Update time/date in Kali Virtual Machine

If you flick back and forth between VMware Workstation snapshots when you inevetibly break something in Kali, you might find if you roll back to an old snapshot you get the following error when trying to browse your web app targets…

Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue

Firefox detected an issue and did not continue to www.google.com. The website is either misconfigured or your computer clock is set to the wrong time.

What can you do about it?

www.google.com has a security policy called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), which means that Firefox can only connect to it securely. You can’t add an exception to visit this site.

Your computer clock is set to June 11, 2020. Make sure your computer is set to the correct date, time, and time zone in your system settings, and then refresh www.google.com.

If your clock is already set to the right time, the website is likely misconfigured, and there is nothing you can do to resolve the issue. You can notify the website’s administrator about the problem.

It’s likely your time and date is way out of whack, which is now set to whenever you took the snapshot. I spent ages trying to get the virtual machine to simply take my host’s time (which was real-time) and despite the option being ticket it just never seemed to update. So let’s do it manually

First check your timezone is set correctly with the below command;

timedatectl

If it’s not, you can set it. The list can be retrieved via

timedatectl list-timezones

Set your desired timezone.

sudo timedatectl set-timezone America/Belize

And then re-get the time from the ntp servers.

sudo ntpd -gq

The -g switch in this instance is important as ntp will not allow an update outside of a specific range (1000 seconds). The switch overrides that limitation and grabs the time no matter what.

You should now have the correct timezone and time set. Importantly, it is no longer outside the 1000 seconds range. This is also a great time to take a new snapshot and revert to this one. When reverting, it should now continue to update the time as normal.