation Attacks: Breaking WPA2 by forcing nonce reuse, and research paper (Key Reinstallation Attacks: Forcing Nonce Reuse in WPA2, co-authored by Frank Piessens)…

We’ve been awfully quiet lately, which usually means something is brewing below the surface. In the past few months we’ve been working feverishly on our next generation of Kali Linux and we’re really happy with how it’s looking so far. There’s a lot of new features and interesting new aspects to this updated version, however…

Kali Linux contains a large number of very useful tools that are beneficial to information security professionals. One set of such tools belongs to the Pass-the-Hash toolkit, which includes favorites such as pth-winexe among others, already packaged in Kali Linux. An example of easy command line access using pth-winexe is shown below. We constantly strive…

In keeping with our tradition of publishing new releases during the annual Black Hat and DEF CON conferences, we are pleased to announce the availability of Kali Linux 1.0.4. The last few months since the initial release of Kali have seen a large number of changes, upgrades, and improvements in the distribution, all of which…

We’re happy to announce that we’ve once again listed our Kali Linux images on the Amazon AWS marketplace. You can now spin up an updated Kali machine easily through your EC2 panel. Our current image is a “full” image, which contains all the standard tools available in a full Kali release. Once your instance is…

For the latest information, please see our documentation on Docker Last week we received an email from a fellow penetration tester, requesting official Kali Linux Docker images that he could use for his work. We bootstrapped a minimal Kali Linux 1.1.0a base and registered it under our Kali Linux Docker account. A few minutes later,…

We’ve just pushed a bunch of packages, tools, and utilities to the main Kali repositories. These tools have been on the top of our wish list for a while and some of them were quite challenging to package. Before we start telling you of our packaging woes, here’s how to update your Kali installation and…