Kali Sana Release Aftermath Kali Linux 2.0 has been out for a couple of months and the response has been great, with well over a million unique downloads of Kali 2.0 as a testament. Release day was somewhat hectic for us, as we did not anticipate the sheer volume of traffic … which we somehow always underestimate. In the first few days after the release of 2.0, we had ten times the download volume of 1.0 in a similar period, back in 2013.
Our Next Generation Penetration Testing Platform We’re still buzzing and recovering from the Black Hat and DEF CON conferences where we finished presenting our new [Kali Linux Dojo](](/docs/development/dojo-mastering-live-build/), which was a blast. With the help of a few good people, the Dojo rooms were set up ready for the masses - where many generated their very own Kali 2.0 ISOs for the first time. But the excitement doesn’t end for us just yet. With the end of the cons, we now find ourselves smack in the middle of the most significant release of Kali since 2013. Today is the day that Kali 2.0 is officially released.
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 we’ll keep our mouths shut until we’re done with the release. We won’t leave you completely hanging though…here’s a small teaser of things to come!
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, said fellow pentester was up and running with Metasploit and the Top 10 Kali Linux tools on his Macbook Pro.
A short while ago, we packaged and pushed out a few important wireless penetration testing tool updates for aircrack-ng, pixiewps and reaver into Kali’s repository. These new additions and updates are fairly significant, and may even change your wireless attack workflows. Here’s a short run-down of the updates and the changes they bring.
Vulnerability scanning is a crucial phase of a penetration test and having an updated vulnerability scanner in your security toolkit can often make a real difference by helping you discover overlooked vulnerable items. For this reason, we’ve manually packaged the latest and newly released OpenVAS 8.0 tool and libraries for Kali Linux. Although nothing major has changed in this release in terms of running the vulnerability scanner, we wanted to give a quick overview on how to get it up and running.
After almost two years of public development (and another year behind the scenes), we are proud to announce our first point release of Kali Linux - version 1.1.0. This release brings with it a mix of unprecedented hardware support as well as rock solid stability. For us, this is a real milestone as this release epitomizes the benefits of our move from BackTrack to Kali Linux over two years ago. As we look at a now mature Kali, we see a versatile, flexible Linux distribution, rich with useful security and penetration testing related features, running on all sorts of weird and wonderful ARM hardware. But enough talk, here are the goods:
Squash the Bugs with Kali 1.0.9a Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen a bunch of nasty bugs hit the scene, from shellshock to Debian apt vulnerabilities. As we prefer not to ship vulnerable ISOs, we’ve rolled up new images for our Kali Linux and NetHunter releases as well our Amazon AWS images with the relevant security fixes in place. These images correspond to Kali 1.0.9a and NetHunter 1.0.2 versions, now available for download through our mirrors. We expect the Amazon images to be updated in the AWS backend by the end of the week. If you’re already running Kali Linux, all you need to do is run an update and dist-upgrade to get the latest and greatest:
Now that we have caught our breath after the Black Hat and DEF CON conferences, we have put aside some time to fix an annoying bug in our 1.0.8 ISO releases related to outdated firmware as well as regenerate fresh new ARM and VMware images (courtesy of OffSec) for our new 1.0.9 release. With this release come a few more updates worth mentioning:
The long awaited Kali Linux USB EFI boot support feature has been added to our binary ISO builds, which has prompted this early Kali Linux 1.0.8 release. This new feature simplifies getting Kali installed and running on more recent hardware which requires EFI as well as various Apple Macbooks Air and Retina models. Besides the addition of EFI support, there is a whole array of tool updates and fixes that have accumulated over the past couple of months.