Kali Undercover mode in Kali Linux - How to turn on or turn off (Get windows like UI on Kali Linux).

Open a terminal and run kali-undercover. In about two seconds your Kali desktop looks like Windows 10. Run the same command again to change it back — it is a toggle, there is no separate off switch.

Now the part almost every other page leaves out, and the reason this one exists: Undercover mode is a theme. It changes your wallpaper, window borders, icons and panel. It hides nothing from the network, nothing from a forensic examination, and nothing from anybody who walks over and looks at your screen properly. It is cover against a glance across a coffee shop. Treat it as anything more and you will get hurt.

kali-undercover          # turn it on
kali-undercover          # run it again to turn it off

The Man in the Coffee Shop

Arjun — Jake's nephew, most of the way through a cybersecurity course, and the reason his uncle's shop Wi-Fi finally works — was doing lab homework in a cafe near the college.

Four terminals. Green text. A red dragon wallpaper behind them. A man queuing for coffee looked over his shoulder for slightly too long, then looked again, and Arjun watched him decide something.

Nothing happened. Nobody said anything. But Arjun packed up early anyway, because the whole afternoon he could feel himself being the guy with the hacker laptop.

He asked Ethan about it that evening. Ethan told him about kali-undercover, and then said the thing that turned into this article.

"Use it. It's genuinely good for exactly that. But understand what you're buying, because the name oversells it badly. You're not going undercover. You're putting a Windows-shaped poster over the window. The man in the queue will walk past. Anyone who sits down next to you and reads your screen for ten seconds sees Kali, because you'll have a terminal open, and terminals still look like terminals."

Arjun asked what it does hide from, then.

"Curiosity. Nothing else. And that's worth having — curiosity is what costs you the afternoon."

What Kali Undercover Mode Actually Is

Kali Undercover arrived in Kali Linux 2019.4, released in November 2019. That is the same release that made Xfce the default desktop instead of GNOME, and the two facts are connected in a way that explains most of the confusion around this tool. Undercover was built for the new default desktop, and it never got a version for any other one.

What it is, mechanically, is a small script that flips a set of appearance settings:

• The wallpaper becomes a plain Windows-style background instead of the Kali dragon
• The GTK theme changes, so buttons, menus, scrollbars and dialog boxes take on Windows 10 proportions and colours
• The window manager theme changes, so title bars and the minimise / maximise / close buttons sit where a Windows user expects them
• The icon set changes to Windows-like icons
• The panel moves to the bottom of the screen and rearranges into something shaped like a taskbar — launcher on the left, clock on the right

That is the complete list. It is a costume, applied to one user's desktop session, and it is reversible in a keystroke.

Why a security distribution ships a costume

Because a Kali desktop is loud. The stock look is deliberately distinctive — that is good branding and terrible discretion. If you do security work for a living, you spend a certain amount of every engagement being looked at.

The framing when it launched was exactly this: sitting in a public place, or on a client's floor, and not having your screen become a topic of conversation. That is a real problem with a real cost in time and awkwardness, and a theme genuinely solves it.

The trouble is only that the feature is called Undercover, and people reasonably infer that a tool with that name does more than change colours.

Turning It On and Turning It Off

There is one command and it does both jobs:

kali-undercover

The first run saves your current appearance settings somewhere safe and then applies the Windows-style ones. The second run reads the saved values back and puts your desktop as it was. There is no --on, no --off and no configuration file you are expected to edit.

From the menu, without a terminal

Opening a terminal to turn on a disguise is a little self-defeating if someone is already watching. Two quieter routes:

1. Click the Applications menu (top left on stock Kali) and type undercover into the search box. The entry appears; press Enter.
2. Press Alt+F2 to open Xfce's small run dialog, type kali-undercover, press Enter. No terminal window ever opens.

Giving it a keyboard shortcut

This is the setup worth doing, because the whole value of the feature is speed. Through the settings UI:

1. Open Settings → Keyboard
2. Go to the Application Shortcuts tab
3. Click Add
4. Type kali-undercover as the command and click OK
5. Press the key combination you want — Ctrl+Alt+U is free on a stock install

Or set it in one line, which is useful if you rebuild machines often:

xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts \
  -p "/commands/custom/<Primary><Alt>u" \
  -n -t string -s "kali-undercover"

A word on what you just typed, because unexplained commands are how people stay stuck. xfconf is Xfce's settings database — the equivalent of the Windows registry for this desktop, but far smaller and readable. xfconf-query reads and writes it. -c picks a channel (a settings group), -p is the property path, -n means create it if it does not exist, and -t string -s sets the type and the value. <Primary> is Xfce's name for Ctrl. Since the command is a toggle, one shortcut serves both directions.

