The developers of Ethical Penetration Testing Distribution Kali Linux have announced the first release of the distro for this year, version 2022.1.
Kali Linux is a Debian-based Linux distribution that follows the rolling release model, which means you only need to install it once, and you'll always get the latest version of it, as long as you keep it up to date. A new version of the distribution is released every three months, and it is not suitable for beginners.
Kali Linux 2022.1 includes a lot of visual updates to the distro, including new wallpapers for desktop, login, and boot displays, in addition to a refreshed installer theme.
The functions, theme, and layout of the boot menu present in ISO images have been improved, and the UEFI boot menus and BIOS now have a unified look with the same options, designs, and menus to give the distro a consistent look in all respects to improve its overall user experience.
The prompt shell has been improved as well with the removal of the right-side prompt which had the exit code and the number of background processes, and the skull (💀) icon in the root prompt has been replaced with a simple ㉿ icon.
This release brings a new look to the default browser landing page by adding links to the new Kali-Docs and Kali-Tools documentation sites and search functionality, and it adds drag-and-drop and copy/paste support for the i3 desktop environment session on virtual machines.
Kali Linux now also offers a brand-new flavor that includes all Kali tools in one standalone image (ISO) for complete offline use. This ISO image is much larger than the normal image, it is over 9 GB in size and takes longer to install.
The development team has also returned the speech synthesis feature to the Kali installer to help blind and visually impaired users to install the OS, and a new setting is now included in the kali-tweaks Hardening section to enable configuring Kali’s SSH client for Wide Compatibility to make it easier to discover vulnerable SSH servers.
The feroxbuster and ghidra packages are now included in the arm64 Kali Linux 2022.1 installation images, Bluetooth has been fixed on Raspberry Pi images except for the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, and Kali's ARM build scripts now have a documentation page that explains them a bit more in-depth.
Furthermore, Kali Linux 2022.1 comes with the following new tools:
- dnsx : Fast and multi-purpose DNS toolkit allow to run multiple DNS queries.
- email2phonenumber : An OSINT tool to obtain a target’s phone number just by having his email address.
- naabu : A fast port scanner with a focus on reliability and simplicity.
- nuclei : Targeted scanning based on templates.
- PoshC2 : A proxy aware C2 framework with post-exploitation and lateral movement.
- proxify : Swiss Army knife Proxy tool for HTTP/HTTPS traffic capture, manipulation, and replay on the go.
Kali Linux can be downloaded directly from its official website by following this link, and existing Kali users can also upgrade their system by executing the following commands via the terminal:
$ echo "deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main non-free contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt -y full-upgrade
$ cp -rbi /etc/skel/. ~
$ [ -f /var/run/reboot-required ] && sudo reboot -f {codeBox}
{getButton} $text={Download Kali Linux 2022.1} $icon={download} $color={#4298EE}
