The Kali Linux Certified Professional (KLCP)

After almost two years in the making, it is with great pride to  announce Kali Linux Certified Professional certification– the first and only official certification program that validates one’s proficiency with the Kali Linux distribution.

If you’re new to the Information Security field or are looking to take your first steps towards a new career in InfoSec, the KLCP is a “must have” foundation certification. Built on the philosophy that “you’ve got to walk before you can run”, the KLCP will give you direct experience with your working environment and a solid foundation toward a future with any professional InfoSec work. As we continually see, those entering the Offensive Security PWK program with previous working experience with Kali, and a general familiarity with Linux, tend to do better in the real world OSCP exam.

For those of you who already have some experience in the field, the KLCP provides a solid and thorough study of the Kali Linux Distribution– learning how to build custom packages, host repositories, manage and orchestrate multiple instances, build custom ISOs, and much, much, more. The KLCP will allow you to take that ambiguous bullet point at the end of your resume – the one that reads “Additional Skills – familiarity with Kali Linux”, and properly quantify it. Possession of the KLCP certification means that you have truly mastered the Kali penetration testing distribution and are ready to take your information security skills to the next level.

* The KLCP exam will be available via Pearson VUE exam centres worldwide.

Upcoming Book- Kali Linux Revealed: Mastering the Penetration Testing Distribution

More exciting news! In the past year, Kali Linux Official Team has been working internally on an Official Kali Linux book – Kali Linux Revealed: Mastering the Penetration Testing Distribution. This is the first official Kali book from Offsec Press, and is scheduled for release on June 5th, 2017. Kali Linux Revealed will be available in both hard copy and online formats. Keeping the Kali Linux spirit, the online version of the book will be free of charge, allowing anyone who wishes to hone their skills and improve their knowledge of Kali to do so at no cost. This book, together with our official Kali documentation site will encompass the body of knowledge for the Kali Linux Certified Professional (KLCP).

Kali Linux review and a brief history of the BackTrack

Looks like Kali Linux is a great success. Kali Linux is the successor to BackTrack, the much loved Linux Penetration Distro/ Operating System that is aimed at penetration testers and security professionals. Before we dive into our brief review – we thought it would be cool to give a brief history of how Kali Linux came to be.

What is the history of Kali Linux and BackTrack?

We are all very familiar with Backtrack, which has been around for the last seven years – created and managed by Offensive Security, but what is the history of this famous Linux penetration testing distribution?

Much like we trace our ancestors back to Africa, so we trace Kali Linux back to Knoppix! Knoppix was one of the first ever bootable Live Linux Distro’s. Still in existence, Knoppix is a classic distro with a loyal community. Over time the Knoppix project was forked into WHoppix (yes the WH are meant to be capitalized) that was then re-forked into WHAX. WHAX was then re-branded and streamlined into the BackTrack that we all used. There is a common thread throughout these distros, (Knoppix, which became WHoppix, and then WHAX and finally into BackTrack); that is that the lineage focused on intrusion detection and digital forensics. BackTrack expanded the scope and allowed for many more tools to be incorporated into the distro. In any event, BackTrack had a long reign of almost seven years as the pentesters and hackers distro of choice. However, as of March 2013 the venerated distro was decommissioned and replaced by Kali Linux. Phew. Long story – but the bottom line is that Kali Linux is the result of a rich and colorful history.

So why bother changing the name?

Kali Linux is so different that the fine folks over at Offensive Security thought that to solve the ‘inherent problems’ of BackTrack the authors needed a complete re-write. The main issue with BackTrack v1-v5 was that it was a headache for dependencies. Here was the problem: too many pentesting tools embedded within BackTrack all struggled to co-exist within the dependencies. Many pentesting and security tools where not regularly updated by their creators so the result was that trying to update the entire OS often caused conflicts and tools would simply stop working, crash or even cause other tools to crash. A good example of this is Ettercap which was not updated for a long time.

The solution was to rebuild the distro bottom-up by making Kali Debian based. Before with BackTrack there was a /pentest/ folder, whereas now it is all updated and managed by Debian packages.

Kali Linux has 300 tools which automatically work within the Kali ecosphere. Kali also has been created with the clean “File system Hierarchy Standard” and offers vast plug and play wireless support, with the only exception appearing to be broadcom.