Does it survive a reboot?

Yes. What Undercover writes is ordinary Xfce configuration, saved to your home directory like any other theme choice. Log out, reboot, come back next week — still Windows-looking until you toggle it off.

One exception worth knowing before you count on it: the boot process is not disguised. Power the machine on in front of someone and they get the Kali GRUB menu and the Kali splash screen before the desktop ever appears. If that matters to you, the boot screen is a separate job — our guide to changing the GRUB wallpaper and theme in Kali covers it, and it is the piece almost everyone forgets.

What It Changes Under the Hood

You do not have to take anyone's word for this, including ours. The tool is a short script and you can read it:

cat $(which kali-undercover)
dpkg -L kali-undercover

$(which kali-undercover) substitutes the full path of the command, so cat prints the script itself. dpkg -L lists every file the package installed — the themes, the icons, the wallpaper, the panel layout. Five minutes with those two commands tells you more than any article, and it is version-accurate for your install rather than for whichever release the author happened to have.

What you will find it doing is a series of xfconf-query writes, roughly along these lines:

Then it restarts xfce4-panel and xfdesktop so the change is instant instead of waiting for the next login. That restart is why the screen flickers for a moment, and why a half-finished toggle usually shows up as a missing or duplicated taskbar.

Want to see the current state yourself? These print what your session is using right now:

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/ThemeName
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/IconThemeName
xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/theme

Run them before and after a toggle. The theme name changing from the Kali default to the Undercover one is the entire mechanism, laid bare. There is no daemon, no kernel module, no service — which is also, precisely, why it cannot hide anything.

What Undercover Mode Does Not Hide

This is the most important section on the page, and the one you will not find on most results for this search. Read it before you decide how much to lean on this feature.

Any terminal window at all

This is the one that ends it. Kali's default shell prompt is unmistakable — it draws a two-line box with your username and hostname in it, and both of those say kali:

┌──(kali㈹kali)-[~]
└─$

The window title bar says the same thing. You are doing security work, so you have a terminal open; that is the job. The Windows theme is a picture frame around a window that still clearly contains Linux.

The Start menu is not a Start menu

Click the launcher in the corner and you get Xfce's application menu, still organised into Kali's tool categories — 01 – Information Gathering, 02 – Vulnerability Analysis, and the rest of the numbered list. Undercover restyles the panel; it does not rewrite the menu behind it.

Anyone who clicks it learns everything in under a second.

Your hostname, and therefore your network presence

Undercover does not touch your hostname. It stays kali, which means:

• The DHCP request your machine sends when it joins the cafe or client Wi-Fi includes that hostname. It lands in the router's client list, where it sits next to "Sarah's-iPhone" saying kali.
• If Avahi (mDNS) is running, the machine announces itself as kali.local to everything on the segment.
• Any inventory tool, NAC appliance or bored network admin sees it without trying.

If the hostname genuinely matters to you, change it — and note that this also fixes the shell prompt above, which makes it the single highest-value change on this page:

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname workstation-07
sudo nano /etc/hosts
# update the 127.0.1.1 line to match the new name, then reboot

Editing /etc/hosts is not optional. If the 127.0.1.1 line still names the old host, some programs stall for seconds trying to resolve a name that no longer exists. You can confirm what the system currently thinks it is called with the same commands used to check your Kali version, since both read from the same place.

Everything a network can see

Nothing in the list below changes when you toggle Undercover, because none of it lives in your desktop session:

• Your MAC address and its vendor prefix
• The DHCP fingerprint — the specific set and order of options your client asks for, which identifies the operating system family on its own
• TCP/IP stack characteristics that passive fingerprinting tools read directly off your traffic
• Open ports and any service you have running
• Your browser's user agent, which cheerfully says Linux
• Any scan or tool traffic you generate, which is the loudest signal of all

If the network layer is your actual concern, that is a completely separate set of tools. MAC address changes are one small piece — and a common source of the error covered in "Could not change MAC: interface up or insufficient permissions". For traffic itself, kernel-level routing through Tor with oniux is a real answer where Undercover is not one at all.

