Downloading Kali Linux

For safety and security reasons, it is always best to download Kali Linux directly from the website of its creators, Offensive Security. The main reason for this being that the downloads of Kali on other pages could possibly be fake, or worse, infected with malware such as Trojans, rootkits, and even ransomware. Offensive Security has also included hashes of all versions of Kali downloads on their site, allowing users to compare the hash of their downloaded version of Kali with what was generated and posted by Offensive Security on their website (https://www.kali.org). Once there, you can click on the Downloads link ,or go directly to the Kali Linux Downloads page by visiting https://www.kali.org/downloads/.

Once on the Downloads page, we can see six download versions of Kali available for download, each with specific category information:

• Image Name: Specifies the name of the download as well as whether the operating system is 32-bit or 64-bit.

32-bit operating systems are limited to utilizing only 4 GB of RAM. Should you have a system with more than 4 GB of RAM, you may wish to download the 64-bit version of Kali Linux.

• Download: ISO (an acronym for International Standard Organization) downloads directly via the user's browser. Torrent requires special software to be installed in order to be downloaded.

ISO files (or ISO images, as they are commonly called) are exact copies of data used specifically when duplicating data.

• Size: File size in GB.
• Version: Version of Kali Linux.
• sha256sum: Command used in Linux to generate a checksum or digital output representing the existing data, which can then be used to compare against the checksum of the downloaded copy to ensure that no data or bits were changed or tampered with:

For this book, we'll be using the Kali 64-bit, downloaded as an ISO image as seen here: