Skip to main content

Kali Linux review and a brief history of the BackTrack

Looks like Kali Linux is a great success. Kali Linux is the successor to BackTrack, the much loved Linux Penetration Distro/ Operating System that is aimed at penetration testers and security professionals. Before we dive into our brief review – we thought it would be cool to give a brief history of how Kali Linux came to be.
What is the history of Kali Linux and BackTrack?
We are all very familiar with Backtrack, which has been around for the last seven years – created and managed by Offensive Security, but what is the history of this famous Linux penetration testing distribution?
Much like we trace our ancestors back to Africa, so we trace Kali Linux back to Knoppix! Knoppix was one of the first ever bootable Live Linux Distro’s. Still in existence, Knoppix is a classic distro with a loyal community. Over time the Knoppix project was forked into WHoppix (yes the WH are meant to be capitalized) that was then re-forked into WHAX. WHAX was then re-branded and streamlined into the BackTrack that we all used. There is a common thread throughout these distros, (Knoppix, which became WHoppix, and then WHAX and finally into BackTrack); that is that the lineage focused on intrusion detection and digital forensics. BackTrack expanded the scope and allowed for many more tools to be incorporated into the distro. In any event, BackTrack had a long reign of almost seven years as the pentesters and hackers distro of choice. However, as of March 2013 the venerated distro was decommissioned and replaced by Kali Linux. Phew. Long story – but the bottom line is that Kali Linux is the result of a rich and colorful history.
So why bother changing the name?
Kali Linux is so different that the fine folks over at Offensive Security thought that to solve the ‘inherent problems’ of BackTrack the authors needed a complete re-write. The main issue with BackTrack v1-v5 was that it was a headache for dependencies. Here was the problem: too many pentesting tools embedded within BackTrack all struggled to co-exist within the dependencies. Many pentesting and security tools where not regularly updated by their creators so the result was that trying to update the entire OS often caused conflicts and tools would simply stop working, crash or even cause other tools to crash. A good example of this is Ettercap which was not updated for a long time.
The solution was to rebuild the distro bottom-up by making Kali Debian based. Before with BackTrack there was a /pentest/ folder, whereas now it is all updated and managed by Debian packages.
Kali Linux has 300 tools which automatically work within the Kali ecosphere. Kali also has been created with the clean “File system Hierarchy Standard” and offers vast plug and play wireless support, with the only exception appearing to be broadcom.
ARM Support
Another interesting feature about Kali Linux is that it supports ARM architecture meaning that you can use the distro on Raspberry Pi’s and Chromebooks etc. Incidentally, you can also create your own .iso file with Kali through the Debian lifebuild feature.
In summary
Kali is a well thought out penetration testing distribution which had to address its’ previous problems with regards to updates. The distro has two modes: forensics and default, all of which run best (in our opinion) in gnome. All the usual pentesting tools work with the distro with ease and the file hierarchy is the same as previous BackTrack versions – so you won’t have a problem using this distro if you are previous BackTracker. Offensive Security still insist that you run the OS as root so this probably won’t be your day to day distroFor pentesting Kali Linux is clearly an awesome OS with the world’s best pentesting suite of tools that can all be preconfigured. Couple that with the very large and loyal community, bug tracking service and attention to detail and yes, it is a solid pentesting Linux distribution.

Comments


  1. Nobody deserves a liar as a partner so kindly contact this hacker named Evans Webroot to help you hack into your patners pone device or computer so you can see things that your patner might have been hiding from you. Contact via ( Webroothacker@gmail.com ) or whatsapp +1 (917)275-0978.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Never met any hacker as discreet and fast like this White Collar Hackers. They are called WhiteHats and they has helped me in multiple ways first was when my ex spouse cheated on me- they got me every information from my spouse phone number and now they are helping me paying my credit cards debts. They have the best hacking tools plus service any one can ever imagine and I recommend him to the world. I am thankful and grateful for the second chance. Honestly, WhiteCollar hackers are life savers please contact them here if you need their swift service Email; WhitehatspytechATcyberservicesDOTcom

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

plz add ur comment here

Popular posts from this blog

Upcoming Book- Kali Linux Revealed: Mastering the Penetration Testing Distribution

More exciting news! In the past year, Kali Linux Official Team has been working internally on an Official Kali Linux book – Kali Linux Revealed: Mastering the Penetration Testing Distribution . This is the first official Kali book from Offsec Press , and is scheduled for release on June 5th, 2017 . Kali Linux Revealed will be available in both hard copy and online formats. Keeping the Kali Linux spirit, the online version of the book will be free of charge, allowing anyone who wishes to hone their skills and improve their knowledge of Kali to do so at no cost. This book, together with our official Kali documentation site will encompass the body of knowledge for the Kali Linux Certified Professional   (KLCP) .

Kali Linux: A complete InfoSec Distro

BackTrack has always been a popular choice when it comes to security and penetration testing. This open source distro has gained a lot of popularity and was rolled till version 5 with frequent changes to the variants. This project from Offensive Security has been moved from Ubuntu to Debian and the operating system is now renamed as Kali Linux. If you have installed a fresh copy of Kali Linux, then you might have noticed some awesome security and penetration tools under Kali Linux drop down menu list. These tools are powerful and yet efficient to use. If you go through the menu list of security tools, you might have noticed that few like Wireless Attacks, Forensics and Reverse Engineering is added, which is quite impressive. One more section has been added in the list, ie Hardware Hacking. One more thing that you would be happy to see is Arduino kit on the list. Arduino is a single-board microcontroller designed to make the process of using electronics in multi-disciplinary projects mo...

EOF of Kali Linux 1.0

Kali Sana (ver. 2.0) has been out there couple of months ago and the response was great. Kali Moto (ver. 1.0) has been given 2 months of grace period to date the version to 2.0. To upgrade, edit the souces.list file and put the following entries. 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 EOF Then, run the following command to do upgrade Kali Moto to Kali Sana. apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade # get a coffee, or 10. reboot