Anything on the disk

Undercover is not anti-forensic in any sense. It does not touch:

• Your shell history in ~/.zsh_history
• System logs under /var/log
• The package database, which lists every tool you have installed
• /etc/os-release, which states plainly that this is Kali GNU/Linux
• Your files, your project directories, your notes, your captures

Anyone with the machine in their hands and five minutes has all of it. The tool that addresses data at rest is full-disk encryption — LUKS, set up at install time — and it solves a completely different problem from the one Undercover solves. They are not alternatives to each other and neither substitutes for the other.

The running system

A process list is a confession. ps aux shows every tool you have running. top, a system monitor, even a screen-sharing session mid-call — all of it reports the truth regardless of what colour the title bars are.

Will Undercover mode fool someone who knows Windows?

At six feet, for two seconds, absolutely. Up close, no, and the tells are ordinary ones:

• The fonts are wrong. Windows uses Segoe UI, which is not on your machine and cannot be legally shipped by Kali. The shapes are close but a familiar eye notices.
• No Windows sounds and no notification centre sliding in from the right.
• Ctrl+Alt+Delete does nothing, and neither does Win+X.
• Right-clicking the desktop gives an Xfce menu, not the Windows one.
• It is Windows 10 — a rounded-corners Windows 11 machine is what most people now expect to see, and a 10 desktop looks slightly dated in 2026. Still unremarkable, which is all it needs to be, but not invisible.

Set your expectations at "unremarkable in peripheral vision", and the tool delivers exactly that, every time.

Why It Only Works on Xfce

If you ran the command and nothing at all happened — no error, no message, no change — this is why, and it is by far the most common complaint about the tool.

Everything Undercover does, it does through xfconf-query. On GNOME there is no xfconf to write to; GNOME keeps its settings in dconf and is configured with gsettings. KDE Plasma uses its own kwriteconfig and a different set of files again. The writes either fail silently or land in a database nothing is reading, and the script finishes without complaint.

Check which desktop you are actually on:

echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP

If that prints GNOME or KDE, Undercover was never going to do anything, and no amount of reinstalling the package will change that. It is worth saying because several popular guides for this feature never mention a desktop environment at all, which leaves GNOME users reinstalling a working package over and over.

Option 1: install Xfce alongside what you have

You do not have to give up your desktop. Two sessions can coexist, and you pick between them at the login screen:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install kali-desktop-xfce kali-undercover

Log out, then use the small session selector on the login screen — usually a gear or a list icon near the password box — to choose Xfce. Undercover works in that session and is ignored in the other. Our walkthrough of changing the desktop environment in Kali covers switching properly, including how to set the default, and the reverse direction is in installing GNOME as your default desktop if you decide you preferred it after all.

Be aware that installing a second desktop drags in a few hundred megabytes of packages and adds duplicate entries to your application menu — two file managers, two terminal emulators, two text editors. Untidy, not harmful.

Option 2: build the look yourself

There is no secret sauce in Undercover, so on GNOME or KDE you can reproduce most of it by hand:

• Install a Windows-like GTK or Plasma theme and a matching icon set
• Set a plain blue or grey wallpaper
• On GNOME, add a taskbar extension (Dash to Panel is the usual choice) and move it to the bottom
• On KDE, the default panel is already taskbar-shaped — you mostly need the theme
• Install extra fonts so the metrics look closer — our note on installing fonts on Kali covers the mechanics

The honest downside: you lose the one-keystroke toggle, which was the good part. You can get it back by saving two sets of settings and writing a small script that swaps between them — which is, of course, exactly what kali-undercover is.

Option 3: do not bother

Ethan's actual advice, when Arjun asked whether to install Xfce just for this: don't. If you are on GNOME and the only thing you want is to be less conspicuous, change your wallpaper to something plain and pick a neutral theme. You get eighty percent of the benefit in ninety seconds without installing a second desktop, and the red dragon was doing most of the work anyway.

Customising Undercover Mode

The default look is generic Windows 10, which is the right choice for a tool that ships to everyone. If you want it to blend into a specific environment, there is room to move — with one trap to understand first.

