Kali Linux 2022.2 released with new tools, terminal tweaks and more

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It’s that time of year again, time for another Kali Linux release! Quarter #2 – Kali Linux 2022.2. This release has various impressive updates, all of which are ready for immediate download or updating.

The summary of the changelog since the 2022.1 release from February 2022 is:

• GNOME 42 – Major release update of the popular desktop environment
• KDE Plasma 5.24 – Version bump with a more polished experience
• Multiple desktop enhancements – Disabled motherboard beep on Xfce, alternative panel layout for ARM, better support for VirtualBox shared folders, and lots more
• Tweaks for the terminal – Enhanced Zsh syntax-highlighting, inclusion of Python3-pip and Python3-virtualenv by default
• April fools – Hollywood mode – Awesome screensaver
• Kali Unkaputtbar – BTRFS snapshot support for Kali
• Win-KeX 3.1 – sudo support for GUI apps
• New tools – Various new tools added
• WPS attacks in Kali NetHunter – Added WPS attacks tab to the NetHunter app

GNOME 42

Like for every (almost) half-year, there is a new version bump for the GNOME desktop environment. Kali 2022.2 brings the new version, GNOME 42, which is a more polished experienced following the work previously introduced in versions 40 and 41.

The shell theme now includes a more modern look, removing the arrows from the pop-up menus and using more rounded edges. In addition, they’ve upgraded and tweaked the dash-to-dock extension, making it integrate better with the new look and fixing some bugs.

Here is a preview of the upgraded Kali themes for gnome-shell:

Kali-Dark:

Kali-Light:

GNOME 42’s Built-In Screenshot and Screencast Tool

With GNOME 42, there is one new feature that is brighter than all of the others: the screenshot and screen-recording tool. It’s an enormous improvement in terms of user experience. Screenshots are, at the same time, saved to the ~/Pictures/Screenshots/ folder and copied to the clipboard, so the user does not need to find them.

Quick shortcuts to skip the On Screen Display (OSD) dialog:

• Window screenshot: Alt + PtrScr
• Full-screen screenshot: Shift + PtrScr

Other Desktop Enhancements

Xfce Tweaks

• Disable noisy motherboard beep when clicking the logout dialog! 
• Configure mousepad (text editor) to add the missing newline at the end of the file (POSIX standard): It was especially problematic if you used the text file in the terminal. Printing two files would show their respective last and first lines joined.
• Set the default wallpaper for multi-monitor setups
• Fix mouse pointer size to prevent auto-scaling in large displays
• New simplified panel layout for arm devices: The layout they generally use for Xfce works perfectly, but it could not fit in undersized displays. This issue was common on ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi, which can use a screen the size of the board. Therefore, they have created an alternative panel layout that gets automatically applied for all ARM-based images. Here is an example of a display with a 800×480 resolution:

This modification also removes the CPU graph widget, not only due to the horizontal space it required, but also because it had a performance hit in low spec ARM devices.

See Also: Attackers Use Event Logs to Hide Fileless Malware

Tweaks for the Terminal

• Small changes to the Zsh syntax-highlighting colours to improving legibility.
• python3-pip and python3-virtualenv are now included by default Kali installations.
• Added shell autocompletion for John The Ripper.
• All …2john tools (zip2john, 7z2john, pdf2john, etc.) can now be called directly by just typing their name, no need to cd /usr/share/john/ first.
• Resource packages (wordlists, windows-resources, powersploit, etc.) now show a much clearer output with colours differentiating the type of file or directory:

See Also: Offensive Security Tool: malicious-pdf

New Tools in Kali

It would not be a Kali release if there were not any new tools added! A quick run down of what has been added (to the network repositories):

• BruteShark – Network Forensic Analysis Tool (NFAT)
• Evil-WinRM – Ultimate WinRM shell
• Hakrawler – Web crawler designed for easy, quick discovery of endpoints and assets
• Httpx – Fast and multi-purpose HTTP toolkit
• LAPSDumper – Dumps LAPS passwords
• PhpSploit – Stealth post-exploitation framework
• PEDump – Dump Win32 executable files
• SentryPeer – SIP peer-to-peer honeypot for VoIP
• Sparrow-wifi – Graphical Wi-Fi Analyzer for Linux
• wifipumpkin3 – Powerful framework for rogue access points

They want Kali to be able to access and interact with as many different services as possible. We all know that databases often contain juicy information. And MongoDB is no exception. The client has been restored and fixed up. 

There have been numerous packages updates as well.

See Also: Write up: Find hidden and encrypted secrets from any website

Source: www.kali.org

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