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.
Kernel 3.14, Tool Updates, Package Improvements Kali Linux 1.0.7 has just been released, complete with a whole bunch of tool updates, a new kernel, and some cool new features. Check out our changelog for a full list of these items. As usual, you don’t need to re-download or re-install Kali to benefit from these updates - you can update to the latest and greatest using these simple commands:
One of our goals when developing Kali Linux was to provide multiple metapackages that would allow us to easily install subsets of tools based on their particular needs. Until recently, we only had a handful of these meta packages but we have since expanded the metapackage list to include far more options:
Kali Linux in the Amazon EC2 Marketplace EDIT: For updated Kali Rolling images in the Amazon AWS, check this post.
After several weeks of “back and forth” with the Amazon EC2 team, Kali Linux has finally been approved into the Amazon EC2 marketplace. This means that our users can now activate and access Kali Linux instances in the Amazon cloud quickly and easily. We are “selling” these images on the marketplace for free, so other than the regular amazon charges, there no extras to pay. We have currently published a single 64 bit minimal instance of Kali Linux, which can be found in the marketplace by searching for “Kali Linux” or accessed via its direct link.