Kali 2.0 was released last week which means that we get to spend some time sifting through Offensive Security‘s latest release looking at all the new tools and tricks. Offensive Security promised us a better, more powerful penetration testing platform, and my preliminary look at 2.0 shows that they delivered.
The Look
Kali 2.0 switched over to the GNOME3 interface which brings a much needed update to the user experence. This new UI gives you a customizable favorites bar, which will certainly come in handy, having your common tools at the ready at all times. The new Applications menu in the top bar comes with new, easier-to-understand groupings. This is wonderful if you’d like to have a quick glance at all of your available applications.
Better still, Kali 2.0 also natively supports KDE, Xfce, MATE, e17, lxde and i3wm so if you’re not a fan of the default, you can switch fairly easily to one that you’re more fond of.
The Tools
Kali 2.0 includes a variety of previously-unavailable-by-default toolset including Maltego, Responder from SpiderLabs, and a sleu of wireless penetration testing tools. All of these and more are accessible through the the multi-level navigation mentioned previously.
The Updates
One of my personal concerns with the previous version of Kali was that updates weren’t frequent enough and tools weren’t updated as often as they should. Kali 2.0 is now a rolling distribution, meaning more updates to both the operating system and the natively supported tools.
The Upgrade
Upgrading from Kali 1.0 to 2.0 is easy, just open up a terminal and run the following:
cat << EOF > /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://http.kali.org/kali sana main non-free contrib
deb http://security.kali.org/kali-security/ sana/updates main contrib non-free
EOFapt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade # get a coffee, or 10.
reboot
Some Post-Install Tips
Installing NVIDIA Drivers:
Half of the fun of installing most Linux distros is getting NVIDIA drivers to work properly. Luckily, Kali has documentation and easy to follow steps here.
Adding a Non-root User
If you’re like me, you don’t like using the user “root” for pretty much anything. Adding another user is easy. Just do the following:
root@kali:~# useradd -m muts -G sudo -s /bin/bash
root@kali:~# passwd muts
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
Installing King Phisher
King Phisher is the must-have phishing application developed and maintained by our R&I team. Intalling this application is pretty easy.
cd /opt
sudo git clone https://github.com/securestate/king-phisher.git
sudo apt-get install libpq-dev python-dev
sudo pip install –upgrade psycopg2
cd king-phisher/
sudo pip install -r requirements.txt
cd tools
sudo ./install.sh
cd ..
./KingPhisher
Toggling That Sidebar On/Off
Straight from Offensive Security:
Basically, Offensive Security did a bang-up job upgrading the look and feel of Kali to something more modern and useable. I moved away from Kali 1.0 over the course of its lifecycle due to update and compatibility issues. Of course, as a pentester, logging in and opening a terminal minimizes the importance of the shiny UI (but it is a pretty nice upgrade). Thankfully, regular updates for both the tools and the operating systems are going to be pushed, and for the time being, I will be using Kali 2.0 as my main pentesting platform.
