14 DAY TRIAL // Kali Linux 1.0.8, a more mature, secure, and enterprise-ready version of BackTrack Linux, has been announced by Offensive Security and brings support for EFI systems, among other updates and changes.
The developers of Kali Linux 1.0.8 took advantage of this version change and decided to make other improvements to the operating system, although you will need a user account to see exactly what has been modified.
There are numerous Linux distributions in the open source ecosystem, but there are very few built specifically for penetration testing and digital forensics. It seems that the devs of Kali didn't do a good job transmitting the fact that Kali is actually a replacement for BackTrack. People are still looking for that distribution and they are still using it, despite the fact that it's no longer maintained and updated properly.
In fact, BackTrack had such an amazing success that it's still one of the most sought after Linux distributions right now, but Kali is more than apt to take over the mantle from the old distro.
“The long awaited Kali Linux USB EFI boot support feature has been added to our binary ISO builds, which has prompted this early Kali Linux 1.0.8 release. This new feature simplifies getting Kali installed and running on more recent hardware which requires EFI as well as various Apple Macbooks Air and Retina models. Besides the addition of EFI support, there is a whole array of tool updates and fixes that have accumulated over the past couple of months.”
“As this new release focuses almost entirely on the EFI capable ISO image, Offensive Security won't be releasing additional ARM or VMWare images with 1.0.8. As usual, you don't need to re-download Kali if you've got it installed, and apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade should do the job,” say the developers in the official announcement.
According to the changelog, ghost-phisher has been added, a scapy sendpfast bug has been corrected, the device-pharmer upstream has been updated, “acccheck” now opens from the kali-menu, a tool to audit the Robots.txt automatically has been added (Parsero), SSLsplit has been updated, Armitage has been updated to version 07.15.14, Automater is now at version 2.0, Nishang has been updated to version 0.3, and open-vm-tools has been updated to a newer version from the unstable branch.
Kali Linux 1.0.8 is distributed as DVD ISO images featuring the GNOME desktop environment and supporting the x86, AMD64, and ARM architectures. You can download Kali Linux 1.0.8 right now from Softpedia.