Kali Linux Introduction

  Kali's ARM History When BackTrack ARM first came out, it was one image, for a Motorola Xoom. The work was done on the Xoom itself by  @muts . He started from an Ubuntu image for it, built all of the packages for BackTrack on it, then installed them.  @steev  then took the work and expanded it to support 3 or 4 different ARM devices he had, following a similar proceedure. @steev showed @muts the work he'd done and @muts was as excited about it as @steev was. When Kali came about, we retooled everything, including build servers for armel, armhf, and arm64. No more building packages manually on the ARM devices themselves. So everything was in place, but the images for ARM devices were still being built manually. Putting out an updated image meant downloading the last release, writing it to an sdcard, booting the device, running updates, building the kernel, installing the new kernel, cleaning up the logs and apt cache, then powering the system off, plugging the sdcard back into

  Kali Linux History ​Kali Linux is based on years of knowledge and experience of building a pentestion testing Operating Systems, which has spanned over multiple previous projects. During all these project's life-time, there has been only a few different developers, as the team has always been small. As a result, Kali has been years in the making and has come a long way.​ The first project was called  Whoppix , which stood for  WhiteHat Knoppix . As can be inferred from the name, it was based on Knoppix for the underlining OS. Whoppix had releases ranging from v2.0 to v2.7.​ This made way for the next project,  WHAX   (or the long hand,  WhiteHat Slax ).  The name change was because the base OS changed from Knoppix to Slax. WHAX started at v3, as a nod towards it carrying on from Whoppix.​ There was a similar OS being produced at the same time,  Auditor Security Collection   (often getting shorted to just  Auditor ) , once again using Knoppix, and efforts were combined (with WHAX)

  Kali Undercover Kali Undercover  is a set of scripts that changes the look and feel of your Kali Linux desktop environment to  Windows 10  desktop environment, like  magic . It was released with  Kali Linux 2019.4  with an important concept in mind,  to hide in plain sight . Going "undercover" Switching to undercover mode is pretty straight-forward, just run the following command: kali@kali:~$ kali-undercover kali@kali:~$ or, you can also look for  "Kali Undercover Mode"  from menu of your desktop and launch it. Swoosh!  Now, you are completely  (almost)  invisible. The script will turn your desktop environment's look and feel similar to that of Windows 10. Reverting Back Now, to  revert  back into your previous desktop settings just re-enter the previous command: kali@kali:~$ kali-undercover kali@kali:~$ Ta-da!  Welcome back! Now, all your desktop settings should be restored to. Purpose of Undercover Mode in Kali Linux The main purpose of introducing  Kali Un

  Kali Default Non-Root User For years now, Kali has inherited the default root user policy from BackTrack. As part of our evaluation of  Kali tools  and policies we have decided to change this and move Kali to a “traditional default non-root user” model. This change will be part of the 2020.1 release, currently scheduled for late January. However, you will notice this change in the  weekly images  starting now. The History of Default Root User In the beginning, there was  BackTrack . In its original form, BackTrack (v1-4) was a Slackware live based distro intended to be ran from a CDROM. Yes, we do go back a ways  (2006!) . In this model, there was no real update mechanism, just a bunch of pentesting tools living in the  /pentest/  directory, that you could use as part of assessments. It was the early days, so things were not very sophisticated, we were just all happy things worked. A lot of those tools back then either required root access to run or ran better when ran as root. With

  Kali's Default Credentials Kali changed to a non-root user policy by default since the release of  2020.1 . This means: During the installation of  amd64  and  i386  images, it will prompt you for a standard user account to be created. Any default operating system credentials used during  Live Boot , or  pre-created image  (like  Virtual Machines  &  ARM ) will be: User:  kali Password:  kali Vagrant  image  (based on their  policy ) : Username:  vagrant Password:  vagrant Amazon  EC2 : User:  kali Password:  <ssh key> Default Tool Credentials Some tools shipped with Kali, will use their own default hardcoded credentials (others will generate a new password the first time its used). The following tools have the default values: BeEF-XSS Username:  beef Password:  beef Configuration File:  /etc/beef-xss/config.yaml MySQL User:  root Password:  (blank) Setup Program:  mysql_secure_installation OpenVAS Username:  admin Password:  <Generated during setup> Setup Program

  Downloading Kali Linux IMPORTANT! Never download Kali Linux images from anywhere other than the official sources. Always be sure to verify the SHA256 checksums of the file you've downloaded against our  official values . It would be easy for a malicious entity to modify a Kali installation to contain exploits or malware and host it unofficially. Where to Get Official Kali Linux Images ISO Files for Intel-based PCs In order to run Kali "Live" from a USB drive on standard Windows and Apple PCs, you'll need a Kali Linux bootable ISO image, in either 32-bit or 64-bit format. If you're not sure of the architecture of the system you want to run Kali on, on Linux or macOS, you can run the command  uname -m  at the command line. If you get the response, "x86_64", use the 64-bit ISO image (the one containing "amd64" in the file name); if you get "i386", use the 32-bit image (the one containing "i386" in the file name). If you'r