| Guided reading | If you hear a 13-year-old hacker brag about how awesome he is, it's possible because of Kali Linux . Despite being called a "script kiddie," Kali is, in fact, an important tool (or toolset) for security professionals. |
Kali is a Debian-based Linux distribution. Its goal is to keep it simple: to include as many penetration and auditing tools as possible in a useful toolkit. Kali achieves this goal. Most open source tools for security testing are covered.
Why Kali?
Kali is developed and maintained by Offensive Security. It's a well-known and trusted company in the security space, and it even has some respected certifications to certify security practitioners.
Kali is also an easy security solution. Kali does not require you to maintain a Linux system yourself, or collect software and dependencies yourself. It is a "turnkey project". All this tedious work doesn't require you to think about it, so you only need to focus on the real work to be audited instead of preparing the test system.
How to use it?
Kali is a Linux distribution. Like any other Linux distribution, you can install it permanently on a hard drive. It would work better that way, but you can't use it as an everyday operating system. Because it's built for penetration testing, that's the whole reason you use it.
It is best to make Kali a self-starting distribution. You can burn Kali to a DVD or create a self-bootable USB stick to run it. You don't have to install any software or save any files on a Kali. You can start it anytime you need to test a system. It's also very flexible, allowing the machine running Kali to run on the network you want to test whenever you want.
What can Kali do?
There are a lot of security tools in Kali and nothing else. That's what it can do. After all, Kali is a security tool.
It has classic information gathering tools like NMap and Wireskark.
Kali also has WiFi-oriented tools like Aircrack-ng, Kismet, and Pixie. For cracking passwords, it also has tools like Hydra, Crunch, Hashcat, and John the Ripper.
There are many more kits, including Metasploit and Burp Suite. These are just a few of the security tools that Kali has built in by default. It takes a lot of time to fully understand these tools, however, you can clearly see that many very popular tools have it.
Is Kali for you?
Kali is not for ordinary users. It's not a normal Linux distribution running on your laptop, but a cool "hacking OS". If you use this operating system, you will be running an insecure system because Kali is designed to run with root privileges. It is not inherently secure, and its configuration is not the same as normal Linux distributions. It is an offensive tool, not a defensive one.
Kali is not a toy. You can use it's built-in tools to do dangerous things (you know) that do real harm, and that's going to cause you a lot of real trouble. It's easy for an uneducated user to do something seriously illegal, and then you'll find yourself in a very helpless situation.
Having said all that, however, Kali is an excellent tool for a professional user. If you are a network administrator and want to do a real test of your network, Kali can do everything you want. Kali also has some excellent development tools for auditing their applications in real time.
Of course, if you happen to be interested in learning about security, you can use Kali in some controlled environment, and it can teach you a lot of really good stuff.
Kali Linux is a collection of many excellent security tools. It has incredible benefits for professional users, but can also cause a lot of big trouble for some malicious people. Use Kali carefully and take full advantage of its huge advantages. If you don't, you're going to spend the rest of your life somewhere (you know what).
Provide the latest Linux technology tutorial books for free, and strive to do more and better for open source technology enthusiasts: http://www.linuxprobe.com/