Something I’ve learnt while studying within cybersecurity is that Linux is your best friend. Like anything, you can ignore it and use your preferred OS, however you’ll find most guides, videos, tutorials and writeups are using Linux.
The easiest way to get started within Linux with a cybersecurity focus is with Kali. Kali Linux is a Debian-based distribution of Linux which comes preloaded with common tools used by cybersecurity professionals, such as Metasploit, Burp Suite, John the Ripper and more, but these will be touched on in a later blog.
The easiest and quickest way to get started is to get a virtual machine (VM) of Kali Linux from their website (downloads linked here). Below is what I would consider the easiest method of downloading and running Kali:
- Download your virtulisation software of choice – in this example we’ll be using VirtualBox, which you can download here: virtualbox.org/wiki/downloads and selecting your current operating system under VirtualBox Platform Packages.
- Navigate to the Kali Linux downloads page for Virtual Machines: kali.org/get-kali/#kali-virtual-machines
- Download your Kali VM of choice, in this example click to download the VirtualBox installation. Once completed, extract and move to an easy-to-access location (for example, C:\Users\<username>\VirtualBox VMs\, where <username> is your OS username.
- Within VirtualBox, click Machine > Add and navigate to where you moved the extracted .vbox file to and click open (or click Ctrl-A)
- Once this appears in the list of machines, I would highly recommend updating the RAM allocation. This can be done by right-clicking on the machine and selecting ‘Settings’
- Once selected, System > Motherboard and change the base memory to at minimum 4096 and hit OK to save.
Note: I would recommend 8192 or higher if you have the availability on your device. If you only have 8GB available on your host machine (where you have VirtualBox installed), the default RAM of 2048 is viable, however you will run into issues when doing more memory-intensive tasks. - Click Start to launch the VM – how exciting!
- Once launched, default credentials are kali / kali for the username and password respectively.
And now you’re in, that was easy!
From here, the sky is the limit. I’ll be posting future blogs on how you can navigate Kali and interesting tools to dive in to.
