Chapter 2. Setting up Your Lab with Kali Linux

Preparation is the key to everything. It becomes even more important when working on a penetration testing engagement, where you get a limited amount of time to do the reconnaissance, scanning, exploitation, and finally gain access and present the customer with a detailed report. Each penetration test that you conduct would be different in nature and would require a different approach from a test that you earlier conducted. Tools play a major role in it, and you need to prepare your toolkit beforehand and have hands-on experience of all the tools that you will need to execute the test.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Overview of Kali Linux and changes from the previous version
• Different ways of installing Kali Linux
• Virtualization versus installation on physical hardware
• Walkthrough and configuration of important tools in Kali Linux
• Installing Tor and configuration