Changing the wallpaper it uses

Find the file the package ships and replace it with your own image at the same path and the same name:

dpkg -L kali-undercover | grep -i -E 'png|jpg|svg'

Back the original up first (sudo cp original.png original.png.bak) and expect a package update to overwrite your replacement one day. That is the deal with editing files owned by a package, and it is a small price for a change that takes a minute to redo.

A corporate desktop wallpaper from the client you are visiting is the most effective version of this by a wide margin, if you are permitted to use one. It stops looking like a generic Windows machine and starts looking like their machine.

Making your own variant instead

Cleaner than editing the package: copy the script somewhere on your PATH under a new name, point it at your own theme and wallpaper, and bind that to your shortcut.

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
cp $(which kali-undercover) ~/.local/bin/my-undercover
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/my-undercover
nano ~/.local/bin/my-undercover

~/.local/bin is on your PATH by default on Kali, so the new name is available immediately. Package updates cannot touch it, and the original stays intact as a fallback.

The terminal is what gives you away, so fix that too

Given that a terminal is what breaks the illusion, the highest-value customisation is not the wallpaper at all:

• Change the hostname, as covered above. Turning (kali㈹kali) into (dev㈹workstation-07) removes the single most recognisable string on your screen.
• Use a light terminal colour scheme while undercover. Black-with-green reads as "hacker" from across a room; a white terminal reads as a developer, and nobody has ever panicked about a developer.
• Turn off the two-line prompt if you want to go further — Kali's zsh prompt is configurable, and a plain $ gives nothing away. If your shell setup is already misbehaving after an upgrade, our guide to zsh missing or failing to start in Kali covers repairing it first.

Troubleshooting

Why does kali-undercover say command not found?

The package is not installed. That is normal on several kinds of install — the minimal or netinstall images, an install built around GNOME or KDE, or a Kali you upgraded up from a very old release.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install kali-undercover

If apt update itself throws an error, fix that first — nothing installs until it is healthy. The two you are most likely to hit on Kali are the repository signature failure covered in the missing key / sqv error guide and the half-finished install state in "dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run dpkg --configure -a". If the whole apt system is new to you, what apt actually is and what its commands do is the ten-minute version.

Why does nothing happen when I run kali-undercover?

Three causes, in order of likelihood:

1. You are not on Xfce. Run echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP. Details above.
2. You ran it with sudo. The theme went to root's session. Run it as your normal user.
3. You are connected over SSH or remote X. There is no local desktop session to theme, so the settings are written into a session nobody is looking at.

It applied half way and now the desktop looks broken

Symptoms: the wallpaper changed but the panel did not, the taskbar vanished entirely, or you have two panels stacked on top of each other. The toggle restarts two processes and one of them did not come back.

xfce4-panel -r      # restart the panel
xfdesktop -R        # reload the desktop and wallpaper

If either command is unavailable because you have no panel to open a terminal from, press Ctrl+Alt+F2 for a text console, log in, and run DISPLAY=:0 xfce4-panel -r, then Ctrl+Alt+F7 to go back. DISPLAY=:0 tells the command which graphical session to talk to, since a text console does not have one of its own.

Still wrong? Log out and back in. This fixes the large majority of half-applied states, because the session reads every setting fresh on login.

I cannot get back to the normal Kali look

First, just run kali-undercover once more — people often toggle twice in frustration and end up back where they started without realising.

If the toggle genuinely will not restore, set the theme by hand:

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/ThemeName -s "Kali-Dark"
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/IconThemeName -s "Flat-Remix-Blue-Dark"
xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/theme -s "Kali-Dark"

Theme names vary between releases. List what is actually installed on your machine with ls /usr/share/themes and ls /usr/share/icons and use a name from there rather than trusting the ones above.

As a last resort, delete the panel configuration and let Xfce rebuild it from defaults:

rm ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-panel.xml
# then log out and back in

This works reliably and it destroys any custom panel layout you had built. If you spent an evening arranging launchers, back that file up before deleting it.

It reverted on its own after an update

A Kali upgrade can replace theme packages or the default panel configuration, which sometimes lands you back on the standard look mid-session. Toggle it on again. If it keeps happening after every upgrade, keep your own copy of the script as described earlier — a file in ~/.local/bin is not touched by package updates. Release-to-release changes like this are usually noted in the upgrade write-ups, such as what changed in Kali Linux 2025.3.

