The Offensive Security has announced Kali Linux 2022.1 with major updates. The first version of the year 2022.
Kali Linux is one of the famous platform for ethical hackers and penetration testers.
After two months, Kali Linux 2022.1 release with new development including six softwares, visual refresh, desktop, boot splash, login backgrounds, arm updates.
New Theme Update
This update includes new wallpapers for desktop, login, and boot displays, in addition to a refreshed installer theme
The summary of the changelog since the 2021.4 release from December 2021 is:
- Visual Refresh – Updated wallpapers and GRUB theme
- Shell Prompt Changes – Visual improvements to improve readability when copying code
- Refreshed Browser Landing Page – Firefox and Chromium homepage has had a makeover to help you access everything Kali you need
- Kali Everything Image – An all-packages-in-one solution now available to download
- Kali-Tweaks Meets SSH – Connect to old SSH servers using legacy SSH protocols and ciphers
- VMware i3 Improvements – Host-guest features properly work now on i3
- Accessibility Features – Speech synthesis is back in the Kali installer
- New Utilities – Various new softwares added, many from ProjectDiscovery!
New Softwares
Between numerous packages updates, there has been various new tools added! A quick breakdown of what has been added (to the network repositories):
- dnsx – Fast and multi-purpose DNS toolkit allow to run multiple DNS queries
- email2phonenumber – An OSINT tool to obtain a target’s phone number just by having his email address
- naabu – A fast port scanner with a focus on reliability and simplicity
- nuclei – Targeted scanning based on templates
- PoshC2 – A proxy aware C2 framework with post-exploitation and lateral movement
- proxify – Swiss Army knife Proxy tool for HTTP/HTTPS traffic capture, manipulation, and replay on the go
Refreshed Browser Landing Page
This release comes with a fresh new look for the default landing page shipped inside Kali. Utilizing the refreshed documentation sites (Kali-Docs and Kali-Tools), the search function will help you find almost anything you could need using Kali Linux!
VMware i3 Improvements
For users that use Kali in a guest VM with the i3 desktop environment (kali-desktop-i3), VMware’s host-guest features (e.g. drag ‘n’ drop, copy/paste) were not enabled by default, it had to be done manually. This is now fixed and you should not have anything to do, it should work out of the box. This was enabled with package i3-wm 4.20.1-1.
Kali ARM Updates
A list of packages that were previously not available for the arm64 architecture, and that have been added in this release:
- feroxbuster
- ghidra
Bluetooth should now be fixed on the RaspberryPi images, aside from the Zero 2 W, which we are still hunting down a fix for and will release an updated image when it is ready. There was a change with the bootloader that changed the serial device name being used.
Image file names have changed to be a bit more verbose with their naming, instead of using short-hand or nicknames of devices.
Existing Installs: If you already have an existing Kali Linux installation, remember you can always do a quick update:
┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~] └─$ echo "deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main non-free contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list ┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~] └─$ sudo apt update && sudo apt -y full-upgrade ┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~] └─$ cp -rbi /etc/skel/. ~ ┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~] └─$ [ -f /var/run/reboot-required ] && sudo reboot -f
You should now be on Kali Linux 2022.1. We can do a quick check by doing:
┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~] └─$ grep VERSION /etc/os-release VERSION="2022.1" VERSION_ID="2022.1" VERSION_CODENAME="kali-rolling" ┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~] └─$ uname -v #1 SMP Debian 5.15.15-2kali1 (2022-01-31) ┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~] └─$ uname -r 5.15.0-kali3-amd64
NOTE: The output of uname -r may be different depending on the system architecture.
Download Kali Linux 2022.1
