Whenever we are given the opportunity to describe Kali Linux, we use the word “powerful”. Have you ever wondered or asked yourself why exactly we consider Kali to be so “Powerful”? Why is Kali any different or better from say, an Ubuntu machine with a bunch of security tools preinstalled on it?
In keeping with our tradition of publishing new releases during the annual Black Hat and DEF CON conferences, we are pleased to announce the availability of Kali Linux 1.0.4. The last few months since the initial release of Kali have seen a large number of changes, upgrades, and improvements in the distribution, all of which are included in version 1.
We’ve just pushed a bunch of packages, tools, and utilities to the main Kali repositories. These tools have been on the top of our wish list for a while and some of them were quite challenging to package. Before we start telling you of our packaging woes, here’s how to update your Kali installation and get the latest goodness from our repos:
A couple of weeks ago, we were approached (independently) by two blind security enthusiasts who both drew our attention to the fact that Kali Linux had no built-in accessibility features. This made Kali difficult, if not impossible, to both install and use from a blind or visually impaired user’s perspective.
We’ve been busy this week, still behind on our emails, but going strong with Kali development. We packaged some new tools which were pointed out by the community as missing, such as inguma, arachni, bully, lbd, uniscan, automater, as well as started to build a framework of libraries and patches for bluetooth sniffing and ubertooth tools.
Five days into the Kali Linux release at BlackHat EU in Amsterdam, and we’re still not fully recovered. Since the release, we’ve had just over 90,000 downloads, a dozen or so package updates, added more articles to the Kali Documentation, started a Portuguese translation, and we even managed to squeeze in a small bugfix release (Kali 1.
Kali Linux, the rising It’s been 7 years since we released our first version of BackTrack Linux, and the ride so far has been exhilarating. When the dev team started talking about BackTrack 6 (almost a year ago), each of us put on paper a few “wish list goals” that we each wanted implemented in our “next version”.
Enter Kali Linux “So, what’s the difference between BackTrack and Kali?” you might be asking. Unfortunately for us, that’s not a simple question to answer. It’s a mix between “everything” and “not much”, depending on how you used BackTrack.
From an end user perspective, the most obvious change would be the switch to Debian and an FHS-compliant system.