Managing Kali Linux services

The dafault kali linux installation ships with serveral services preinstalled such SSH and HTTP.
To mantain low profile kali prevents network services starting by default, unless we explicitly enable them.

SSH(Secure shell ) service is most commonly used to remotley access a computer, using a secure encrypted protocol.
The SSH is TCP-BASED and listens by default on port 22.

To start the SSH service, run:
systemctl start ssh

When the command completes successfully, it does not return any output, but we can verify if the service is active by issuing the following command:
ss -antlp | grep sshd

HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) is a protocol that we will often use for our activities as penetration testers, especially with the apache service, perhaps to host a website or provide a platform for the victim to download files. THE HTTP service is TCP-BASED and listens by default on port 80.

To start the HTTP service on kali we can use systemctl as we did when starting SSH service.

sudo systemctl start apache2

We can verify taht the the http service is running and listeningon tcp port 80 with ss and grep.

Most services in kali linux are operated in much the same way as SSH and HTTP. We can verify a table of all available services run systemctl with the command:

system list-unit-files