Hey guys, what is up everyone? I am back for you with a new video. This time a highly requested video that many of you wanted from me over the past year
And I finally had the time to put something together. And today we are going to talk about the top things to do after installing Kali Linux
The article is already written and is already published on the website. I will link it in the description below
So in case the things I do in this video are a little bit too fast for you, just hit up the article and there is every command that we will use in this video
And you can just go ahead, read the article, copy paste the commands and you have a whole list of stuff what is going on in this video
Let me tell you one thing first, that if you are new to Kali Linux, I want to tell you that Kali Linux is not recommended for beginners
This is the first thing that you should learn if you want to get started with Kali Linux
Of course you have to start somewhere and I really cannot stop you, so I thought I put a list together of things, at least a little layer of protection
and tell you a couple of things that you should take into consideration when using a security distribution like Kali Linux
There are other operating systems out there like the Parrot OS that are a little bit safer to use than Kali Linux because they come pre-configured with a non-root user and stuff like this
So the privileges are a little bit different. But if you anyway want to use Kali Linux, I will just show you what to do to secure a system and to be on the safe side of things
Now I will tell you that the difference from this video to the written article is that the article actually gets updated along the way
So I specifically called this article Top Things to Do and not Top 5 Things or whatever to do after installing Kali Linux because I will constantly go ahead and update this list
So I really recommend you to put this link to my written article in your bookmarks and just check it out every half a year or so and see if you are still on the latest version of this article
Okay, enough for this introduction. I first want to quickly go over the VirtualBox settings with you because most of you will probably install it on VirtualBox
If you use something else, just skip over this part. It will just take a minute
So if you want to know how to install Kali Linux on VirtualBox, I will leave a link to another video in the description below. It's very easy
But let's quickly run through the settings. Connect your virtual machine, click on settings and of course just give it a name with the version number
Then you go to the systems tab, you allocate some memory. The default value at 2 GB is fine but just give it as much as you can spare confidently
So I went for 8 GB because I have a lot of memory there as you can see
Then head over to the processor tab and give it 2 processors. That's enough. Give it as many as you want as long as this is in the green area here
And then let's also go to the acceleration tab and I have this VTX AMD enabled. I have nested paging enabled and on here I have this PAENX feature enabled
I don't exactly know what this does but I never enabled it. I just nested as it came preconfigured from Kali. So this should be fine
Next go to the display tab. I'll allocate 128 MB of video memory and enable 3D acceleration
And the last thing I did, and this is up to personal preference, you can change your network adapter to bridge mode which simulates that your machine is physically connected to your local network
Or you can use a NAT network or NAT itself as it comes preconfigured. It's perfectly fine to use either option
Okay, I just wanted to run through a little bit through those settings. You can also just pause the video and check the settings you've already here
And now let's go ahead and get started. So, let's start it up. And this is really a vanilla version of Kali. I didn't do anything and I will run through with you each and every setting that I did on the top thing to do after installing Kali Linux
Let's first boot it up. And as you can already see, if you come from problems with hooks remote, the hooks remote is perfectly working on the preconfigured virtualbox VM from Kali
So log in with root and the default password is T-O-O-R. So root backwards
Okay, if you have installed Kali Linux manually, then you already set a password. But if you have also downloaded the virtualbox image like I did, the first thing you want to do is open a terminal and actually change your root password by typing passwd
And just simply enter a new, more secure password for your root user
Okay, password updated successfully and we are founded. The next thing I usually do and that's probably only applicable if you are outside of the US is hitting the Windows key to open up the search field here
And I want to search for keyboard to change my keyboard layout
And you can find that by going to region and language. So I'm located in Germany and I already changed that to German, but if you are in English you just press the plus sign here and choose your language
I just did it now and have to re-record it because something didn't work
I put it to French. And then you click on it and you move it up and then you go ahead and delete your old one that you don't need
Okay, so I delete French because now we don't need French. And we have the proper keyboard layout set and can work
Good! Since we have that done, we are going ahead and we are going to type sudo apt-get update and do sudo apt-get upgrade
Or let's do this. So what this does is it updates your repository, your software repository and it updates your system or updates your system to the newest version
Now I went ahead and did this before because it takes a long time to finish if you just started up the freshly installed or freshly completed VirtualBox in it
So just hit yes and probably it will again find some updates for me as well
And as you can see, another 290 megabytes. And if you do that initially, it will pull down about 1.8 gigabytes which will take a long time to install so you better plan some time
But it's important to do that so let's wait for that to be finished. By the way, every single question that comes up here while you're installing those updates
there might be something like if you want to use the default value, just always choose the default value and you are fine
