To get the most out of this book
The intent of this book is to emphasize Kali’s off-the-shelf capabilities as much as possible. Many commercial products are not mentioned, or if they are mentioned, free alternatives are reviewed in the labs (e.g., the free version of Shellter versus Shellter Pro). Today’s professional penetration tester has a wealth of excellent commercial tools in their toolset, but you can be an effective pen tester with what’s already freely available. Per The Hacker Manifesto, this was our intention with these discussions.
The version of Kali Linux used in this book is 2021.1; however, closer to the publishing date, I reviewed the labs with 2022.1 and found no issues. The processor and stack discussions assume a 32-bit operating system.
Kali Linux is free to download. However, Windows is a paid operating system. Thankfully, Microsoft provides evaluation copies of Windows Server and Edge developer copies of Windows 7 and 10; these were used as Windows targets in the labs.
The virtualization used was VMware Workstation, which is paid software. You can build comparable environments with the freeware Oracle VirtualBox.
The evaluation copy of Windows Server can be downloaded from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-server-2016.
The developer copies of Windows 7 or 10 can be downloaded from https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/.
