Using Kali Linux Lesson -1

Using Kali Linux Lesson -1

So you are using Kali Linux as the attack platform . Kali, the successor to the popular BackTrack Linux, is a Debian-based distribution that comes with a plethora of penetration testing tools preinstalled and preconfigured. Anyone who’s ever tried to set up a pentesting box from scratch the day before a big engagement knows that getting everything working correctly can be a real pain. Having everything preconfigured in Kali can save a lot of time and headaches. Kali Linux works just like the standard Debian GNU/Linux distribution, with a lot of extra tools.

Linux Command Line

The Linux command line looks like this:

As you can see, there’s not much in the root directory, only a folder
called Desktop.

The Linux Filesystem

In the Linux world, everything is a file: keyboards, printers, network
devices—everything. All files can be viewed, edited, deleted, created,
and moved. The Linux filesystem is made up of a series of directories
that branch off from the root of the filesystem (/).To see your current directory, enter pwd at the terminal:

Changing Directories

To move to another directory, enter cd directory using either the absolute or
relative path to the new directory, based your current location. The absolute
path is the path to a file in relation to the root directory (/).

For example, tochange to your desktop from anywhere, you could enter the absolute path to the desktop with : cd /root/Desktop to reach the root user’s desktop.

If you were in the directory /root (the root user’s home directory), you could use the relative path to the desktop (that is, relative to your current location) by
entering cd Desktop, which would also take you to the desktop.

Entering cd .. from root’s Desktop directory takes us back to root’s home directory. Entering cd ../etc from there moves us back up to the root of the
filesystem and then to the /etc directory.

Learning About Commands: The Man Pages

To learn more about a command and its options and arguments, you can
view its documentation (called its manual page, or man page) by entering mancommand. For example, to learn more about the ls command enter man ls as :

Creating a New File or Directory
To create a new, empty file called myfile, use the touch command.

Use ls to confirm that the new directory has been created, and then
change to mydirectory using cd.

Copying, Moving, and Removing Files
To copy a file, use the cp command as shown here :

Managing Installed Packages

On Debian-based Linux distributions such as Kali Linux, you can use the
Advanced Packaging Tool (apt) to manage packages.

To install a package,enter apt-get install package. For example, to install Raphael Mudge’s front end for Metasploit,Armitage, in Kali Linux, enter the following:

Processes and Services

In Kali Linux you can start, stop, or restart services using the service command. For example, to start the Apache web server, enter service apache2 start as shown next.