Kali Linux Review, The Linux Penetration Testing Distribution

Kali Linux is a great successor to BackTrack. Many people loved Linux Penetration Distro/ Operating System that is aimed at penetration testers and security professionals. Read this following brief history of how Kali Linux came to be. Backtrack is very familiar around the last seven years. It is created and managed by Offensive Security.

Kali Linux is different for the fine folks over at Offensive Security,  when solving the ‘inherent problems’ of BackTrack the authors needed a complete re-write. The problem is too many pentesting tools embedded within BackTrack all struggled to co-exist within the dependencies.  BackTrack v1-v5 that a headache for dependencies. Many penetrating 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  stop working, crash or even cause other tools to crash. For example is Ettercap which was not updated for a long time.

For solving the problem we can rebuild the distro bottom-up by making Kali Debian based. Before with BackTrack there was a /pentest/ folder.  Now, it 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.

Another interesting feature about Kali Linux is that it is supported with ARM architecture so you can use the distro on Raspberry Pi’s and Chromebooks etc. You can also create your own  file with Kali through the Debian lifebuild feature.

For summary, Kali is a well thought out penetration testing distribution which had to address its’ previous problems with regards to updates. It has two modes: forensics and default, all of which run best in gnome. All the usual pentesting tools work with the distro with ease and the file hierarchy is the same as previous BackTrack versions. For 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. It is a solid pentesting Linux distribution.

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