Kali Linux Adds 'Undercover' Mode to Impersonate Windows 10

You don't need heavy tweaking for that. Just set your terminal to have a white background with black text. Unless someone moves up really close to you it'll look like regular old Notepad.

It wouldn't be too difficult to modify things like ttl, syn/ack prng, and banners to fool something like nmap, but more sophisticated fingerprinting software would require mimicking SSDP requests and responses; totally doable with enough packet captures over a period of time. Would be a fun project.

Having been working in many parts of the world, in many different kind of environments - coffee shops, hotels, airports and train stations, restaurants, co-workings, and a lot less common places like public benches, beaches, or post office - I very, very rarely had someone asking me, or even looking what I was up to.

I may have not noticed a curious eye once a while, but not sure it would be able to pick up if I'm spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, or pentesting the nearby bank's network.

Cool feature though!

There are definitely environments where "weird stuff" on the screen would get attention, but that will apply even if you're running Windows - it just has to look "hacker-like" enough. So I'm not sure disguising the desktop and the file manager will help if you still spend most of your time running shell commands.

If everyone in a workplace spends all their time on corp gmail (white background) and in terminal sessions to some mainframe somewhere (let's be generous and say teal text on black in like 20pt courier), anything that doesn't match either of those appearances will stand out pretty dramatically.

Maybe because you are yourself a long time Linux desktop user so that you don't really care what people feel about your environment unless they speak out.

I remember the moment that I saw someone who uses the plain GNOME 3 desktop for the first time when the only Linux I knew was Ubuntu - it was not "weird" but is was enough distinctive to me so that it dragged my all of attention.

That's not the envisioned use case, I guess. From the actual Kali Release Notes, it's specifically about hiding the more iconic parts of Kali for Pen-Testers (logo mostly). So it's a pretty specific use case being considered here.

Heck, opening a terminal seems like the best way to slack off in a corporate environment, as nobody seems to understand what it is and just assumes it's above their pay grade. But you quickly dispel the illusion when you are just as clueless about what is wrong with their Office 365 as they are.

I've definitely had users panic a little bit when they see a windows command prompt on their own machine (when I'm doing tech support or whatever.) I think it's because they see something foreign on a machine that's familiar to them. But I've never had anyone but fellow nerds comment when I run unfamiliar things on my own machine.

Ditto. I didn't realize people were getting picked up enough by the authorities to merit building a Windows clone.

That background was apparently a fairly complicated project:

https://gmunk.com/Windows-10-Desktop/

It totally will. I mean, we all have different stances on how copyright should work, but if anything's a copyright infringement, this is.

The icons are pretty devoted lookalikes too, which makes it complicated.

They could distribute the script and ask their users to drop the copyrighted assets to a set location by themselves.

They didn't even need to copy the default background. People customize their Windows wallpaper all the time.

If anything, I would say that continuing to use the default wallpaper instead of changing it to a picture of your kids, your dog, or some cool scenery makes you look even more suspicious. It makes you look like you're not quite at home with the device you're using.