Learning Kali Linux

Preface

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

AI Koan

One of the places over the last half century that had a deep hacker culture, in the sense of learning and creating, was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and, specifically, its Artificial Intelligence Lab. The hackers at MIT generated a language and culture that created words and a unique sense of humor. The preceding quote is an AI koan, modeled on the koans of Zen, which were intended to inspire enlightenment. Similarly, this koan is one of my favorites because of what it says: it’s important to know how things work. Knight, by the way, refers to Tom Knight, a highly respected programmer at the AI Lab at MIT.

The intention for this book is to teach readers about the capabilities of Kali Linux through the lens of security testing. The idea is to help you better understand how and why things work. Kali Linux is a security-oriented Linux distribution, so it ends up being popular with people who do security testing or penetration testing for either sport or vocation. While it does have its uses as a general-purpose Linux distribution and for use with forensics and other related tasks, it really was designed with security testing in mind. As such, most of the ...