The BackTrack Team is proud to announce the public release of BackTrack 4 R1. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we believe this version is by far the best version released to date. With a shiny new 2.6.34 kernel, there are many significant improvements, such as expanded hardware support, and improved desktop responsiveness. Check out some screenshots.

Tools have been updated systemwide, and a full Fluxbox desktop environment has been added. A walk-around for the rt28xx driver has been implemented (for all you AWUS050NH owners).

The VMWare version has complete integration with VMWare Tools, which provides a seamless interaction with BackTrack in a virtual environment.

We wish you all a great time with this fine release – Feel free to download it – burn it and make out with it. We await to hear feedback in our forums and Twitter. Lastly, if you are looking for high quality, hands on penetration testing training – check out our Offensive Security Training page.

I recently had the pleasure of competing in the Defcon 18 password cracking challenge affectionately called “Crack Me if You Can“. When I first heard about the challenge I knew Backtrack had to be involved so I set on the task of compiling a team. Due to the Black Hat Trainings and Social-Engineer CTF most of our guys were pretty busy so I decided to enlist the help of my best friend Dakykilla and the guys who write and maintain Hashcat and Oclhashcat. These two tools are the best password cracking software to date and we proved it in the contest. Since Hashcat was the primary software used we called ourselves Team Hashcat.

BlackHat and Defcon were a blast , and we are all back glad to be back in one piece. The BlackHat crew printed around 5500 BT4 R1 DVD’s, which were all distributed during the two conferences. In Defcon, the DVD’s were freely available (optional donation) in the Hackers for Charity booth. Many people chose to donate – we applaud you all !

The Online version of the ISO will be released in the next 48 hours. We need to add a missing ipw2200 firmware which was pointed out to us in BH. The main difference in this release in comparison to BT4 Final is a new kernel (2.6.34), which brings with it faster desktop responsiveness, as well as a bastion of new and improved wireless drivers. The rt3070 driver is still a bit wonky, so the new Alfa AWUS036NH cards will not work with aircrack-ng – this will hopefully be resolved soon.

Keep your eye out on the blog for the download links to the public R1 release!