A little later than usual, but Kali 2024.2 is here! The delay has been due to changes under the hood to make this happen, which is where a lot of focus has been. The community has helped out a huge amount, and this time they’ve not only been add...

Following the recent disclosure of a backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma, we are writing this “get started” kind of blog post. We will explain how to setup an environment with the backdoored version of liblzma, and then the first commands to ru...

As of 5:00 pm ET on March 29, 2024 the following information is accurate. Should there be updates to this situation, they will be edited onto this blog post.


The xz-utils package, starting from versions 5.6.0 to 5.6.1, was found to contain a backd...

Hello 2024! Today we are unveiling Kali Linux 2024.1. As this is our the first release of the year, it does include new visual elements! Along with this we also have some exciting new mirrors to talk about, and of course some package changes - both new...

Last month we were privileged to be invited by GitLab to participate in the introduction of GitLab’s DEI Badging integration. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) badging is an initiative that the Community Health Analytics in Open Source Softw...

TL;DR: Dear Kali user, when you have a moment, check your /etc/apt/sources.list, and add non-free-firmware if ever it’s missing.
Programmatically speaking:
kali@kali:~$ sudo sed -i 's/non-free$/non-free non-free-firmware/' /etc/apt/sources.list

...

With 2023 coming to an end and before the holiday season starts, we thought today would be a good time to release Kali 2023.4. Whilst this release may not have the most end-user features in it again, there are a number of new platform offerings and the...

Today we are delighted to introduce our latest release of Kali, 2023.3. This release blog post does not have the most features in it, as a lot of the changes have been behind-the-scenes, which brings a huge benefit to us and an indirect positive effect...

TL;DR: pip install is on the way out. Installing Python packages must be done via APT, aka. Kali Linux’s package manager. Python packages coming from other sources should be installed in virtual environments.
Long story below.
Some background
Bac...

Quick off the mark from previous 10 year anniversary, Kali Linux 2023.2 is now here. It is ready for immediate download or upgrading if you have an existing Kali Linux installation.
The changelog highlights over the last few weeks since March’s r...

Wednesday 13th, March 2013, 10 years ago, Kali Linux v1.0 was first released. Today we want to celebrate Kali’s 10th anniversary!
Time has flown. And gosh, a lot has changed since then!
They grow up so fast!
This is the story of how Kali came to...

Today we are releasing Kali 2023.1 (and on our 10th anniversary)! It will be ready for immediate download or updating by the time you have finished reading this post.
Given its our 10th anniversary, we are delighted to announce there are a few special ...

One of the primary goals of Kali Linux is to put the tools you need as close to you as possible. Over the years this has resulted in a number of different ways to get Kali, but not everyone knows about all the options! In this post we are going to do a...

Before the year is over, we thought it was best to get the final 2022 release out. Today we are publishing Kali Linux 2022.4. This is ready for immediate download or updating existing installations.
A summary of the changelog since August’s 2022....

In Secure Kali Pi (2022), the first blog post in the Raspberry Pi series, we set up a Raspberry Pi 4 with full disk encryption. We mentioned that we can leave it somewhere as a drop box. This brought up the question, “If it is not on my local net...

The following blog post was written by a moderator on the Kali Linux & Friends Discord server, Tristram. A massive thank you to Tristram for writing this blog post and to all of the participants!


This past summer we held our first community ev...

In light of “Hacker Summer Camp 2022” (BlackHat USA, BSides LV, and DEFCON) occurring right now, we wanted to push out Kali Linux 2022.3 as a nice surprise for everyone to enjoy! With the publishing of this blog post, we have the download l...

This is the first part of a 3 part series of blog posts surrounding Kali usage on Raspberry Pi devices. This first post will cover enabling Full Disk Encryption (FDE) on a Raspberry Pi, part two will cover remotely connecting to it, and finally, part t...

We have always made all our build-scripts public. These are the same set of tools which we use to generate Kali Linux (for each release, or our weekly images). You may have noticed that previously there wasn’t anything about Virtual Machines (VMs...

