Login as root in Kali

Hey guys,
In this blog, we are going to see how to login as root in Kali.

Kali Linux is a fantastic distribution for pentesting, hacking whatever you may call it. It has a lot of tools pre installed. So we just get it on and pop shells.

The Kali’s update disables the login as root, which is disturbing because its annoying for some people to type in sudo everytime running a privileged command. Ok lets see how to change it and login as root.

I am going to demonstrate this in VMWare but it works on all installations.

Permission denied for a privileged command

You can see that we get permission denied, everytime trying to run a privileged command.

So, here comes the solution Switch shell to root using sudo and change the password of root to your choice. Then you can login as root.

Follow up

sudo -s

Getting to Root user

You could see that we get the root shell.
Now go on and change the password.

passwd (or) passwd root

It would ask for a new password, enter it and thats it, you can now login as root. Lets see how.

Setting Root Password

You may now close the terminal and log off from the system.

When you log back in , instead of your username, type in root and for password type the one that we changed using the passwd command.

Login as root

you can also verify this after login by opening the terminal.

Running whoami Command

And yeah we logged in as root in Kali. Thats it.

Thanks for reading. Hope you learned something.

If you have any problems, please watch this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMf999ISf4Q