Nothing to hand in
Kali Linux is a Linux distribution pre-loaded with tons of security-related tools. Officially targeted at the community of professional penetration testers, Kali is a very convenient way to get up and running as a student of computer security, an ethical hacker, or, of course, a not-so-ethical hacker.
This term, we will be using Kali as the basis for many of our hands-on activities. Thanks to the efforts of the awesome Rebecca Barkmeier and Mike Tie, the machines in Weitz 138 are set up to run Kali in a virtual machine. We can also run Metasploitable, an intentionally vulnderable Linux virtual machine, to act as our target machine when we are learning about various types of attack. More on this in the coming weeks.
Today, we just want to fire up the Kali virtual machine and give it a spin.
Running Kali in Weitz 138
- Boot into macOS and login.
- Launch VirtualBox. It's in /Applications, or you can use Spotlight Search (Command-Spacebar, type VirtualBox, etc.), or however you choose to go about finding apps on Macs.
- Start Kali. Select the Kali virtual machine in the left-hand panel of
VirtualBox, and hit the Start button. (Double-clicking on the VM also works, of course.)
- Login as root. Once Kali has booted up, login with username root and password toor. These are the default settings for Kali. NOTE: we kept the default root password in this virtual machine because we're using the VM only for lab exercises. If we were storing important data ZZ not changing default settings is one of the main reasons
- Open a terminal. The icon is in the dock on the left side of the Kali desktop.
- Execute a command. Try
ifconfigand thenman ifconfigto start thinking about your homework.