There is a readily available Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that runs Kali Linux on the Amazon Marketplace. This means that a penetration tester can quickly set up a Kali Linux instance on the Amazon Cloud and access it at any time for any kind of penetration test. This chapter focuses on creating an Amazon EC2 instance, setting it up with a Kali Linux AMI, and configuring remote access to this host in a variety of ways. Once set up, a penetration tester can remotely access a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) belonging to an AWS account and perform pentests within that VPC and on any remote hosts using Kali.

In this chapter, we will learn about the following:

• How to run Kali Linux on the Amazon Cloud
• Accessing Kali remotely over SSH
• Accessing Kali remotely through clientless RDP