Hacker Culture A to Z

Chapter 11. K

Kali Linux

Kali is a Linux-distribution operating system that’s popular with hackers who work as penetration testers. Pentesting, as it’s known, is all about simulating cyberattacks to find security vulnerabilities in computer systems. Defensive cybersecurity specialists then use that information to harden their systems’ security.

Kali is open source and can be downloaded for free. Originally Kali was designed for computers with x86/x86-64 architecture Intel or AMD CPUs. But now there are also versions of Kali that can be run on Android devices, Apple Silicon ARM64 devices (including newer MacBooks), and some other devices with ARM CPUs. All of those versions can be directly installed onto the machines or run as a live boot from a USB device, or there are also prebuilt images for virtualization in VMware and VirtualBox. There’s also a Win-KeX interface version of Kali that can be run from Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Either way, you get a desktop computing environment—Xfce by default in most versions—with a wide variety of hacking scripts and applications preinstalled. Kali is a fork of Debian Linux, and applications designed for Debian are fully compatible. It includes tools for cracking WiFi, capturing packets, malware analysis, and many other fun purposes.¹

See also “Debian”, “Linux”, “Penetration testing”

Key

There are keys on your keyboard, keys to your front door and mailbox, and I hear Florida has a lot of “Keys” too. But this entry is about encryption ...