Kali Linux on System Overlord

Security 101: Beginning with Kali Linux

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Fri, 03 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve found a lot of people who are new to security, particularly those with an interest in penetration testing or red teaming, install Kali Linux™¹ as one of their first forays into the “hacking” world. In general, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, I also see many who end up stuck on this journey: either stuck in the setup/installation phase, or just not knowing what to do once they get into Kali.

This isn’t going to be a tutorial about how to use the tools within Kali (though I hope to get to some of them eventually), but it will be a tour of the operating system’s basic options and functionality, and hopefully will help those new to the distribution get more oriented.

Chrome on Kali for root

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Sun, 24 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

For many of the tools on Kali Linux, it’s easiest to run them as root, so the defacto standard has more or less become to run as root when using Kali. Google Chrome, on the other hand, would not like to be run as root (because it makes sandboxing harder when your user is all-powerful) so there have been a number of tricks to get it to run. I’m going to describe my preferred setup here. (Mostly as documentation for myself.)

Setting Up Kali Linux

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 03:55:12 +0000

I've been meaning to write this up for a while, and it's as much a reminder to me as it's meant to be useful to anyone else, but with DEFCON around the corner, I'm reformatting my laptop for the trip, so now's the best time. I'm sure everyone has their own "routine" when setting up a new system. This is my checklist for Kali Linux, which I use for security cons & ctfs, and is separate from my everyday OS installs.

Booting Raw Partitions in VirtualBox with Grub2

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 06:44:27 +0000

Background: I dual-boot my laptop between two different Linux distributions: one for normal/desktop use (currently Mint), and one for "security" uses: mostly CTFs or otherwise hostile networks (currently Kali Linux). I also kept a Kali installation in a VM for use from within my desktop environment, but I was getting tired of having two Kali installations on the one laptop. I'd discover irritation at different configurations, not easily having data between the two, etc. Suffice it to say that fewer installations to maintain is a good thing. So I wondered: can I boot my raw hard disk install from VirtualBox?