Kali also offers preinstalled VM images on Offensive Security's website, including ones specifically for VirtualBox. Kali images are located on its website, so you can download the one that best suits your needs from there. Once the installer has finished, launch VirtualBox from your Applications folder. When the file finishes downloading, mount the disk image when it appears, then double-click on the VirtualBox.pkg within.

This is what I'll be using in this guide.ĭon't Miss: How to Create a Virtual Hacking Lab While there are many options to choose from, such as those from VMware, I like to use Oracle's VirtualBox, which can be downloaded from its website for free. In order to run Kali, we will need some virtualization software first. You can also install Kali on your Mac's hard disk as another partition. If you dislike running in a VM for whatever reason, there are many computers that will run Kali well enough that can be purchased for very reasonable prices, or you can just boot from a USB stick. In these steps, I will show you how to get a VM up and running on macOS. If you're a pentester or regular Null Byte user, you're probably well familiar with it already-a great deal of the tutorials here on Null Byte use Kali. Kali comes with a large collection of pentesting tools preinstalled, and it's simple to set up. Since you will generally be working with a deadline and can't stop your current project, I recommend a Kali Linux virtual machine as part of your macOS toolkit. Previously: How to Install RVM to Maintain Ruby Environments in macOS When we need tools, we need to be able to run them right away. With a bit of know-how, you maybe able to port a tool that you want, but that's a long process and more of a side project. For example, anything involving the proc filesystem, or many of the common hacking tools for wireless networks. And then there are those tools that simply won't work at all in macOS. In other cases, there's a lot of work involved. In some cases, they can be made to run with a little bit of elbow grease. While macOS is a powerful POSIX-compliant operating system, some of our Linux tools do not work out of the box on it. If you haven't checked out previous tutorials, I'd recommend you do so first before diving right into this one.

We're nearly done getting our Mac set up for hacking.

Install kali virtualbox