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!

We  have finally got around to migrate the old BackTrack forums to the new ones, import all users, and re-open the international communities. Our current active international communities are: Portuguese, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

These new forums provide an opportunity for non English speakers to have a formal outlet for their BackTrack related issues. Bienvenidos, Bienvenue, Bem vindo, Benvenuto and Willkommen to you all!

The BackTrack team is happy to announce the acquisition of the Aircrack-NG project, as well as a new, long awaited update to v 1.1. The acquisition will mark a turning point to the Aircrack-NG project in more than once sense, and we are looking forward to seeing the project grow.

The new version of Aircrack-ng (now renamed “backcrack-ng“) is available in the Aircrack SVN repository:

svn co http://trac.aircrack-ng.org/svn/tags/1.1 backcrack-ng