ARM Support
Another interesting feature about Kali Linux is that it supports ARM architecture meaning that you can use the distro on Raspberry Pi’s and Chromebooks etc. Incidentally, you can also create your own .iso file with Kali through the Debian lifebuild feature.

In summary
Kali is a well thought out penetration testing distribution which had to address its’ previous problems with regards to updates. The distro has two modes: forensics and default, all of which run best (in our opinion) in gnome. All the usual pentesting tools work with the distro with ease and the file hierarchy is the same as previous BackTrack versions – so you won’t have a problem using this distro if you are previous BackTracker. Offensive Security still insist that you run the OS as root so this probably won’t be your day to day distro. For pentesting Kali Linux is clearly an awesome OS with the world’s best pentesting suite of tools that can all be preconfigured. Couple that with the very large and loyal community, bug tracking service and attention to detail and yes, it is a solid pentesting Linux distribution.

Kali Linux: A complete InfoSec Distro

BackTrack has always been a popular choice when it comes to security and penetration testing. This open source distro has gained a lot of popularity and was rolled till version 5 with frequent changes to the variants. This project from Offensive Security has been moved from Ubuntu to Debian and the operating system is now renamed as Kali Linux. If you have installed a fresh copy of Kali Linux, then you might have noticed some awesome security and penetration tools under Kali Linux drop down menu list. These tools are powerful and yet efficient to use.

If you go through the menu list of security tools, you might have noticed that few like Wireless Attacks, Forensics and Reverse Engineering is added, which is quite impressive. One more section has been added in the list, ie Hardware Hacking. One more thing that you would be happy to see is Arduino kit on the list. Arduino is a single-board microcontroller designed to make the process of using electronics in multi-disciplinary projects more accessible. The hardware consists of a simple open source hardware board designed around an 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontroller, though a new model has been designed around a 32-bit Atmel ARM. The software consists of a standard programming language compiler and a boot loader that executes on the microcontroller. The Forensic tools added were also quite impressive, thus making Kali Linux a complete security distro.

Another good option when it comes for the pen testing point of view was Stress Testing. Rather than checking out for different tools over the internet, tools have been provided for stress testing.

Though InfoSec professionals setup their own machines as per as their requirements. But Kali Linux is a complete InfoSec ased distro that gives you versatile features under one distro. The distro can be downloaded from the official page. ARM option gives power to tablet users this time.

BackTrack vs. Kali Linux

As we know Kali Linux is the successor of BackTrack 5, so there are much similarities to BackTrack in many ways, but it lays a new foundation and makes substantial improvements that will allow it to be even more useful to penetration testers in the coming years.

BackTrack

Many security practitioners have been using BackTrack to perform their security assessments. BackTrack is an open-source Linux-based penetration testing toolset. BackTrack made performing a security assessment easier because all of the common tools that you needed were all packaged into one nice distribution and ready to go at a moment's notice. BackTrack contains so many security tools that it is too difficult to list them all. If you want to see a complete list of all the tools just run "dpkg --list". BackTrack made it easy to create a new VM from the downloaded ISO, perform the assessment, then either archive that VM for future reference or delete it when done to remove the evidence. The latest version of BackTrack is version 5 release 3 and it came out on August 13, 2012. If you want to explore this version, you can download it from this site. But before, you do, check out Kali Linux first.

Kali Linux

Kali Linux is a new open source distribution that facilitates penetration testing. Whereas BackTrack was built on Ubuntu, Kali Linux is built from scratch and constructed on Debian and is FHS-compliant. Kali Linux also has improved software repositories that are synchronized with the Debian repositories so it makes it easier to keep it updated, apply patches and add new tools. It is also easy to customize your own Kali Linux so that it contains only the packages and features that are required. You can also customize your desktop environment to use Gnome(default), KDE, LXDE, XFCE or whatever you prefer.

The development of Kali Linux was funded by Offensive Security. Offensive Security is a security training and penetration testing consulting firm that has been a creator, supporter and maintainer of BackTrack since the beginning. For years they have offered their popular Penetration Testing with BackTrack (PWB) class, but with the introduction of Kali Linux, that class name will likely change.

To get your hands on the latest Kali Linux distribution, you can download it from: http://www.kali.org/downloads or http://cdimage.kali.org.

Kali Linux offers documentation at http://docs.kali.org, bug reporting at http://bugs.kali.org and a Kali forum site at http://forums.kali.org.