A few months ago, Linode reached out to us asking “What would be needed in order to get Kali added to Linode?”. We explained to them how all the build-scripts that we used to create Kali are public, and what their different options and conf...

It’s that time of year again, time for another Kali Linux release! Quarter #2 - Kali Linux 2022.2. This release has various impressive updates, all of which are ready for immediate download or updating.
The summary of the changelog since the 2022...

Adjective (German)
unkaputtbar (comparative unkaputtbarer, superlative am unkaputtbarsten)
From un- + kaputt + -bar.

(colloquial) indestructible, unbreakable
Diese Flasche ist unkaputtbar. ― This bottle is indestructible.


With our 2022.1 release, w...

Today we are pushing out the first Kali Linux release of the new year with Kali Linux 2022.1, and just in time for Valentine’s Day! This release brings various visual updates and tweaks to existing features, and is ready to be downloaded or upgra...

Here is a very quick announcement for users of the Kali Linux Docker Images.
Until recently we used to have a Docker image named simply kali, and it was built from the last versioned release of Kali (e.g. 2019.4, 2020.1, etc.) matching our “kali-...

With the end of 2021 just around the corner, we are pushing out the last release of the year with Kali Linux 2021.4, which is ready for immediate download or updating.
The summary of the changelog since the 2021.3 release from September 2021 is:

Impro...

Today we have released the newest version of Kali Linux, 2021.3 (quarter #3), which is now ready for download or updating.
A summary of the changes since the 2021.2 release from June are:

OpenSSL - Wide compatibility by default - Keep reading for what...

Say hello to Kali Linux 2021.2! This release welcomes a mixture of new items as well as enhancements of existing features, and is ready to be downloaded (from our updated page) or upgraded if you have an existing Kali Linux installation.
A quick summar...

On and off for the last 18 months we have been working on Kaboxer, and just before Kali 2021.1, it is ready to say “Hello World” (then it will start shipping you applications).
TL;DR - What is this?
What is the name about, Kaboxer? Kali App...

When Ampere partnered with Debian, this caught our eye. We were aware that our current ARM cloud provider was soon ending support for arm64 servers (which we use for our build daemons).
At Kali Linux, one of the things which is important to us, is that...

Today we’re pushing out the first Kali Linux release of the year with Kali Linux 2021.1. This edition brings enhancements of existing features, and is ready to be downloaded or upgraded if you have an existing Kali Linux installation.
The summary...

We have always worked to support the information security community as a whole, and over the years experimented with different ideas (some with a greater success than others). One of the key components to Kali is the tools included (either pre-installe...

Many of you may have known about the show Mr Robot and its unique connection to Kali Linux. But there is a little bit more that we have not talked about due to NDAs. But it appears the mystery is over, the red tape has been removed, and we now wanted t...

As the end of the year is coming up (some may say not quickly enough), we want to take a few minutes and recap on our roadmap 2019/2020 post.
At a higher level, the last 12 months of Kali Linux (outside of the normal release items - e.g. packages updat...

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Today we are announcing the Kali Linux newsletter.
It’s easy to miss certain news. Not everyone is regularly checking our web page to see if something has been posted (and we don’t have a regular schedule of...

We find ourselves in the 4th quarter of 2020, and we are ecstatic to announce the release of Kali Linux 2020.4, which is ready for immediate download or updating.
What’s different with this release since 2020.3 in August 2020 is:

ZSH is the new ...

We have been humbled by the amazing response to our recent launch of Win-KeX. After its initial release, we asked ourselves if that is truly the limit of what we can achieve or could we pull off something incredible to mark the 25th anniversary of Hack...

Its that time of year again, time for another Kali Linux release! Quarter #3 - Kali Linux 2020.3. This release has various impressive updates, all of which are ready for immediate download or updating.
A quick overview of what’s new since the las...

Despite the turmoil in the world, we are thrilled to be bringing you an awesome update with Kali Linux 2020.2! And it is available for immediate download.
A quick overview of what’s new since January:

KDE Plasma Makeover & Login
PowerShell b...

