Automating Kali installations for lazy pentesters

As you know, Kali is a specialized Linux distribution for cybersecurity, allowing vulnerability analysis, intrusion testing, network packet analysis, reverse engineering, and many other things. If you’re a pentester, you probably use it and know that creating Kali Linux VMs for each mission can be a bit of a hassle!

Fortunately, a new open-source project called Kali-automation-install will greatly simplify your life. This tool allows you to automatically create a Kali Linux VM with all necessary tools pre-installed, using a simple bash script that can be quickly and easily modified to meet your specific needs on each of your expert missions ;-).

This project was developed by sKillseries, a regular in the offensive cyber world, and also allows for configuring Kali in French to work with the two most common hypervisors: VirtualBox and VMware.

To use it, you’ll first need to install packer and your hypervisor of choice (I chose Virtualbox for the example).

apt install packer virtualbox virtualbox-ext-pack

Then, you can modify the variables in the kali-var.json file to customize your Kali Linux VM.

{ "iso_url": "<Kali-Linux Download Link>", "iso_checksum": "<SHA256Checksum of ISO> }

Finally, once these modifications are made, you can initiate VM creation with a single command directly from your terminal or your own scripts.

packer build -var-file=kali-vars.json config-virtualbox.json

You can even do it in headless mode if you want (without interaction) by adding the following parameter to your hypervisor json file.

"headless": "1",

You’ll find all the information on this project on its Github page.

Check it out here!