Does Undercover mode slow Kali down or break any tools?

No. It writes a few settings and restarts two desktop processes. No service is started or stopped, no network configuration changes, no package is touched. Nothing you run — from Metasploit to a simple scan — behaves any differently. The only casualty is a custom panel layout, and only if you built one.

What Actually Helps If You Need To Be Inconspicuous

If your reason for searching this was stronger than "the dragon wallpaper is a bit much", here is the honest ranking — strongest first, and Undercover is not at the top of it.

1. Run Kali in a VM on a normal host

This is the real answer and it is not close. Your laptop boots Windows or macOS, looks like every other laptop in the room, and Kali lives in a window inside it.

What that gets you that a theme cannot:

• The login screen and boot process are ordinary — the part Undercover never covers
• You can minimise the whole thing instantly, which no theme can do for a desktop you are sitting in
• Your host has your email, documents and browser on it, so it behaves like a work machine because it is one
• Snapshots — you can break the Kali install badly and roll back in a minute

Two practical notes. Keep the VM windowed rather than full screen; a maximised VM defeats the entire point. And know what a VM does not pass through to the guest before you depend on it — our Kali Bluetooth troubleshooting guide opens with the biggest example, because a host Bluetooth adapter never reaches the guest at all. Wireless adapters have the same issue, which is why people doing wireless work keep a USB one.

If you are setting a VM up from scratch, start from a current image rather than an old one you have lying around — the official download links, with checksum verification is the page for that, and verifying the checksum takes thirty seconds.

2. Change the hostname

Cheap, permanent, and it fixes both the shell prompt and your network presence at once. Covered in full in the limits section above. If you only do one thing on this page beyond the toggle itself, do this.

3. Do not run Kali on the machine you open in public

Unsatisfying, and true. Kali is a workshop, not a daily driver. The project has said as much for years: it is a distribution built for a specific job, with a specific set of tools, and it was never meant to be the operating system on the laptop you take to a lecture.

Most of what students actually need day to day — a terminal, Python, Docker, a browser, notes — runs perfectly on an ordinary Ubuntu or Debian install that looks like nothing in particular. Keep Kali in a VM for the labs. You will also stop breaking your daily machine every time an exercise goes sideways.

4. Basic screen discipline

The unglamorous list, which beats all of the above for the actual coffee-shop scenario:

• Sit with your back to a wall. A privacy filter costs less than a month of coffee and works on everyone, at every angle, with no configuration
• Set a short screen-lock timeout and actually use Ctrl+Alt+L when you stand up
• Do not leave credentials on screen, and remember that anything you type is in your shell history — a password manager keeps secrets out of terminal scrollback entirely
• Enable full-disk encryption at install time, because the realistic threat to a laptop in a cafe is that somebody picks it up and leaves

None of that is exciting. All of it outperforms a theme.

When Undercover Is Exactly the Right Tool

Having spent a thousand words on its limits, here is the other half, and it is genuinely positive: for the job it was built for, this feature is very good, and the people who use it most are professionals.

On a client site

You are an authorised tester. The client's security team knows exactly who you are, what you are doing and when. Your laptop is open in an office where forty people who are not in that meeting walk past your desk.

Without Undercover, some of them see a black terminal on a red dragon and a few of them tell somebody. Then a helpdesk ticket gets raised, and someone from IT walks over, and you spend twenty minutes explaining an engagement they were not briefed on. Multiply by the number of days you are on site.

With Undercover, they see a Windows laptop and keep walking. Nothing has been concealed from anyone entitled to know — the security team has your scope document — you have simply stopped generating noise. That is the whole feature, and it is a completely legitimate use of it.

In a coffee shop, a library or a lecture

Arjun's original problem. You are doing homework and you would rather not be the most interesting screen in the room. One keystroke, problem gone.

On a call, presenting, or recording

A genuinely underrated use. Screen-sharing a Kali desktop in a meeting with people outside your team turns your wallpaper into a talking point at the exact moment you wanted attention on your slides. Toggle it before the call. This is also why demo machines at conferences often run it.

