Kali - An Introduction

Kali was first introduced in 2012 with a completely new architecture. This Debian-based distribution was released with over 300 specialized tools for penetration testing and digital forensics. It is maintained and funded by Offensive Security Ltd, and the core developers are Mati Aharoni, Devon Kearns, and Rapha?l Hertzog.

Kali 3.0 came into the picture in 2018 with tons of new updates, bug fixes such as AMD Secure Memory Encryption Support, and increased memory limits.

In the previous edition of this book, we saw some of the great tools in Kali that help penetration testers around the globe to perform their job efficiently. In this chapter, we will primarily cover the installation of Kali and setting up different desktop environments, as well as some custom tools that will help us.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Configuring Kali Linux
• Configuring the Xfce environment
• Configuring the MATE environment
• Configuring the LXDE environment
• Configuring the E17 environment
• Configuring the KDE environment
• Prepping Kali with custom tools
• Zone Walking using DNSRecon
• Setting up I2P for anonymity
• Pentesting VPN's ike-scan
• Setting up proxychains
• Going on a hunt with Routerhunter