So we have all seen Mr Robot, and it was a really good watch (even though it was a Fight Club rip-off in my opinion). Don’t worry, I won’t be giving away any spoilers, even though it finished about 5 or 6 years ago at this point. Well, in the series, the tools the main character uses on his computer are all (well nearly all) on Kali Linux,
I am not, as they say, “a hacker” for bad reasons; I wouldn’t even say I am an ethical hacker at this point, but I am going to fix that and add another string to my bow.
I hope that you will come with me. So let’s break this down by firstly explaining what Kali Linux is and why we would want to add this to our testing toolbox.
Kali Linux is a Debian-based Linux distribution specifically tailored for penetration testing, digital forensics, and security auditing.Â
That is the textbook overview; in any case, you can Google it.
What we are really bothered about is all the great tools it comes with out of the box
- Pen testing
- Security research
- Reverse engineering
- Vulnerability assessment
- Wireless network attacks
- Web application analysis
- Password cracking
- Forensic analysis
As well as learning how to do these things, I also want awareness of how I can defend against them, which makes sense, right?
First thing we will do is install it. And there are many options to do this (one thing I really like about Linux is how versatile it is, I mean, you can literally have this on a USB to boot up whenever you want, anywhere.
As a longtime Mac user, I was / still am a bit intimidated by Linux, let alone Kali, but the benefits will far outweigh the massive learning curve and the impostor syndrome I will no doubt feel whilst making Newbie mistakes. But by mistakes we learn, and get better, so I think I will be making a lot of mistakes, so by my own logic I should get good pretty fast.