The National Security Agency and the Central Security Service tested the five U.S. service academies during the 2009 Cyber Defense Exercise.Teams were tested on their ability to defend computer networks the students designed themselves. The winner took home the coveted CDX trophy. In an unclassified movie produced by the NSA, we caught a glimpse.



The Social-Engineering Toolkit (SET) was designed by David Kennedy (ReL1K) and incorporates many useful Social-Engineering attacks all in one simplistic interface. The main purpose of SET is to automate and improve on many of the social-engineering attacks out there. As pentesters, social-engineering is often a practice that not many people perform. A set of new set of videos called “Social Engineering Toolkit Training” has been made available – the pentesters choice for Client Side Attacks and other Social Engineering related attacks. Check them out here and here.

Taken directly from the social-engineer.org site:

The downloads of the latest release of the Social Engineering Toolkit has been truly remarkable.  The new additions to the tool are just amazing in itself.

Yet we get a lot of requests for tutorials and/or training on how to effectively use the tool.  We heard your cries for help and asked Dave to help us out.  Dave put together a series of training videos showing how to complete some of the main attacks with SET.

We then added a whole new section added to the resources page that is just for SET Tutorials.  Check it out and let us know what you think.

With a GREAT effort from local BT community leaders, we are proud to present translated versions of the BackTrack website. We are currently almost done with the Chinese and Spanish versions, and working hard on Portuguese and French. If you are an established BackTrack Forums user with 250 posts and above, and would like to translate the BackTrack-Linux to your own language, please contact us through IRC. A big thanks to huatux, fuurio, error500 and fataku for the excellent work so far.

As time goes on, more and more localized content will be posted, such as “How to get BackTrack to like Chinese”. For Spanish speaking users,  we have a BackTrack IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, #backtrack-es.

If you’re itching to hack something, and need a real challenge, Offensive Security Training has set up a cool hacking tournament which is open to the public. Information about the challenge, as well as registration to it will start on April 23rd. The actual event will take place on May 8-9th, over a weekend. Send the wife to a weekend spa, the kids to the neighbors, close the dog up in the bathroom – whatever it takes to get quality time for your favorite pastime – ethical hacking.

Keep your eyes open on the Information Security Training blog for more details about the challenge, on April 23rd.

We’re stunned. Flabbergasted even. Since the release, the download count hasn’t stopped running…and we’ve finally hit 1,000,000 downloads. In reality, the download count is probably much higher, as we’ve been counting unique IPs only (to prevent false counts caused by download managers – The  NON UNIQUE count is well over 3 million downloads).

We have exciting new developments going on, as well as a whole new BackTrack development infrastructure which should allow for major improvements in the future…stay tuned!