Although we do not make it a habit to announce third party releases, in Maltego’s case, we happily make an exception. Maltego 3.1 is the new flagship product from the guys at Paterva and offers a range of fantastic new features and enhancements to the already phenomenal product. If you haven’t tried Maltego, you don’t know what you are missing. Some of the new features include:

Completely new graph organisational abilities:

You now have the ability to organise the graph in terms of alignment as well as setting the layout for specific segments of graph as well as the entire graph:

New views, including Bubble View which allows users to sort information on their graph in terms of relevance by either incoming links (how many different bits of information point into a node), outgoing links (how many different links point out from a node) or both, as seen below:

Additionally with the layouts there is also the new Interactive Organic view which improves the speed of graph rendering dramatically by only redrawing relevant parts of the graph that are updated. There is also the ability to lock entities in place in a graph to allow for a more human structured format. Within the entities of the graph you can also merge entities together, add notes, add attachments (either from the web or local) as well as the previous features of adding custom entity types and changing the link properties:

Lastly the investigate tab also offers users the ability to now select all entities on a graph based on their bookmark, the type of entity it is as well as the previous searching capabilities:

Once the Parerva development team get their rest, we should be seeing a Maltego 3.1 CE edition surface…we will keep y’all updated once it does. Head down to the Paterva website now, and see the awesomeness of Maltego!

Commercial Support

BackTrack Linux has become the most popular Linux based penetration testing distribution available. However, to this day there are some organizations that would love to use it but have not been able to due to internal regulations that require support contracts for any software that is used. Additionally, other organizations have reached out to us to let us know that they rely on BackTrack so much that they would find support contracts extremely helpful.

Our new commercial support services are designed to help these organizations and more. Commercial support allows subscribers to obtain direct access to the developers, as well as a committed response time for any open tickets. Premium support subscribers are additionally provided with support for alternative kernel configurations.

BackTrack ISO Generation Engine

While we try to ensure that the default BackTrack image fits the needs of as many people as possible, some organizations have unique needs. The BackTrack ISO builder is designed to allow the generation of custom ISO images that can be built to your specific needs. Using the ISO builder you can select which package groups you would like to be included, as well as include custom branding such as bootsplash and wallpapers.

We are also proud to announce that a percentage of the profits from the ISO builder will go to help support Johnny Long’s HFC project.

Commitment to Freedom

These services have been designed to compliment, not replace, the free BackTrack offerings. We always have been, currently are, and always will be, committed to providing the highest quality Linux Penetration Testing Distribution available. Nothing is going to change this.

We are really happy with this release, and believe that as with every release, this is our best one yet. Some pesky issues such as rfkill in VMWare with rtl8187 issues have been fixed, which provides for a much more solid experience with BackTrack.
We’ve released Gnome and KDE ISO images for 32 and 64 bit (no arm this release, sorry!), as well as a VMWare image of a 32 bit Gnome install, with VMWare Tools pre-installed.

Lastly, I would like to thank the whole BackTrack team for pulling off the late nights working on this release, as well as Offensive Security for funding all of this stuff. If you need real world Penetration Testing Training – head on over to Offensive-Security and get ready for a bumpy ride!

BackTrack 5 R1 pre-Release

With over 7,000 DVDs released at BlackHat, we once again would like to thank the BlackHat folks for all their efforts. An additional “thank you” is in order to all the testers who have been reporting back to us. We received many requests to add some amazing tools which were presented during the cons. We are actively working on including these tools into BackTrack 5 R1 – hence the delay.

BackTrack ISO Generator Engine

This month we will be releasing a new paid service which will allow easy, online generation of custom built BackTrack images. Backtrack users who require custom builds will be able to use a simple web interface to configure and customize various aspects of BackTrack, such as package selection, graphics, penetration testing templates, drivers etc. We are very excited about this new service as it will provide a unique opportunity for various organizations and individuals to create unique and highly customized BackTrack environments for the first time. A percentage of all profits from this service will be directed towards Johnny Long’s HFC program.

BackTrack Commercial Services

Together with the ISO generation service, we will be announcing our new commercial BackTrack Support Channel. This service will allow large organizations which require official support, in order to deploy BackTrack in their networks, to finally do so. The BackTrack Support Channel will allow for direct communication with our developers, to aid in easy enterprise installation and deployment processes. The service will initially be provided to enterprise organizations only. For more information about the BackTrack Support Channel, contact info at backtrack-linux dot org.

BackTrack 5 – Free and open-source

With all these commercial services going on, this would be a good time to reassure our community that we are fully committed to a free, open-source BackTrack, forever. This will never change. We hope that through our commercial services, we will be able to better fund BackTrack and (heavens forbid) actually start paying our developers for their time and effort.

BackTrack 5 R1 to be released August 10th

To our friends at BlackHat who will be printing over six thousand (6000!) BackTrack DVD’s and distributing them during the conference, we thank you!  We hope you all enjoy the upcoming conferences and have a productive and fun time. May the sauce be strong with you.

Our goals with the book are to provide a single resource for the Metasploit Framework which doesn’t quickly become outdated and to provide an in depth resource for penetration testers who wish to understand the Framework inside out. The book covers everything from Metasploit basics to fuzzing, exploit development, custom module creation, writing post exploitation modules and meterpreter kung-fu.

In addition to the Metasploit Framework, we cover toolkits that leverage the Framework such as the Social-Engineer Toolkit (SET) and Fast-Track. The book also integrates the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES) as the general methodology for performing penetration testing.

As part of this release announcement, the book is available for pre orders with a 40% discount at No Starch Press when you use the discount code of REDTEAM. This special discount code is valid until midnight on Wednesday, July 20th and if you pre-order the print book, you will immediately receive a PDF version of the book so get your copy now! Over 25% of net revenue going to the authors will be donated to the HFC group.

In addition, the authors will be appearing on the PaulDotCom Podcast this Thursday and the Infosec Daily Podcast Friday to discuss the book and give away free tickets to DerbyCon.

We have s new RSS feeds through which you can follow the development process – feel free to subscribe to the BackTrack Activity log RSS feed. As for the immediate future, we plan to have a 5.1 release in a couple of months which will include all bug fixes, features and tool additions up to that point.

We would like to take this opportunity to invite all those passionate about BackTrack to actively participate in its development by identifying bugs, suggesting fixes and improvements and alerting us of tool upgrades. Bring on the sauce!

• Offensive-Security who have played a major role in development and funding of our project.
• Devon Kearns – A new member in our BackTrack team who single-handedly covered more packages than the whole team put together. At some stage we considered renaming the release to “dookie-track”.
• Shadz – Master of the dragon and creator of the promo movie. Check him out at http://www.zusedesign.com/
• Digip – Master of our website and dang good artist – http://ticktockcomputers.com
• Elwood – For getting an awesome forensics environment up. Thanks!
• Mister_X – For going through our wireless setup and making sure everything was sparkling.
• Bolexxx – our torrent and download master. Your download is due to him.

Head down to the downloads page and get your copy of BackTrack 5!