When it is the wrong tool

Clearly, and without hedging:

• Anything involving concealment from a party with authority — an employer, a network owner, an investigator. It does not work, and attempting it is worse than not attempting it.
• Anything on the network. Wrong layer entirely.
• Protecting data on a stolen or seized machine. That is full-disk encryption, and Undercover contributes nothing.
• Convincing a technical person for more than a moment. They will click the Start menu.

Questions People Actually Ask

What is Kali Undercover mode?

A desktop theme that makes the Kali Xfce desktop resemble Windows 10 — wallpaper, window decorations, icons and panel. It is cosmetic cover against a casual glance across a room. It is not a security feature and it changes nothing about how the system behaves.

How do I turn on Kali Undercover mode?

Run kali-undercover in a terminal, with no arguments and no sudo. It takes about two seconds. You can also find it by typing "undercover" into the Applications menu search box, or bind it to a key.

How do I turn off Kali Undercover mode?

Run the same command again. It is a toggle — the first run saves your settings and applies the disguise, the second run restores what it saved. There is no separate off command.

Does Kali Undercover mode hide anything from the network?

No. Nothing at all. It only writes settings in your own desktop session. Hostname, DHCP requests, mDNS announcements, MAC address, open ports and traffic are all completely unchanged.

Is Kali Undercover mode a security or anti-forensic feature?

Neither. It encrypts nothing, clears no logs or shell history, hides no processes or installed packages, and survives no real inspection. One terminal window, one process list or the package database identifies the machine as Kali immediately.

Does Kali Undercover mode work on GNOME or KDE?

No — it is Xfce only, and there is no official version for either. Install the Xfce session alongside your current desktop and switch to it when you need Undercover, or rebuild the look by hand with a theme, an icon set, a wallpaper and a rearranged panel.

Can I add a keyboard shortcut for Kali Undercover mode?

Yes. Settings → Keyboard → Application Shortcuts → Add, enter kali-undercover as the command, then press your chosen combination. Because the command toggles, one shortcut handles both directions.

Does Undercover mode change my hostname?

No, and this is what catches people out. Your hostname and username both stay kali, and both are visible in the shell prompt, the terminal title bar, DHCP requests and local network discovery. Changing it is a separate job with hostnamectl.

Does Kali Undercover mode survive a reboot?

Yes — the settings persist like any other theme choice until you toggle back. What it does not disguise is the boot process itself, which still shows the Kali GRUB menu and splash screen.

Can I customise the Undercover wallpaper and theme?

Yes, with one caution: anything you change while Undercover is active can be overwritten when you toggle back, because the toggle restores the values it saved on the way in. Edit the shipped files instead, or copy the script to ~/.local/bin and point your version at your own images.

What actually helps if I need Kali to be inconspicuous?

Run Kali in a VM on a normal-looking host and keep the window unmaximised, change the hostname to something ordinary, and where it genuinely matters, do not run Kali on the machine you open in public at all. Undercover is the last five percent of that, not the first.

Which Kali version added Undercover mode?

Kali Linux 2019.4, in November 2019 — the same release that made Xfce the default desktop. The two are connected, which is also why no GNOME or KDE equivalent ever appeared.

Is there a Windows 11 version of the theme?

Not officially — the shipped look is Windows 10. Community GTK themes that imitate Windows 11 exist and you can point your own copy of the script at one, though on a laptop in an office a Windows 10 desktop is still entirely unremarkable.

Can I make Undercover mode start automatically at login?

You do not need to. The setting persists across reboots on its own, so if you leave it on it is still on next time. Adding it to your startup applications would toggle it off on any boot where it was already on, which is the opposite of what you wanted.

Does it work on the Kali live USB or on WSL?

On a live USB with the Xfce session, yes — and it resets when you reboot, since a live session keeps nothing unless you set up persistence. On WSL, no: there is no Kali desktop session to theme, and Win-KeX runs a desktop inside a window on Windows, which is arguably undercover already.

The Short Version

Run kali-undercover. Run it again to undo it. Give it a keyboard shortcut, because the value is entirely in how fast it is.

Then change your hostname, because that is the part the theme cannot reach and it takes one command.

Arjun did both, and went back to the same cafe the following week. Nobody looked twice, which was the entire objective — and he was under no illusion that the man in the queue was the threat model. He was just tired of being interesting.

Related Guides

Originally published November 2019 for Kali Linux 2019.4. Rewritten and re-tested in 2026 on Kali rolling.

Happy Breaking..!!