The first operating system that we're going to install is Kali Linux.
See, throughout the course we're going to use a number of hacking tools. You can install each of these tools manually.
Or you can do what most hackers do, including myself, and save time and effort and use an operating system designed for hacking.
We're going to use an operating system called Kali Linux. It's a Linux distro based on Debian, and the only difference between Kali and the actual original Debian Linux distro is the fact that Kali has a lot of hacking and penetration testing tools, pre-installed and pre-configured in it.
Therefore, once you install Kali, you will have access to so many hacking tools without the need to install or configure any of them, which will save you a lot of time and a lot of effort.
This is your home, your control panel to your Amazon Cloud account. So we're going to scroll down. And in here it's giving you a number of options to build a solution.
And the first one is to launch a virtual machine, which is what we want to do. We want to start a Kali machine. So let's open this in a new tab.
And even though this looks pretty cluttered and it might seem complex, it's actually very, very simple. Basically, first of all, it's asking you to give a name to this computer, to this virtual machine
that you're going to create, and let's call it Kali, because it's going to be a Kali machine. And if you scroll down, it's giving you the application or the OS, the operating system that you want to start.
So in here, it's giving you a nice slider that contains the most common operating systems that people usually use.
So you've got ubuntu, windows, Red hat, Mac OS and so on. Alternatively, you can click on Browse More AMIs.
Basically, an Ami is an Amazon Virtual machine, so you could use the search bar in here to search the marketplace for whatever virtual machine you want to start.
So you can see in the quick start we only have 44, but in the marketplace we got 5000 and 485 machines. So you could simply just in here type hacking and you'll get all the virtual machines that you could start that contain the word hacking in them.
You could read the description. You could even look up on Google what features these virtual machines have. But we want to run a Kali machine. So I'm just going to type Kali. And as you can see, we have a Kali machine in here.
You'll always see the latest current version in here. So we're just going to click on select. And as you can see it's saying it's eligible for the free tier. So that's perfect. So we can go ahead with it.
We're going to click on continue. And we're back to the same page where we were selecting the operating system. But as you can see now, Kali Linux is selected for us. So once we finish this process, Amazon is going to create a Kali machine for us on their servers.
Now, if we scroll down, it's asking us for the instance type. So the machine type or the resources of the machine that we will install Kali on. So we can use the drop down to change that. And we want to make sure we go for the free one. So as you can see, we can go for this one and this one.
| Kali Linux Image on AWS |
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These are the only two that are eligible for free. If you go for the others, you will be charged. So we're going to go with this one because it has the higher spec than this one. So it's going to come with one CPU and one gigabyte of memory. So not a lot of resources, but it should do for now.
Next, we'll have to create a key pair, which will be used to log in to this computer that we are creating on the cloud. So basically what we're doing is we're creating a Kali machine on Amazon's cloud servers. But we don't have physical access to this computer. It's at Amazon's servers.
Therefore for us to be able to use it, we're going to have to communicate with it using a service or using a tunnel that is called SSH. So SSH is a service that allows us to remotely control computers on the internet.
Now, obviously you can't control any computer you want. There has to be some kind of authentication between you and the server. And we do that using keys. So we create a public key on the server and a private key that will be kept by you by the user. Now this private key serves like a password. So you should never share it with anybody.
And you're going to use it in order to authenticate with the server, with the computer that we're creating on the cloud. And it will only allow you to control it over SSH if your private key matches the public key.
So in here, it's asking us whether we want to use an existing key pair or if we want to create a new key pair. Now, I've never created one, so I'm going to click on create a new key pair. We're going to set a name for this key pair.
So we're just going to name it "Kali-keypair" key pair. We're going to keep the options in here the same. And we're going to click on create a key pair. So as you can see now Amazon automatically downloaded a file.
For me it's called Kali dash Keypair pem. And this is the private key which I'm going to use to authenticate with the server. And it automatically stored the public key in the server in the right location.
So I don't need to worry about this key. But later on, once the machine is created, I'm going to use the private key that I have in my downloads. Right now it's called Kali Keypair PEM to authenticate and log in to my Kali machine that is stored on the cloud.
If you scroll down, it'll give you some network settings that you can modify, but we're going to leave everything the same in here. You could tick these boxes to allow connections to the web server, but I'm going to show you how to do that later on anyway, so you don't need to take any of this.
Scrolling down, you're going to get to the storage configuration, where you could configure the amount of storage that your computer is going to have. You could also set advanced settings in here, but we're going to leave that for now. You could also see a summary of everything that we selected so far.
So we're creating a Kali Linux machine. This is the instance type. We selected this because it's the free one. It's not the most powerful but it's free.
You can see we have no firewall settings. We'll talk about that later. The amount of storage we have 12GB. Now we're actually eligible for 30. So I'm actually going to change that here to 30. But make sure you stick with whatever you're allowed for for the free tier if you don't want to spend anything.
And we're going to click on Launch Instance. So now Amazon is going to do everything automatically for you. It's going to create a new computer on their cloud servers, install the latest Kali on it and install the public key on it.
So then you can log in to that computer using SSH using the private key that we just downloaded in here. And I'm going to show you how to do that in the next lecture. Now I'm getting another message similar to what I got when I was signing up with the verification problem. It was telling me it might take some time. It's saying that this machine is taking a little bit extra time than usual.
Give it some time. Try again in about half an hour or so. And then we're going to resume and continue. You can also click on the launch log to see where it's failing or where it's getting stuck. And we can see we're getting stuck at the subscription marketplace. But anyway, I gave it some time.
So I'm going to click on View All Instances in here to see if my instance is ready. And as you can see, my Kali machine right now is actually running. And I can actually go ahead and connect to it and use it. And I'm going to show you how to do that in the next lecture. If you ever wanted to come back to this page where you can see your machines after you log in, all you have to do is simply click on services and click on EC2.
Amazon has a number of categories for their cloud services, and the Kali machine that we created falls under the EC2 category. Therefore, all you have to do is click in here and you will end up in this page where you can see it and manage it.
Now that we have the Kali machine installed and it's running on the cloud, let's go ahead and see how we can connect to it, control it, and maybe hack some computers. As mentioned previously, we're going to use a program called SSH to connect from our local computer to the remote Kali machine and control it.
Now SSH is a command line program, which means that we can only use it to control the cloud computer using the system commands. We are limited to this at the moment because we just installed our cloud computer, and it actually does not have a graphical user interface.
I will show you how to install a graphical user interface on it in the future, but for now we're going to have to use it using SSH. And we're actually going to communicate with this computer using SSH often because it is actually much quicker and faster.
So you're going to get very comfortable with the command line as we go through the course. So first of all, before we can use SSH we're going to have to change the permissions of the key file that we downloaded so that it can be used with SSH in order to authenticate us with our cloud computer.
chmod 700 /Users/john/Downloads/Kali-keypair.pem
ssh -i /Users/john/Downloads/Kali-keypair.pem kali@3.15.236.163https://www.mediacollege.com/linux/command/linux-command.html
https://explainshell.com/