Starting with Kali - Linux Tutorial

- [Instructor] Kali is the latest evolution of what started out as a security testing suite called BackTrack. It runs on a wide range of hardware and is used extensively by professional security testers. Kali is a Linux distribution, which includes over 600 security testing tools and a graphical interface to make using the main testing tools easier. Kali is being continually upgraded with tools and changes to its graphical interface. However, the underlying operating system and approach to managing its tools remains the same. The Kali main screen has an active bar at the top with Kali tool icons at the left, and system icons at the right. Let's check out the system icons first. If we hover over the leftmost system icon, we see our network connection. We're connected on virtual wired connection one. When we click the icon, we get a dropdown menu, which allows us to disconnect or set up a VPN connection. If we disconnect, we get a cross showing that we have no network connection. If we click on the icon again and click on Wired connection, we once again engage the network. If we click on VPN connections and add a VPN connection, we can see we have a lot of different options for VPNs, including Open VPN. We don't need to use a VPN in this course, so we'll skip this. If we right click on the network icon, we can get connection information and can edit the connection. If we select Edit and select Wired connection one in the tools icon, we get the main panel up for adjusting our network connections. One of the common things we'll want to do is change from an automatic DHCP address to a manual address. We can do that by changing the method and adding the manual address. For instance, we can put 10.0.2.100. In our Netmask, 255.255.255.0 will give us a Class C subnet of 256 addresses. We can change that to 24, and that's a shortcut of 24 bits, which gives us exactly the same. In the gateway, we'll put 10.0.2.1, and in the DNS servers we have 8.8 8.8 to use the Google DNS, and we can save that. To activate the new address, all we have to do is disconnect the network and reconnect it. And if we check our address with IPA, we find our address is 10.0.2.100. Going back to our top ribbon system settings, we can see an audio icon next. We can use this to adjust the audio volume, and we're not using audio, so we'll move on. The next icon is notifications. Let's enable the do not disturb setting so that we don't get any notifications other than urgent ones, and we can see the notifications icon is now grayed out. The next icon provides the presentation mode power setting shortcut, and the settings for power. If we click on the settings, we get the power manager menu and we have more granular power settings. Let's select the systems tab and we can see that we never suspend due to inactivity. This is our preferred settings. If we select the display, we can blank the screen or we can leave it as never blanked. Our preferred setting is never to blank the screen or to switch off. The security tab has an automatic session lock when the screen savory is activated, which is fine. Okay, we can close that now. The final icon to the left of the ribbon bar is the time display, and if we click on that, we get a calendar popup. To the right of the ribbon, we have two system settings. The padlock icon is the screen lock and the power button allows us to manage our session, and the two options we're using most frequently will be restart and shut down. The left hand side of the screen has three panels. The first is the Kali applications menu, the second our favorite icons, and the third shows the workspaces. We'll come back to these later. If we right click on the main screen, we get a context menu, and there's a few options here. Create launcher used to set up menu items to launch applications. And create URL links provides a URL link on the desktop. Let's create one and we'll call it targets. And in the URL, we'll put http://www.vulnhub.com and create, and we get an icon appears on the desktop. We'll come back to this later. We have create folder and create a document. Let's click on the create a document. This provides a message indicating that no templates are installed, but allows us to create an empty file. If we want to use templates, we can add a blank template document to our templates folder. We do this from the terminal by going into templates, and we'll create a template called bash with #!/bin/bash. And when we create a bash document, it will have that at the top. Now when we create documents, bash appears as an option. The next context menu item is open terminal here, and this just opens a terminal with a working folder being the desktop. Open as root opens the file manager as the root account. We get a popup request for authentication and we put our password, which is Kali, and we get the file manager and we can see in the file system all our folders and under home our Kali folder. Open a new window also opens the file manager, but as the Kali user account. We can arrange the desktop icons from the context menu and we can adjust the desktop settings. This allows us to change the background, change the context menu settings, and adjust the icons. Let's remove all but the trash icon and let's change the icon size to 30 and close. And of course we still have our targets icon that we created. The final item in the context menu is applications, and this is the same menu we get if we click the icon at the left of the top bar. This menu allows us to run a program, open a terminal window, browse files, change our settings, or run any of the applications in the Kali menus, starting zero, one and going to 42. We'll be running through the applications menu shortly. So let's leave the initial tour of Kali here.