Many outstanding discoveries have been made by our vibrant NetHunter community since 2020.1, so we have decided to publish a mid-term release to showcase these amazing developments on selected devices.
Massive thanks to our dedicated developers @Kimoco...

Just a quick update to the 2020.1 release we put out last month. We made some major changes to the installers, and some people had a few issues with some of the images we released. So, we made some slight alternations to smooth things out and make the ...

There was some recent noise around children and their use of Kali, so @Re4son stepped up with a new way to run Kali in locations where it may have been hard to in the past. This allows you to run Kali instances inside other Unix systems, making Kali ev...

We are here to kick off our first release of the decade, with Kali Linux 2020.1! Available for immediate download.
The following is a brief feature summary for this release:

Non-Root by default
Kali single installer image
Kali NetHunter Rootless
Impro...

Five years ago, the Python developers announced that they will stop supporting Python 2 in 2020. For a long time, nobody cared and Python 3 adoption was slow. But things have changed a lot lately as the deadline is right around the corner (1st January)...

We are pleased to announce that our third release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.3, is available immediately for download. This release brings our kernel up to version 5.2.9, and includes various new features across the board with NetHunter, ARM and packages...

With our 2019.3 Kali release imminent, we wanted to take a quick moment to discuss one of our more significant upcoming changes: our selection of metapackages. These alterations are designed to optimize Kali, reduce ISO size, and better organize metapa...

Kali NetHunter has been undergoing a ton of changes of late. Now supporting over 50 devices and running on Android devices from KitKat (v4.4) to Pie (v9.0), its amazing the extra capabilities that have been introduced.
But, we don’t want to stop ...

We love the Raspberry Pi, and judging by the response we got to a late night tweet we sent out last weekend a lot of you love the Pi too!
Because of that, when the Pi 4 dropped we wanted to get Kali supported on it right away.
What’s new on the R...

DigitalOcean is a cloud provider similar to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and many others. They offer instances, called “droplets”, with different Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, etc. Similar to AWS, Digi...

Now that our 2019.2 release is out, we thought we would take this opportunity to cover some of the changes and new features we have coming to Kali Linux in the following year. Normally, we only really announce things when they are ready to go public, b...

Kali Linux has had support for WSL for some time, but its usefulness has been somewhat limited. This was mostly due to restrictions placed on some system calls , most importantly those revolving around networking. Furthermore, additional issues with sp...

Welcome to our second release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.2, which is available for immediate download. This release brings our kernel up to version 4.19.28, fixes numerous bugs, includes many updated packages, and most excitingly, features a new release ...

Welcome to our first release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.1, which is available for immediate download. This release brings our kernel up to version 4.19.13, fixes numerous bugs, and includes many updated packages.
Tool Upgrades
The big marquee update of t...

Running Kali on a Gem
The Gemini PDA from Planet Computers is an ultra-thin, clamshell mobile device with a tactile keyboard. Sporting a 5.99" screen, QWERTY keyboard, 4G & Wi-Fi, deca-core CPU, and an Open-source bootloader that supports mult...

Welcome to our fourth and final release of 2018, Kali Linux 2018.4, which is available for immediate download. This release brings our kernel up to version 4.18.10, fixes numerous bugs, includes many updated packages, and a very experimental 64-bit Ras...

Inspired by a recent community blog post, we have decided to add a new official way for our community to use Kali. Starting now, you can find an officially maintained Kali Linux image in the Vagrant Cloud.
What is Vagrant?
From Vagrant’s website:...

One of the many useful things we can do with APT is create metapackages, which are effectively empty packages that declare a list of other packages as dependencies. Kali Linux includes metapackages for password cracking, software-defined radio, wireles...

We have been hearing a lot about WireGuard lately and with it being recently added to the Kali repos, we thought we would give it a quick try to see what all the fuss is about. All in all, we found this is a really nice and quick to configure VPN solut...