Alright, gladly that was quickly finished for me. And the next thing to do if you are using VirtualBox, what I would recommend here is to go to devices and make sure the shared clipboard is on bidirectional and drag and drop is also on bidirectional
What that means is you could just go ahead and copy something from here and you would have it available on your host system as well to paste it
So you can also go and of course paste from your host system something into your guest system
So I'm gonna just demonstrate you. I just copied something from my article on my host system and I insert it here so that's how it works
Very useful if you have to do a lot of copy-pasting to do
Just let me close something in here on the side that I just almost forgot
Just go ahead and tap on your machine and now that you updated everything and you messed something up
you probably wouldn't want to go through the whole upgrade process again
So just make sure your machine is powered off and then go here on this three marks here and click on snapshots and click on paste to create a new snapshot
I just call it fresh installation after upgrade. Click on OK and it takes the snapshot from the machine so in case you mess anything up later on, which you will do
you can always revert back to this fresh installed snapshot. This is very, very useful and I would highly recommend you to do that especially as a beginner
It is a good idea to create a new lower privileged user account
Chrome and Firefox and a couple of other apps could never be run as root anyway
Therefore, let's go ahead and create a new account. Open your terminal and we are going to type ad user and whatever username you want
I call it low privileged user for this example and enter a safe password
So we got that and if you want to fill out this information or not, it doesn't matter
The information is correct and then you can check if the home directory was created by typing ls forward slash home forward slash
As you can see, the home directory for our new user was created
Now we need to add our new user to the sudoers group. If you want to use Kali Linux, you should be familiar with the sudo command already
I highly recommend getting the Linux basics straight before starting to use Kali at all
By adding the user to the sudo group or as originally referred to as the super user do group
which probably makes a little bit more sense, you are allowed to run commands that require root by putting the sudo command in front of it
So for example, the apt-get upgrade command that we run above wouldn't be allowed for our new user
We couldn't run it with him. But we could run it if we just put sudo apt-get upgrade
So the sudo in front of it, which basically says super user do
and then you need to enter your super user password that you set for the user
But let's go ahead and we need to add the user to the super user or sudo group by doing
usermod tag lowercase a and capital G, sudo and then low pref user
Just add the user to the sudo group and now we can run the commands by using sudo
Let's go ahead and log out from our root user. Click on log out. Yes
Log out. And log in with our new user name, low pref user
Whatever your user name is. Log out password. And now we just have to set up the user for that
And to do that, we open our terminal again and we can see that we are logged in now with the low pref user
and we are going to run css forward slash bin forward slash bash and low pref user
Now enter the password for your super user password basically. Try that again
Maybe you need to forget which password it was. Yeah, it was your user password
Simply type in your user password for your user here. All right
So now that we have securely set up our Kali installation and we are logged in with a low pref user
we can go ahead to the next step which is installing a drop down terminal
I absolutely love those drop down terminals and I really can't work without them anymore
If you have ever played games like Quake or Quake 3 or whatever
the old games you were able to put a console by pressing the trigger or circumflex button like here
and basically you can have the same thing in Kali Linux which is pretty amazing
and gives you a lot of freedom to just put down a console whenever you need it
We use Guache Terminal for that, hence the name Quake. It comes from that, like a variation of that
And we can install this terminal by typing now sudo. Let's make an example actually
Let's try to do app.get.install.guache. And we cannot do it because we don't have the privilege for that
So let's type sudo app.get.install.guache. Enter your password from your low privilege user
And as you can see, we are now allowed to install it
That could be quickly done. And come on, come on. There we go
Now we also want that Guache is starting automatically on the next reboot
Otherwise we always have to pull it up manually. So to do that we do sudo copy user share application forward slash Guache, I think
Guache desktop. Maybe we need to first start it. Let's see. I'm typing Guache
Let's start it. See if we can pull it down with F12
Maybe we have to just start it first. Let's see. Try that again
Sudo copy user share application. Oh, I think I had to toggle that already. Yeah
Dang it. Guache desktop. And then make a space here. Then forward slash p2p xdg. Alt-Restart
Hit enter. Your sudo password. And then we have it automatically started
Next time we restart our computer. So now as a bonus tip, if you want to, if you not want to use F12 to pull down, let's
start it again actually. Let's hit up Guache like this. And then if you press F12 by default, you see that a drop down terminal comes down and
you can use a couple of tabs here. And it's really, really, really handy
And if you want to reassign this button to the tilde or to the circumflex key, right
click somewhere in Guache. Go to preferences. And then go to keyboard shortcuts
And you can see probably Guache has visibility. Just hit it once and then hit the get circumflex or tilde key
And now if you press the tilde key, boom. Drop down terminal
As I said, it's amazing. I really love this terminal and I would not like to work with Audit anymore
You can see you can have a terminal open here. You can pull another terminal down. You can make another tab
