Kali Linux 2016.2 Delivers New Security Testing Options

In addition to multiple desktop options, Kali Linux 2016.2 offers updates for forensics, social engineering, sniffing and post-exploitation security tools.

In the past, users that downloaded Kali got the GNOME desktop environment by default. Now with the 2016.2 milestone, users can choose to download Enlightenment (e17) Mate, Xfce or LXDE desktops.

While choice of desktop environments is all fine and nice, fundamentally Kali Linux is about security tools. With the 2016.2 milestone, forensics, social engineering, sniffing and post-exploitation tools have been updated.

Among the many password tools included in Kali Linux is the John the Ripper password-cracking tool. The Johnny tool provides a graphical user interface front end, providing an alternative to the command-line interface.

There are many social engineering tools in Kali, including the Ghost Phisher wireless and Ethernet security auditing and attack program. According to its authors, the program is able to emulate access points and deploy various internal networking servers for networking, penetration testing and phishing attacks.

Among the interesting attack scenarios that Kali helps researchers test is that of sidejacking, with the help of the Hamster tool. According to the Hamster project’s description, hamster acts as a proxy server that replaces your cookies with session cookies stolen from somebody else, allowing you to hijack their session.

The Sparta tool that is included in Kali 2016.2 is a GUI application that is targeted at helping researchers during the initial enumeration phase of penetration testing, with scanning capabilities. Additionally, Sparta can help a researcher identify password re-use on the scanned infrastructure.

The idea behind the Faraday tool is to provide a multi-user penetration testing environment. According to Faraday’s GitHub project page, “The main purpose of Faraday is to reuse the available tools in the community to take advantage of them in a multiuser way.”

Powering the Kali Linux 2016.2 release is a Linux 4.6 kernel. Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the Linux 4.6 kernel on May 15.