We are pleased to announce that our third release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.3, is available immediately for download. This release brings our kernel up to version 5.2.9, and includes various new features across the board with NetHunter, ARM and packages (plus the normal bugs fixes and updates).

As promised in our roadmap blog post, there are both user facing and backend updates.

Kali Linux is Open Source, and Cloudflare hearts Open Source – so it’s a perfect match! As a result, CloudFlare has graciously allowed us to use their content delivery network (CDN) to mirror our repository, allowing us to now distribute our content through them. A more technical breakdown can be found on their blog.

We are currently running the CloudFlare services side by side with our standard and community mirrors.

If you notice the
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domain appearing on screen when you run
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, this means you’re using CloudFlare’s services.

We now have a status page – status.kali.org. This provides an overview of all public facing domains and allows you to check if they are responding correctly. We have included all the sites we control, as well as the community mirrors for the repositories, allowing you to see everything you could possibly use (even if you are unaware)!

Note: Our load balancer on http.kali.org should automatically detect when a mirror is not responding and redirect you to one that is. As such,
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should always work (even if slow at times).

We already announced the changes to metapackages in a previous blog post, and the Kali tool listing page goes into more detail on it. However, to recap, the default toolset going forward has changed. To help with this transition, for this release only (Kali 2019.3), there is a one-off, extra image called
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, that contains all previous default tools.

Going forward, during our release cycle, we will be evaluating which tools belong to each group:

There’s a wide range of tools in Kali. Some tools are designed to be used on Linux, some are designed for Windows (and we can still use them with WINE), and some are static resources. During our recent metapackage refresh, we took the time to create a few “helper scripts”.

You may have installed a package, gone ahead and typed in the package name to run it, and the response back was
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. Not any more!

We understood it may not have been obvious how to use them straight away. As a result, all of our static resources should now be easy to find. Just type in the package name (Such as PayloadsAllTheThings, SecLists, WebShells and Wordlists to a name a few), you’ll see a brief description, a directory listing, and then be moved to the folder.

When it comes to Windows binaries (Such as hyperion, mimikatz, and windows-privesc-check), depending on their functionality, it will now either start up WINE or, like above, hotlink you to the location.

On the subject of tool type, we have altered the location of packages related to Windows (which eagle eye readers may have spotted in the example above). These types of tools are now located in
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. For example, our windows binaries used to be in
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, instead, they are in
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.
We have done this to make it easier to discover what resources can be transferred over to a Windows platform and executed directly there. Using this new location as a root path (example: http
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, or samba
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), you can quickly share everything to the target/victim machine.)

As always, we have our updates for all our tools, including (but not limited to):

If you use the default Kali image, it is (currently) using GNOME for the desktop environment. If you used the command line for a period of time, chances are you noticed it was refreshing the repositories in the background. This has now been disabled.