It's pretty amazing. There are a couple of customization options like changing the background, transparency
and stuff like this. So just go ahead and play around with it as you want
This brings us to the next step which is install your favorite code editor
So if you don't code, just skip this step and go to the next step
But for all the rest of you, I like to just add them
Install whatever you want. I just will show you how to install Atom by using the terminal
And first you need to install a few prequisites for that. Let me quickly paste that because that's a quite long command
As I said before, you can just copy and paste it from the original architecture. So let's do the apt-get install gcons2, gconservice, gvstvfsbin and libcons2-4 whatever
Just copy and paste it. Put your password and without that in place, you are not able to install Atom
So let's quickly run through that. Okay, then we need to open a web browser and download Atom
So let's go ahead. I think it's atom.io. It's a really good open source editor by the way
If you don't know what to use, just go and try Atom. I really, really like it
And we want for Kali download the .eeb file. Save. 85 MB big
Should be downloaded fairly quickly. And we can already go ahead and navigate to our CD download directory
Where it should show up in a minute. Let's wait for that to finish
If you are wondering about my current situation, I did this video usually after working a full day
My brain is also a bit slow. Please excuse any mistakes or whatever you find along my video
Okay, next sudo vpkd-i atom-64.deb
And now Atom will install. It will take a couple of seconds or minutes
We just wait again for that to finish. It only took a couple of seconds to finish
Press your windows or command key. And have Atom and open it up
And it should easily start. And it does. That's it for installing Atom
Next on the list is OpenVars. OpenVars is a very popular open source vulnerability scanner
It is an essential tool at your repertoire. But because installing OpenVars initially is a lengthy process by itself
I simply point you to the link in the description below where I have a completely detailed article
and I think also a video on how to install OpenVars. And I recommend you to follow through that because, as I said, it's a more lengthy process
and it would shoot over the borders of this video length. I highly recommend using OpenVars
I personally use it almost all the time and on every assignment
because it can run scans and it sometimes brought up results that other scanners didn't bring up
and it's always like this. One scanner has different findings than the other one
and it's just another tool that you can use to find some vulnerabilities
Almost the last thing is installing your favorite tools and this is up to your personal choice again
but I can just recommend a couple of tools like Air. I use it regularly
One is AirGetOn. I will leave all those links in the description below so you can go ahead and install them by yourself
One is AirGetOn by Visitor. Ah, this is not here. Sorry, man
I always do that. I know. Visitor is here. And RootOfFloat is another one
Put it up here. All of them are GitHub. And I'm actually working on an installer for you guys
that helps you to install those tools easier. Then also the Flaxen which I use, which is a very nice Wi-Fi analyzer tool
So those are my favorite tools that I always install everywhere. If you are lazy, you can install a lazy script which helps you with all of those too
But as I said, I'm working on a script myself that helps you with this, with a GUI and stuff like this
to install those kind of scripts to make it even a little bit easier for you
And that's it for installing the tools. If you want a separate video on how to exactly install those tools, please hit me up in the comments below and I shall provide it as always
All right. We came to the last step and the last step is basically, or the last step in the written article is VPN
So, setting up VPN. I recently written an article where I compared the two most popular VPN providers that you can find in the link in the description below as well
I compared them as NordVPN and Private Internet Access. I always like to use a VPN when working with any security distributions
On Parallels Tech, you can use the FaceServe, I think it's called FaceServe or something, anonymous mode
It's an integrated VPN over the Tor network. Kali Linux doesn't come preinstalled with that, so I usually install a VPN
I won't show you how to do that here because it highly depends on which VPN you are using, so I cannot go through all of them
I can just point you to the written article again because there are instructions on how to install NordVPN and PR, Private Internet Access, on Kali Linux as well
So, I use NordVPN in this example in the article because it's easier to set up and, as I said, you can check that out in the written article
And, yeah, that's all the steps it takes to get up and running with Kali Linux and secure your distribution a little bit better
and get a better understanding of how things work and why you shouldn't run a high-privilege or a root user in your distribution
And if I haven't forgotten anything, those are the top things to do after installing Kali Linux, what I do every single time on every Kali installation
I do, and it is important to understand that you can be at risk when running the OS as root
This is the main takeaway for beginners, I think, of this video, or it should be at least
And it's definitely not recommended for a beginner to be on the Internet with a root Kali distribution
Alright? So, if you like those tips, if you didn't know about the drop-down terminal and stuff like this, I really..
I cannot live without it anymore. It's really, really useful. And if you like this style of video and this kind of video, these essential tips, that really should give you a little edge over just being a beginner
and just dabbling in the dark with those kind of distributions, hit the thumbs-up button, guys
It really helps me. Also, subscribe to my channel, because more content like this is coming every single week
I do a new video every week on different topics of cybersecurity, Linux, open source, and so on
Thanks for watching, guys, and learn new tools, and stay safe. Bye