Kali Linux Dojo, BlackHat 2016 - Las Vegas We have really enjoyed doing the Dojo at Black Hat the last few years. It’s been a great opportunity to show off some of the lesser known (but oh so useful) features of Kali Linux as well as interact with the user base. But one of the limitations of the previous structure was that while this was a hands-on exercise, many attendees moved at different paces from each other. So we wanted to move towards more of a “self service” model where attendees can drop in, have access to the training material, and will be free to work at their own pace. We accomplished with the new model we will be premiering this year, allowing everyone to take as much, or as little, time needed to get a working Kali install customized to their desires. While this is being done, Kali developers will be onsite and interacting with everyone on a consistent basis.
The folks at Black Hat have been kind enough to invite us once again to deliver a Kali Dojo in Las Vegas this year. The event will be held on the 4th of August at the Mandalay Bay hotel, and will be open to all Black Hat pass types. This year our Dojo will be set up differently, allowing for a larger crowd and much more interaction. We are going to hold a full day event, featuring several main activity areas :
Our First Release of Kali-Rolling (2016.1) Today marks an important milestone for us with the first public release of our Kali Linux rolling distribution. Kali switched to a rolling release model back when we hit version 2.0 (codename), however the rolling release was only available via an upgrade from 2.0 to kali-rolling for a select brave group. After 5 months of testing our rolling distribution (and its supporting infrastructure), we’re confident in its reliability - giving our users the best of all worlds - the stability of Debian, together with the latest versions of the many outstanding penetration testing tools created and shared by the information security community.
Kali Sana Release Aftermath Kali Linux 2.0 has been out for a couple of months and the response has been great, with well over a million unique downloads of Kali 2.0 as a testament. Release day was somewhat hectic for us, as we did not anticipate the sheer volume of traffic … which we somehow always underestimate. In the first few days after the release of 2.0, we had ten times the download volume of 1.0 in a similar period, back in 2013.
Our Next Generation Penetration Testing Platform We’re still buzzing and recovering from the Black Hat and DEF CON conferences where we finished presenting our new [Kali Linux Dojo](](/docs/development/dojo-mastering-live-build/), which was a blast. With the help of a few good people, the Dojo rooms were set up ready for the masses - where many generated their very own Kali 2.0 ISOs for the first time. But the excitement doesn’t end for us just yet. With the end of the cons, we now find ourselves smack in the middle of the most significant release of Kali since 2013. Today is the day that Kali 2.0 is officially released.
We’ve been awfully quiet lately, which usually means something is brewing below the surface. In the past few months we’ve been working feverishly on our next generation of Kali Linux and we’re really happy with how it’s looking so far. There’s a lot of new features and interesting new aspects to this updated version, however we’ll keep our mouths shut until we’re done with the release. We won’t leave you completely hanging though…here’s a small teaser of things to come!
For the latest information, please see our documentation on Docker
Last week we received an email from a fellow penetration tester, requesting official Kali Linux Docker images that he could use for his work. We bootstrapped a minimal Kali Linux 1.1.0a base and registered it under our Kali Linux Docker account. A few minutes later, said fellow pentester was up and running with Metasploit and the Top 10 Kali Linux tools on his Macbook Pro.
A short while ago, we packaged and pushed out a few important wireless penetration testing tool updates for aircrack-ng, pixiewps and reaver into Kali’s repository. These new additions and updates are fairly significant, and may even change your wireless attack workflows. Here’s a short run-down of the updates and the changes they bring.
Vulnerability scanning is a crucial phase of a penetration test and having an updated vulnerability scanner in your security toolkit can often make a real difference by helping you discover overlooked vulnerable items. For this reason, we’ve manually packaged the latest and newly released OpenVAS 8.0 tool and libraries for Kali Linux. Although nothing major has changed in this release in terms of running the vulnerability scanner, we wanted to give a quick overview on how to get it up and running.
After almost two years of public development (and another year behind the scenes), we are proud to announce our first point release of Kali Linux - version 1.1.0. This release brings with it a mix of unprecedented hardware support as well as rock solid stability. For us, this is a real milestone as this release epitomizes the benefits of our move from BackTrack to Kali Linux over two years ago. As we look at a now mature Kali, we see a versatile, flexible Linux distribution, rich with useful security and penetration testing related features, running on all sorts of weird and wonderful ARM hardware. But enough talk, here are the goods:
