This course provides an overview of Kali Linux and some of its main components and features. We'll also take a look at Linux in general including how it looks, how to use it, how to use the command line, how to change the settings, and more. We recommend taking this course as part of the Web Penetration Testing & Bug Bounty Hunting learning path.
Intended Audience
This course is intended for anyone who wants to learn the basics of Kali Linux, with a view to becoming an ethical hacker and/or a bug bounty hunter.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, it would be beneficial to already have some experience with Linux.
Hi, within this lecture, we're going to learn about a couple of new Linux commands and that includes the Nano, which is kind of an editor that you can use in order to view the contents of the files and change them, write those changes and stuff. And we will actually use this a lot during the course, so let me show you what I mean. Right now I'm inside of root folder, okay? I'm going to cd .. and go into the Kali, okay? So, remember we can go into the Kali and we can go into the documents and we can even create any file over here with the root, right? So, for example, I did that before, right? Touch notes.txt. We did that before like a couple of lectures ago, right? So, you know the root can actually create any file inside of any user's folder. Right now, I have created notes.txt. Let's assume that I want to go inside of that notes.txt and write some notes. Of course, I can download any editor using apt like the package manager. Like we have learned before, like apt install, this editor apt install.editor and it would work. But it comes to that, when you know how to work with nano, you can do that in Kali Linux, you can do that in servers, you can do that in Ubuntu and everything like that. So, first of all, let me show you the cat commands. So, cat like in a cat. So, if you write this cat notes.txt, it actually reads the content of the notes, okay? Content of that file and show it to us. Since we don't have anything, it doesn't show up anything. Right now I'm just going to go ahead and nano this. Nano notes.txt. So, nano is a text editor in which you can change the content of a file, read the content of a file and write some code, write some commands whatever you want. For example, if you write test test test, you can see the available commands inside of the nano over here. For example, you can write out the changes with 'Ctrl O', okay? You can cut the changes with 'Ctrl K', paste the changes with 'Ctrl U' so it's a little bit different than what you used to do actually, not 'Ctrl X' or 'Ctrl C&V'. But it's not that hard, you can see all the shortcuts over here, right? For example, I have written this test test test and if I want I can do 'Ctrl O', 'Enter'. 'Ctrl O' and 'Enter'. In order to save this, I'll 'Ctrl X' to get out of it. Right now if I do cat notes.txt, here you go. Those lines have been saved inside of the notes.txt and I can read it by cat command. So, nano and cat. So, keep that in mind. You can use nano and cat and we will use them a lot during the lectures as I said before. So, let me exit out of this one. Let me open the Kali and I'm going to show you something. So, I'm just going to go into the documents, okay? So, I'm inside of my Kali user, here we go, notes.txt and if I nano notes.txt, let's see what happens. It says that file notes.txt is unwritable, which means that I don't have the permission of writing this inside of Kali user. So, this is one of the difference between the Kali and root. So, even if I write something and even if I try to do 'Ctrl O' and 'Enter' it won't work, as you can see it doesn't work. So, I don't have the permission. This is not related to nano since I don't have the permission to do that. By the way, I believe we have to say no to get out of this one. But I have the permission to read notes.txt as you can see if I do cat notes.txt, I can see all the tests. But if I do sudo su and I can go to the nanotest.txt and I can just change it in a way that I want. And I can just do 'Ctrl O' and 'Ctrl X' to save it, okay? 'Ctrl O', 'Enter', 'Ctrl X' to get out of this one. And if you see me use leaf pad during the lectures, during the course, you can use leaf pad or nano as well. And there is also something called vim. Of course, this is a good editor as well, but it is very hard to use if you're a beginner, so I wouldn't suggest you use it. You can go with nano, okay? And you can go with leaf pad or anything like that but nano is simple, nano is efficient, and you can use it across the Linux distributions as well. It's almost available in every one of them. So, let's stop here and continue with the next one.
Atil is an instructor at Bogazici University, where he graduated back in 2010. He is also co-founder of Academy Club, which provides training, and Pera Games, which operates in the mobile gaming industry.