Kali Linux is a Debian-based Linux distribution that specifically caters to the likes of network analysts and penetration testers. The presence of a plethora of tools that come pre-installed with Kali Linux transforms it into an ethical hacker’s swiss-knife. So, when it comes to ethical hacking or playing with networking tools, the first Linux distro that should come to your mind should be Kali Linux.
Today we’ll be checking out the latest Kali Linux 2021.2 release. This is the second release of the year for Kali Linux and it usually comes in quarters. The first quarterly release was in February and now we’re getting one in June. So, let’s check out what’s new.
What’s New in Kali Linux 2021.2
One of the most exciting things perhaps is the new Kali Tweaks Tool. It can help out with things such as installing or uninstalling groups of tools based on your particular needs. We can also enable or disable various different repositories that are available for Kali Linux depending on if you need to use them.
For example, you can disable the bleeding edge branch if you don’t want to use it. In addition, now you can choose between bash or zsh as your default shell environment.
Kali Tweaks is an exciting tool witch help you customize Kali Linux system based on your needs instead of having all sorts of different configurations and groups of packages that you don’t necessarily need depending on your use case.
The next new tool that grabs our attention in Kali Linux 2021.2 is a Kali Application Boxer (Kaboxer). This is an applications container for packages that are integrated into the standard Kali Linux package management system. It can use apt commands in order to install or remove these containers. Kaboxer is a great tool especially for developers and packagers out there.
Not much has changed on the desktop environment itself. It’s still using Xfce.
One thing that is new in Thunar file manager is that now you are able to open something as a root user. Simply right click and choose “Open as root”.
Finally the last thing we’ll mention is that Kali Linux 2021.2 kernel has now removed restriction to ports under 1023. So anywhere from 0 to 1023 are now available tcp and udp, because they decided most of the users of Kali Linux aren’t really running servers and should have availability to those ports for testing purposes. So, that is now patched directly into the kernel.
New Tools
- CloudBrute – Find a company infrastructure, files, and apps on the top cloud providers
- Dirsearch – Brute force directories and files in web servers
- Feroxbuster – Simple, fast, recursive content discovery
- Ghidra – Reverse engineering framework
- Pacu – AWS exploitation framework
- Peirates – Kubernetes penetration
- Quark-Engine – Android malware scoring system
- VSCode a.k.a. Visual Studio Code Open Source (“Code-OSS”) – Code editor
For more details on specific updates in Kali Linux 2021.2, check out the full release notes.
