Kali (formerly Backtrack) Linux & BeEF

Today's post is contributed by Ben Waugh (@bw_z).

BeEF is preinstalled on Kali linux distributions, allowing you to quickly use BeEF as part of your security testing toolkit.

 Running BeEF in Kali

Kali packages BeEF within the beef-xss service which can either be started from the command line, or the pre-populated menu item under Kali-Linux > Exploitation Tools > BeEF-XSS Framework. We don't recommend starting BeEF directly in Kali (using ruby beef) as this will not load BeEF with the required prerequisites.

You can start BeEF from the command line with; service beef-xss start

Stopping BeEF in Kali

Unfortunately, as the Kali GUI doesn't present the user with the ability to stop BeEF easily you have to stop the service manually by running: service beef-xss stop

Keeping Up to Date

To eliminate known issues and bugs, it's important to keep Kali and BeEF packages up to date. You can update both through the package manger by running apt-get update; apt-get upgrade

Known Issues

There are a small number of known issues running BeEF under the Kali distribution.

The most frequently encountered issue occurs when Kali loads the BeEF Admin GUI in your web browser when you start BeEF. We have found that the Firefox page often loads before BeEF has finished starting resulting in a 'server not found' error. You should be able to reload the page after a few moments to resolve the issue.

Also, we are currently aware of issues with some dependancies and ARM architectures. This has now been fixed, you can update to a working version by running apt-get update; apt-get upgrade 

Have any issues with Kali BeEF or suggestions? Please let us know on Twitter at @beefproject or on github!