Announcing the Kali Linux Dojo

Kali Linux Dojo – Presented by Offensive Security

For the past 6 months, we’ve been busy silently developing an advanced Kali Linux course the likes of which has not yet been seen in the industry. This set of in-depth, practical workshops focuses on the Kali operating system itself, demonstrating some of its advanced features and use-cases by its developers. As with all “Offensive Security” training, this workshop is intensive, educational, and addictively engaging. If you’ve ever wished for fluent proficiency with Kali Linux, this workshop is for you.

Debuting the Workshops During the Cons

Our first opportunity to showcase this course will be at Black Hat USA 2014 in Las Vegas, where we will be running a full day workshop. This will be run separately from our regular Offensive Security Black Hat training classes (which by now are sold out). Shortly after the Vegas cons, we will also have the opportunity to present this workshop at the upcoming DerbyCon 2014 and BruCon 2014 conferences.

Conference Workshop Preview

The conference events will include an interactive Q&A session with the developers, an in-depth look at the distribution including hands on instructions for creating your own custom Kali Linux ISOs, automatic unattended installations of Kali Linux, enterprise management of the distribution, building and utilizing Kali Linux on ARM and Android platforms, and the step by step creation of a custom Raspberry Pi image – transforming it into an effective hardware backdoor. These are just some of the topics covered…for a more comprehensive listing of the ever-changing syllabus, you can check our official Kali Linux Workshop description.

Prerequisites for Conference Workshop Attendees

The workshop is both computer and network intensive. We’ve got the network part covered, but as you’ll be using your own laptops for the exercises, we’ve got some recommendations for you:

• Download our pre-configured Kali Linux Dojo VMware image. Make sure you are able to boot it.
• Familiarity with Linux is a must. We will be whizzing across modules, racing you with exercises. You wont be able to keep up if you’re not familiar with the Linux command line (needed for workshops 2-5).
• Bring a powerful laptop with a 1 Gbps network port and a fast hard drive. Bootstrapping and building ISOs will take a very long time on a machine which isn’t up to spec and you will likely be left behind (needed for workshops 1-5).
• Your laptop should have a full installation of 64 bit Kali Linux, either as a native installation, or as a virtual machine. Make sure it’s fully updated and that you have at least 80 GB of free space (needed for workshops 2-5).
• Recent cellphone/tablet running rooted Android, together with a fast MicroSD device with at least 8 GB free space (Needed for workshop 4).
• Fast, bootable USB drive with at least 8 GB capacity. Make sure the USB device is able to boot your laptops with a Linux OS (needed for workshop 2-3) ahead of time.
• If you’re planning to attend to any of these conference events, we recommend you follow us on Twitter (top-right of this page). This will allow us to keep you updated with any additional instructions, downloads, or requirements for each of these events.

Battle Tested, Free Kali Linux Educational Resources

After a very short deliberation, the Offsec team decided that once these training materials are polished and battle tested in the upcoming conferences, we will release them publicly and free of charge so that Kali Linux users worldwide will all be able to benefit from accessible, high quality training materials revolving around our favourite open source project. Our hope is that by doing this, our users will become both more aware and proficient with the advanced features available in Kali Linux and be able to use it more effectively. This means that we will release these workshop training materials to the public once the 2014 conferences end – for us, that ends up being mid December 2014. We will of course announce this release via Twitter and our blogs, so stay tuned!