• Kali distro of your choice (Gnome, KDE, LXDE, or MATE)
• A blank USB drive at least 16 GB in size.
• A laptop or workstation with manual boot options

Secure networking environments such as those found in most organizations that have IT departments present several challenges to you as a security engineer. The company probably has a specific list of approved applications. Antivirus applications are usually managed from a central location. Security tools are miscategorized as evil hacking tools or malware packages. Many companies have defensive rules against having any operating system that isn't Microsoft Windows installed on company computing hardware.

To add to the challenge, they prohibit non-corporate assets on the corporate network. The main problem you will find is that there are very few economical penetration testing tools written for Windows, and the few, such as Metasploit, that do have a Windows version, tend to fight with the lower-level operating system functions...

Running Kali Linux from Live Disk is best when you are doing forensics or recovery tasks. Live Disk doesn't write anything to the machine's hard drives. Some tools, such as OpenVAS, will not work at all, because they have to be configured and file updates must be saved. You can't do this from the DVD.

To run Kali from the DVD, just load the disk in the machine you are testing and boot from it. You will see the following screen. This is the screen from which you chose the Graphical Installer in an earlier section of this chapter. We will discuss the options now. Note that there are several options in boot live from the DVD.

• Booting from the first option loads Kali complete with a working network stack. You can run a lot of the tools over the network with this option. One of the best uses for this mode is the recovery of a dead machine...

Most of what you need comes preloaded on Kali. If you are working with Kali in specific areas, Kali provides a list of specific categories of tools in the https://tools.kali.org/kali-metapackages page, shown in the following screenshot:

That is a useful data source, but it may complicate your life a little, by forcing you to make choices. There are a few applications we have found useful that are not loaded with the base install. We will also set up and configure OpenVAS for use as our vulnerability scanner.

Kali comes with Leafpad as its default text editor. This is a very lightweight text editor. Kali's desktop is Gnome-based and the Gnome...

Recon is everything, so a good vulnerability scanner is essential. Kali used to come with OpenVAS installed. Now you have to install OpenVAS.

To install:

root@kalibook :~#  apt -y install openvas  

It must be configured and updated before use. Fortunately, Kali comes with a helpful script to set this up. This can be found under Applications | Vulnerability analysis | openvas initial setup. Clicking on this will open a Terminal window and run the script for you. This will set up self-signed certificates for SSL and download the latest vulnerability files and related data. It will also generate a password for the admin account on the system.

Kali also comes with a check set up script which will check the services and configuration. If an issue...

Clean and clear documentation helps you report your work. There are two documentation tools we use to keep documentation organized:

• KeepNote
• Dradis

A document organizer is a not just a glorified text editor or weak word processor. Proper documentation requires an organized filing structure. Certainly, a Windows security analyst could create a folder structure that lets them organize the documents in Kali Linux, just as they would on their Windows workstation. It is in-built in document organizing applications and using them reduces the chance of losing, or accidentally recursing, your folders. It is easier to keep track of your investigation's documentation. You can also create templates for the directory structure so you can standardize on a structure, which also makes your work easier.

There are several services that you will want to turn on when you need them. The general use of services in Windows and Linux is to have them start when the computer boots up. Most administrators spend little time managing services unless something goes wrong. In the Kali system, you will tend to shut down the workstation when you are not actually doing security analysis tasks, and you certainly do not want security tools, such as OpenVAS or Metasploit, that you have on your workstation to be accessible over the internet. This means that you will want to start them when you need them and shut them down when you are not using them.

You can find the commands to start and stop Kali Services from the Applications menu—Applications | System Services

Another way to work with services is by using systemctl on the command line. As an example, consider...

This chapter shows you two ways to set up Kali Linux so that you can use your company-issued Windows laptop, or any other laptop, to get better performance out of Kali Linux and not to have requisition to a new machine just for Kali. Most enterprises do not allow you to dual-boot your computer, and running Kali on a VM throttles the resources for your Kali installation. Further, this chapter shows you the two reporting tools we use, and the situations where each of these tools makes the most sense. We show you how to set up OpenVAS for the first time. We also show you how to run services on Kali Linux.