Written by Simon

Setting up Kali Linux for the Cyber Mentor’s Practical Ethical Hacking Course

Heath Adams aka The Cyber Mentor has one of the most popular Ethical Hacking courses on Udemy. If you haven’t purchased it, you really should. It is available on Udemy at https://www.udemy.com/course/practical-ethical-hacking/ – Heath often runs specials on it. Check out his Twitter where he regularly posts 90% off codes. https://twitter.com/thecybermentor

The course teaches among other things:

  • Practical ethical hacking and penetration testing skills
  • Network hacking and defenses
  • Active Directory exploitation tactics and defenses
  • Common web application attacks
  • How to hack wireless networks
  • Learn how to write a pentest report
  • Understand the security threats affecting networks and applications
  • OWASP Top 10
  • IT security trends

His course is built to use Kali 2019.3 and he has a VM available for download but you can also use newer versions of Kali. If you want to use the newest version of Kali, you need to make some changes to the system.

root user not available

Kali Linux removed the root user in late 2019 and uses the kali user instead. To re-enable the root user for Kali, run the following commands

First we install the package to install the root login

sudo apt-get install kali-root-login

Then we create the profile for the root login

sudo cp -f /home/kali/.bashrc /root

Then you create a password for the root account

sudo passwd root

Fix the missing python packages

Kali is missing the Python 3 and Python 2 packages that various programs need to run correctly.

To install these packages, run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install python3-pip
sudo apt-get install python-pip

Correct the Samba installation

Finally you need to edit the Samba configuration files.

Run the command:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Scroll down until you the [global] section and add/change the following lines

client min protocol = CORE
client max protocol = SMB3